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The expansion of BRICS from an acronym coined by a banker into a widening bloc with its own summits, development bank, and lengthening membership queue signals something more than a diplomatic curiosity. It reflects a broad dissatisfaction across the Global South with an international order whose institutions, currencies, and agenda-setting power remain concentrated in the hands of a shrinking minority of states. The 2024 enlargement, drawing in states across the Middle East and Africa, and the long list of applicants, indicate real demand for platforms outside the Western-led architecture. Yet what BRICS actually represents is deeply contested. It is not an alliance, spans democracies and autocracies, and contains its own rivalries, most sharply between India and China, that limit coherence. Its most discussed ambition, reducing dependence on the dollar through local-currency trade and alternative payment systems, confronts the entrenched network advantages of dollar dominance and the divergent interests of members, making talk of "de-dollarization" more aspiration than imminent reality. The deeper phenomenon is the revival of a non-aligned sensibility, a "non-alignment 2.0" in which states decline to choose sides in the Sino-American contest and instead diversify partnerships to maximize autonomy and bargaining leverage. Whether this amounts to the construction of an alternative order or merely a hedging strategy within the existing one is the central analytical dispute. The questions worth pressing concern what holds so heterogeneous a grouping together beyond shared grievance, whether it can convert rhetorical solidarity into institutional substance, how its internal contradictions constrain its ambitions, and whether the Global South is building a rival architecture or leveraging the threat of exit to renegotiate its terms within the one that exists. The answer will shape the distribution of authority in whatever order emerges.