BRICS - CONFLICT OR CONSENSUS of the GEOPOLITICAL INTERESTS?
The preservation and further development of the BRICS will largely depend on the consensus of the geopolitical interests of the countries - members of this informal Association. These interests manifest themselves at the global and regional levels and they are formulated in the declarations of the BRICS and in the Concepts or doctrines offoreign policy of these countries. The combined analysis of these documents allowed us to identify a number of coinciding geopolitical interests at the global level, which form a common matrix of interests and foreign policy objectives of the BRICS countries. However, at the regional level there may be the contradictions of such interests, which this article shows at the example of the Asia-Pacific region. Foreign policy of the Russian Federation aimed at more active participation in the integration processes in this region may lead to the escalation of latent economic competition between China and Russia in the geopolitical confrontation between them.