Paper short abstract:

Are we seeing the rising of second-generation sub-imperialists?

Paper long abstract:

Robert Ward, who coined the term CIVETS (Colombia, Indonesia, Vietnam, Egypt, Turkey and South Africa), also discussed the notion of "second-generation emerging powers", which denotes countries with young populations and rapidly developing, diversified economies. Given the current faltering fortunes of the BRICS states, this paper seeks to explore whether these second-generation emerging powers will be the ones to continue generating expanded rounds of accumulation within the international system. As most of the BRICS countries lurch from crisis to crisis, are the second-generation emerging powers likely to be the continued drivers of global growth at the middle tier of global capital accumulation? Will cyclical booms and busts, BRICS "exhaustion" in places like Africa, and a depletion of BRICS' political economies, open up further opportunities and give rise to the dominance of new clusters, and will these states continue along the same lines as their BRICS counterparts? Are we seeing the rise of second-generation sub-imperialists?