Global South

This article examines how technological cooperation among the BRICS states is reshaping the foundations of interstate relations at a moment when artificial intelligence, biotechnology and human enhancement research are converging into what the author terms the transhumanization of statecraft. Moving beyond accounts that treat digital sovereignty and human enhancement as separate policy domains, the study proposes a unified analytical lens built around the concept of informational hedging, understood as the simultaneous pursuit of technological autonomy and selective interdependence by states seeking to manage dependence on external powers. Drawing on the 2024 Kazan Declaration, the BRICS Artificial Intelligence Cooperation Framework and recent scholarship on digital sovereignty in Africa, the paper traces how BRICS institutions have translated declaratory commitments into instruments such as the BRICS Institute of Future Networks, the BRICS Rapid Information Security Channel and the BRICS Artificial Intelligence Research and Innovation Centre. The analysis further considers how the convergence of artificial intelligence with biotechnology and human enhancement research introduces a post-human dimension into the balance of power, one in which the object of competition is no longer only territory, capital or information but the biological and cognitive capacities of populations. The article concludes that BRICS technological cooperation should be read not as a coherent bloc strategy but as a loosely coupled architecture of hedging practices through which member and partner states, including African states, attempt to convert technological dependency into a bargaining asset within a metamorphosing, multipolar international order.