CyberPeace, BRICS, and a New Framework for Digital Trust

In the contemporary international order, cyberspace has emerged as both an enabler of unprecedented economic integration and a domain of strategic contestation. The architecture of the digital world, once viewed as a neutral infrastructure for innovation and exchange, is now deeply intertwined with questions of sovereignty, power, and systemic risk. As such, cybersecurity has transcended its technical origins to become a central pillar of statecraft and global governance. At a time when India holds the BRICS chairship, the question of how BRICS should think about digital cooperation has become especially timely. India has placed resilience, innovation, cooperation, and sustainability at the centre of its BRICS agenda. This creates an important opening for a more practical discussion of cybersecurity, digital trust, and societal resilience across the grouping.

This moment is reinforced by developments in India’s own digital policy calendar.  The IndiaAI Mission reflects a concerted push to build scalable, inclusive, and globally competitive AI capabilities, spanning compute infrastructure, datasets, research, and innovation ecosystems.  India also hosted the India AI Impact Summit 2026, a flagship international gathering under the IndiaAI Mission focused on safe, trusted, and inclusive AI futures. Together, these events reflected an important shift: digital policy in India is increasingly being framed through infrastructure and innovation, while also giving greater weight to security, resilience, and international cooperation. Complementing this, in February 2026, New Delhi hosted the Global CyberPeace Summit 2.0, presented as a major multistakeholder forum on trust, safety, digital resilience, cyber diplomacy, and responsible digital governance for all.

The rapid digital transformation is particularly consequential for emerging economies, where accelerated digital adoption has outpaced the maturation of security frameworks. The contemporary threat landscape is no longer confined to isolated incidents of cybercrime; it encompasses state-linked intrusions, ransomware targeting critical infrastructure, supply chain vulnerabilities, and the weaponisation of information ecosystems. For nations navigating rapid digitisation, the costs of cyber insecurity are not merely financial but developmental, undermining trust in institutions and slowing the trajectory of digital growth.

It is within this context that cybersecurity must assume a central place in the strategic agenda of the BRICS grouping. While BRICS has already taken initial steps through cooperative frameworks on ICT security, policy dialogues, and capacity building efforts, the scale and complexity of current cyber risks demand a more integrated and forward-looking approach. Cyber resilience must evolve from a peripheral concern to a core pillar of collective action, embedded alongside economic cooperation and development priorities.

As member states advance their own AI ambitions, there is an opportunity to align efforts around secure and trustworthy innovation, embedding cybersecurity principles within AI collaboration frameworks. Such an approach would enable BRICS not only to address shared risks but also to shape emerging global standards in a manner that reflects the priorities of developing economies. 

In this setting, BRICS acquires particular relevance as a practical space for shaping new frameworks of digital trust. The issue is no longer limited to how states protect infrastructure or regulate platforms. It also concerns how they protect citizens, strengthen digital literacy, improve resilience against cybercrime and disinformation, and create conditions in which digital transformation remains socially legitimate. 

Civil society can play a useful role for BRICS by facilitating coordination, communication, and feedback across expert communities, governments, business, and technology developers.

When we discuss the digital future of BRICS countries and countries of Global South, attention usually focuses on infrastructure, sovereignty, artificial intelligence, platforms, data centres, connectivity, and digital government. All of these issues matter. Yet as digital systems become more deeply embedded in everyday life, another reality is becoming clear: sustainable digital development depends on more than strong networks, mature regulation, and state response capacity. It also rests on user trust, citizen safety, institutional support for victims of cybercrime, digital literacy, and the broader sense of security people experience in digital environments. BRICS therefore, needs a wider framework for discussing the cyber domain, one that connects security, trust, and societal resilience. This is the space that the CyberPeace Index seek to address.

Сyberspace must not be understood solely through the language of threats and response. States must protect critical infrastructure, financial systems, government platforms, and supply chains. Yet if the digital environment remains unsafe for ordinary users, if it reproduces a constant sense of vulnerability, fraud, abuse, and helplessness, then any formal notion of security remains incomplete. 

For BRICS countries, this shift is especially important. The grouping is already one of the key spaces of digital transformation in the contemporary world. It includes large markets, expanding digital ecosystems, public platforms, ambitious AI programs, fintech sectors, telecommunications infrastructure, and digital public services. At the same time, shared risks are growing with equal force: rising cybercrime, uneven digital literacy, user vulnerability, shortages of trained personnel, and institutional gaps between the speed of digitalisation and the development of protective mechanisms. For many countries of the Global South, these are central concerns of sustainable digital development.

BRICS already has an institutional foundation in the cyber sphere. The BRICS Working Group on Security in the Use of ICTs traces its origins to discussions launched by BRICS National Security Advisors in 2013. Its activities are guided by the Roadmap for Practical Cooperation on Ensuring ICT Security. That roadmap highlights policy exchanges, CERT cooperation, law-enforcement cooperation, research and development, and think tank or academic exchange.

BRICS has, in effect, developed several layers of engagement in the cyber domain. The first is the political and diplomatic level. In the Rio de Janeiro Declaration of 2025, BRICS leaders reaffirmed their commitment to an open, secure, stable, accessible, peaceful, and interoperable ICT environment. They underscored the leading role of the United Nations and welcomed the ongoing work of the UN Open-Ended Working Group on the security of and in the use of ICTs as the sole global and inclusive mechanism on this matter.

The second is the practical, agency-to-agency level. BRICS documents point to continued work on cooperation among Computer Emergency Response Teams, law-enforcement cooperation, joint research and development, and memoranda of understanding under negotiation in these areas. This shows that BRICS is moving beyond declaratory language and attempting to build more operational forms of coordination. 

The third is the broader digital and expert track. The 11th BRICS Communications Ministers’ Meeting in 2025 discussed universal and meaningful connectivity, digital public goods and digital public infrastructure, open-source participation, and capacity-building on digital transformation. This wider policy space is distinct from cybersecurity in the narrow sense, yet it is precisely where trust, inclusion, safety, and resilience enter the wider conversation on digital development.

This matters all the more because BRICS includes countries with very different digital models. They differ in market size, regulatory structures, state-market relations, platform development models, and social contexts. Under such conditions, a single rigid model is neither possible nor desirable. What is needed instead is a comparable language of discussion. The CyberPeace Index can be useful in exactly this sense: as a methodology for discussing whether the digital environment is genuinely safe for people, whether support mechanisms are sufficiently developed, whether society is prepared for digital risks, and whether state, corporate, and social institutions are capable of working together. This is one reason such a framework may be particularly relevant for the Global South.

I would underline one further point. BRICS already recognises academic and expert exchange as part of cooperation in ICT security. This means the expert track is an acknowledged element of the broader cooperative architecture. Existing cooperation with Russian colleagues in the expert track can therefore be seen as a natural extension of the logic already embedded within BRICS. At the expert level, it is easier to discuss methodologies, indicators, educational models, approaches to digital literacy, support for victims of cybercrime, new risks related to AI, and the social consequences of insecurity online. States provide the political framework; expert networks provide continuity, substance, and practical content.

BRICS already has the political and institutional formats needed for this discussion. The task now is to fill them with content that is more responsive to public needs and the everyday realities of digital life.