BRICS and Global South: Towards Multilateral Educational Collaboration

Abstract

The article is devoted to the discussion of the educational policies of the BRICS countries in the context of rising Global South. The author argues that BRICS grouping is better understood not as a union of the countries based upon common identity or a set of the values, but as a group, which is held together by certain imaginaries. These imaginaries are a vision of alternative world order on the one hand and of the emerging Global South on the other hand. Education, then, pays a pivotal role in BRICS collaboration, because it helps to develop and to spread these imaginaries. The article analyses multilateral educational collaboration in BRICS in comparison with excellence programmes devoted to establishment of elite world-class universities and oriented at indicators of the main international academic rankings. The author argues that such projects as BRICS Network University are much more relevant to the tasks of South-South collaboration than the excellence programmes such as Russian 5/100 one. In conclusion, the author attracts readers’ attention to the multiple modernities theories as possible rationale for BRICS cooperation or South-South collaboration in general.