Methodology

What a page may contain

• Official short and long country names in common English use
• Capital city, with a note when a state has more than one capital function
• UN membership year as recorded by the United Nations
• BRICS cohort (core, 2024 expansion, 2025 accession, invited/unsettled)
• Qualitative situation notes that point at a named sister or hub page

What a page may not contain

• GDP, PPP, or “share of world output” figures
• Defense budgets, troop counts, equipment inventories, or invented rankings
• Casualty totals copied without the hub’s source window
• A completed-member badge for Saudi Arabia while public accession remains unsettled

Sources for membership

Core dates follow the 2009 Yekaterinburg BRIC summit and the 2010–2011 South Africa accession. The 2024 wave follows the 15th summit invitations (Johannesburg, August 2023) and public presidency lists effective 1 January 2024. Indonesia follows the January 2025 announcement by the Brazilian chair. Partner-country designations after Kazan 2024 are noted as a category, not expanded into a contested full-member list.

Inbound hub cites

When a member sits in a tracked war or chokepoint, this site adds one earned sentence and one link to the matching armedconflicts.org record. No mesh, no farms, no restyle of hub HTML.