BRICS, the acronym for a group formed by the counties of Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa, has been touted as an anti-Western alliance with the power to usher in new world order. Sergei Guriev argues it is nothing of the sort.

He has had one of those lives fit for a Russian novel. Sergei Guriev served as a professor and the Rector of the most elite Russian university, the New Economic School in Moscow, advised the Russian President Dmitry Medvedev, sat on numerous Russian government advisory boards, only to find himself being the subject of a “frightening and humiliating interrogation” by government officials in 2013. He fled the country soon after.