In India this week, the leaders of the world's major emerging economies gathered not merely to confer, but to assert — that the unilateral use of economic sanctions corrodes the shared foundations of international order, and that the fires burning across the Middle East threaten far more than the region itself. BRICS, representing nearly half of humanity, spoke with unusual coherence on two fault lines of our era: the legitimacy of who makes global rules, and the cost of instability for those least insulated from it. It is a moment that asks an old question anew — who holds the authority to go