Shanghai Cooperation Organisation

Based on Wikipedia: Shanghai Cooperation Organisation

The Alliance You've Never Heard Of

Imagine an organization that represents nearly half of humanity. An alliance covering a quarter of Earth's landmass. A bloc whose combined economic output rivals that of the United States and European Union combined. Now imagine you've probably never heard of it.

The Shanghai Cooperation Organisation—known as the SCO—is the world's largest regional organization by both geography and population. Its ten member states stretch from the Baltic Sea to the Pacific Ocean, encompassing sixty-five percent of the Eurasian landmass. As of 2024, these nations collectively account for about thirty-six percent of global economic output when measured by purchasing power parity.

Yet in Western media, it remains largely invisible.

From Border Disputes to Superpower Club

The SCO didn't begin as a grand geopolitical project. It started with a much more practical problem: soldiers pointing guns at each other across contested borders.

In 1996, five nations—China, Russia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, and Tajikistan—gathered in Shanghai to sign something called the Treaty on Deepening Military Trust in Border Regions. The name tells you everything. These were countries that had spent decades, in some cases centuries, fighting over where one nation ended and another began. China and the Soviet Union had nearly gone to war in 1969 over a frozen river island. Now, with the Cold War over, they wanted to stop worrying about each other and focus on their own internal challenges.

This loose grouping became known as the Shanghai Five. A year later, they met again in Moscow to agree on reducing military forces along their shared borders. That same day, Russian President Boris Yeltsin and Chinese leader Jiang Zemin signed something far more ambitious: a declaration calling for a "multipolar world."

That phrase—multipolar world—would become the SCO's ideological North Star.

What "Multipolar" Actually Means

To understand the SCO, you need to understand what its founders were reacting against. The 1990s were the era of American unipolarity. The Soviet Union had collapsed. The United States stood alone as the world's sole superpower. Western commentators spoke of the "end of history"—the triumph of liberal democracy and free-market capitalism as humanity's final form of government.

China and Russia saw things differently.

For them, American dominance wasn't a natural endpoint but a temporary condition to be managed and eventually balanced against. "Multipolar world" was diplomatic code for: we want other power centers that can check American influence. The SCO would become one vehicle for building that alternative order.

At their 2000 summit in Dushanbe, Tajikistan, the Shanghai Five made their position explicit. They agreed to "oppose intervention in other countries' internal affairs on the reason of 'humanitarianism' and 'protecting human rights.'" This wasn't abstract philosophy. NATO had just finished a bombing campaign in Yugoslavia to stop Serbian ethnic cleansing in Kosovo—intervention without United Nations approval. To Beijing and Moscow, this set a terrifying precedent. Today Kosovo, tomorrow Tibet or Chechnya?

The Birth of Something Bigger

June 2001 marked the transformation from informal club to formal institution. The summit returned to Shanghai, and Uzbekistan joined as a sixth member. On June 15th, all six heads of state signed the Declaration of Shanghai Cooperation Organisation, creating something new in international politics.

The timing proved uncanny. Three months later, the September 11th attacks would reshape global politics. Suddenly, counterterrorism became the world's obsession—and the SCO had been talking about terrorism, separatism, and extremism since its founding. These "three evils," as SCO documents call them, weren't abstract concerns for Central Asian states dealing with militant groups, drug trafficking routes from Afghanistan, and ethnic tensions that crossed borders.

The organization moved quickly to institutionalize. By 2003, they had established a permanent secretariat in Beijing and created councils for heads of state, heads of government, and foreign ministers. In 2004, they launched the Regional Anti-Terrorist Structure, known as RATS, headquartered in Tashkent, Uzbekistan. RATS became the operational arm for security cooperation—sharing intelligence, coordinating responses, and maintaining lists of suspected terrorists.

The Geography of Membership

Understanding who belongs to the SCO reveals much about its character. The original six members—China, Russia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, and Uzbekistan—shared borders and immediate security concerns. They were the neighborhood watch.

In 2017, the organization took a dramatic step by admitting India and Pakistan as full members. Think about that for a moment. India and Pakistan have fought four wars. They came close to nuclear conflict as recently as 2019. They still dispute Kashmir, one of the world's most militarized borders. Yet both now sit at the same table in the SCO.

Iran joined in July 2023, adding another major power with its own complicated relationship with the West. Belarus followed in July 2024, bringing the European frontier of Russian influence into the organization.

Today's SCO thus includes authoritarian states and democracies, nuclear powers and non-nuclear states, bitter rivals and close allies. What unites them isn't ideology or even friendship. It's a shared interest in an international order where major powers respect each other's "spheres of influence" and don't interfere in each other's domestic affairs.

The Turkey Question

Perhaps nothing illustrates the SCO's growing appeal—and the complexity of modern geopolitics—better than Turkey's flirtation with membership.

Turkey is a member of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, NATO. It has been trying to join the European Union for decades. Yet Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has repeatedly suggested he might abandon EU membership aspirations for full SCO membership instead.

