BRICS discourse on People-to-People Connectivity has settled into a familiar register: trade fairs, university partnerships, tourism corridors and curated cultural festivals. These are valuable, but they share a common limitation — they are archival. They produce documents, MOUs, delegations, and photo-ops that can be filed, cited, and reported upward into governance summaries. What they rarely capture is the other, older register of cultural transmission: the repertoire — embodied, performed, and transmitted through co-presence rather than paper. If BRICS is serious about People-to-People Connectivity as a governance pillar rather than a public-relations afterthought, it needs to take the repertoire as seriously as the archive, and to recognise that this shift has direct consequences for both the legitimacy of global governance and the texture of regional peace and security.

The distinction, borrowed from performance theorist Diana Taylor, is not merely semantic. The archive privileges what can be transported, translated, and stored: treaties, communiqués, statistics on tourist arrivals. The repertoire lives in gesture, rhythm, ritual, and the felt experience of encounter — a shared meal, a co-performed dance, a jointly rehearsed piece of theatre. Diplomacy built on the archive can produce agreement without trust; it is possible to sign a cultural-exchange protocol without anyone involved having actually met, watched, or moved alongside a counterpart from another BRICS state. Embodied exchange, by contrast, generates a form of interpersonal knowledge that resists reduction to a report — and it is precisely this residue, illegible to the archive, that sustains trust between publics long after any given summit communiqué has been superseded.

This matters for global governance because legitimacy is not manufactured solely at the level of elite consensus. Amartya Sen and Martha Nussbaum‘s capabilities approach offers a useful corrective here: the value of any connectivity initiative should be judged not by how many delegations it produced, but by whether it expanded ordinary people’s real capability to participate, to be heard, to move, and to express themselves across borders. Measured this way, much of what currently passes for BRICS people-to-people connectivity looks thin — curated troupes performing for diplomatic audiences, rather than genuine cross-border capability expansion for artists, practitioners, and communities themselves. A governance architecture that internalised capability-expansion as a metric — asking not “how many events” but “whose agency grew” — would address one of BRICS’s persistent legitimacy deficits: the perception, both internal and external, that it remains a state-driven project performing multipolarity rather than practising it.

The same embodied register bears directly on peace and security, though through a quieter mechanism than formal conflict resolution. Pierre Bourdieu‘s concept of habitus is instructive: the durable, embodied dispositions through which people perceive and classify the world are formed through practice, not instruction. Shared embodied experience — learning a form, training alongside practitioners from another country, absorbing another public’s rhythms of gesture and speech — reshapes habitus in ways that formal briefings cannot. In fieldwork with rights organisations across several Indian states, I have repeatedly observed how cross-community embodied encounter — joint performance, shared training, co-witnessed ritual — lowers the threshold of “othering” between groups with histories of mutual suspicion, in a way that documentary or legal interventions alone rarely achieve. Extrapolated to the BRICS scale, sustained embodied exchange among artists, athletes, and cultural practitioners functions as a low-visibility but durable form of soft security: it builds the kind of cross-cultural literacy that makes securitised threat-perception less automatic, and it does so cumulatively, below the threshold of any single diplomatic event.

But this argument needs a subaltern corrective, or it risks simply re-describing elite cultural diplomacy in more theoretically fashionable language. Ranajit Guha‘s insistence on subaltern agency as distinct from — and often obscured by — elite nationalist or state narratives is directly applicable here. The current architecture of BRICS people-to-people connectivity overwhelmingly channels urban, credentialed, state-approved cultural ambassadors: it reproduces exactly the hierarchy it claims to transcend. A connectivity pillar that continues to route “the people” through embassies and cultural councils is not yet meeting its own name. Genuine multipolarity, if it is to be more than a governance slogan, requires that BRICS connectivity mechanisms actively seek out and resource marginalised practitioners — rural artists, women’s collectives, disability-inclusive ensembles, indigenous and minority-language performers — rather than defaulting to whichever troupe already has a passport and a sponsor. This is not a matter of representational optics; exclusion from connectivity architectures is itself a low-grade driver of the resentment and disaffection that, left unaddressed, feeds into exactly the instability that the Peace and Security pillar is meant to guard against.

Concretely, BRICS could institutionalise this shift in modest, trackable ways: rotating grassroots-to-grassroots exchange programmes assessed against capability indicators rather than attendance figures; oral-history and testimony exchanges between community practitioners, not only state-sanctioned cultural missions; and a standing mechanism — housed within the People-to-People pillar but reporting jointly to Governance and to Peace and Security working groups — that tracks whether embodied connectivity initiatives are measurably reducing stereotype-driven friction between publics, not merely generating footage. India’s own Presidency year offers a natural pilot ground: a country with an unusually dense repertoire of classical and folk performance traditions, and an equally dense civil-society infrastructure for grassroots cultural work, could model what a capability-indexed, subaltern-inclusive connectivity mechanism looks like in practice, before proposing it as a template for the wider grouping.

None of this displaces the archival instruments BRICS already relies on — the MOUs, the ministerial statements, the working-group reports remain necessary for coordination and accountability. The claim is narrower and, I think, more actionable: that these instruments currently constitute the entirety of what counts as “connectivity,” when they should constitute only its documentary trace. The embodied encounter that the archive cannot record is not a soft supplement to governance and security work; it is the substrate that makes both durable. Global governance rests, ultimately, on distributed legitimacy that elite consensus alone cannot generate; peace rests on the slow accumulation of trust that formal instruments alone cannot manufacture. Both are hinge-points, not endpoints, of a genuinely multipolar order — and the repertoire, no less than the record, is where that hinge is built.