BRICS: An economic club or a G7 challenger?

In geopolitical terms the G7 almost always garners the lion's share of political and media attention in the West and beyond, but when the BRICS summit began yesterday in Johannesburg, not only were Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa talking about expansion, there is also the ambition to become a counter to Western domination as they see it.

There's no shortage of countries lining up to join BRICS - Argentina, Belarus, Indonesia and Nigeria among them - but while the leaders of the five nations are broadly in agreement about expansion, at the outset of the summit Brazil's president, Lula de Silva, insisted that BRICS is not meant to challenge the G7.