In 2013, Turkey became an SCO dialogue partner. In 2017, Turkey became the first non-member state to chair one of the organization's clubs—the energy club. At the 2022 summit, Erdoğan announced Turkey would seek full membership.

As recently as July 2024, Erdoğan told Newsweek magazine that Turkey doesn't see its NATO membership as incompatible with joining the SCO or BRICS. This statement captures something profound about the current moment: the old Cold War categories are breaking down. Countries increasingly want to hedge their bets, maintaining relationships with multiple power centers rather than choosing sides.

What the SCO Actually Does

Critics sometimes dismiss the SCO as a "talk shop"—a forum for speeches and declarations that produces little concrete action. There's some truth to this. Unlike NATO, the SCO has no mutual defense commitment. Unlike the European Union, it has no binding legal framework that overrides national sovereignty.

But dismissing it entirely misses important developments.

On the security front, the SCO has conducted regular joint military exercises since 2003. The "Peace Mission" series, as these exercises are called, have grown increasingly sophisticated. Peace Mission 2007 brought over four thousand soldiers to Russia's Ural Mountains region. Peace Mission 2010 saw more than five thousand personnel from five nations conducting joint operations in Kazakhstan. These aren't just symbolic photo opportunities. They build interoperability—the ability of different national militaries to work together—and signal capability to outside observers.

The Regional Anti-Terrorist Structure has claimed significant successes, reporting in 2017 that it had foiled six hundred terrorist plots and enabled the extradition of five hundred suspected terrorists. These numbers are difficult to verify independently, but they suggest real operational cooperation.

Beyond security, the SCO has launched over twenty large-scale projects in transportation, energy, and telecommunications. Regular meetings bring together officials from banking, culture, defense, and economic ministries. A web of relationships is being built, even if it lacks the legal architecture of Western institutions.

The Cyber Dimension

One area where the SCO has staked out distinctive ground is information and cyberspace. While Western governments typically frame cybersecurity in terms of protecting infrastructure from attacks, the SCO takes a broader view—one that makes Western human rights advocates deeply uncomfortable.

A 2009 accord defined "information war" as including efforts by one state to undermine another's "political, economic, and social systems." By 2010, SCO statements argued that disseminating information "harmful to the spiritual, moral and cultural spheres of other states" should be considered a security threat.

This is not the Western conception of a free and open internet. This is an assertion that governments have the right—perhaps the obligation—to control information flows that might destabilize their societies. It's the intellectual foundation for China's Great Firewall, for Russia's sovereign internet laws, and for the broader push by authoritarian states to reshape global internet governance.

The Military Exercises as Theater

Sometimes the SCO's joint exercises serve purposes beyond training. They become stages for geopolitical messaging.

Consider August 2007. Leaders of SCO member states gathered in Russia's Chelyabinsk region to observe Peace Mission 2007. Chinese leader Hu Jintao was in attendance. So were presidents and prime ministers from across Central Asia. Vladimir Putin had a captive audience of exactly the people he wanted to hear his next announcement.

Russian strategic bombers, Putin declared, would resume regular long-range patrols for the first time since the Cold War ended. "Starting today, such tours of duty will be conducted regularly and on the strategic scale," he said. "Our pilots have been grounded for too long. They are happy to start a new life."

The message wasn't really for the other SCO leaders. It was for Washington and the world: Russia was back as a military power, and it had friends.

The Relationship with Other Organizations

The SCO exists in a complex ecosystem of international organizations, some overlapping, some competing, some potentially merging.

Since 2004, the SCO has held observer status at the United Nations General Assembly. It has established formal relationships with the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), the Commonwealth of Independent States, and the Collective Security Treaty Organization—a Russian-led military alliance that includes several SCO members. In 2018, the SCO's anti-terrorist structure established ties with the African Union's counterterrorism center, extending its reach to another continent.

There has even been discussion of merging the SCO with the Collective Security Treaty Organization, though institutional rivalries and overlapping memberships make this complicated. The idea surfaced at a 2014 summit in Dushanbe and has periodically resurfaced since.

Who Isn't a Member—and Why

The SCO's observer and dialogue partner categories tell their own stories.

Afghanistan has held observer status since 2012—though the meaning of "Afghanistan" has shifted dramatically since the Taliban's return to power. Mongolia, surrounded by Russia and China, maintains observer status as a way of engaging both giant neighbors without committing fully to either.

Turkmenistan presents a unique case. It declared itself permanently neutral in 1995, a status recognized by the United Nations. This theoretically precludes SCO membership. Yet Turkmenistan's leader has attended every SCO summit since 2007 as a guest. Neutrality, it seems, has its limits when your largest neighbors are convening without you.

Ukraine expressed interest in observer status back in 2012. Then came the 2014 Maidan revolution, Russia's annexation of Crimea, and eventually full-scale war. That interest is now a historical footnote.

Vietnam has expressed interest but never formally applied. Azerbaijan appears to be on a path toward membership, with Kazakhstan's president suggesting in 2024 that full membership would come "in a little while."

The India-China-Pakistan Triangle

The SCO's most remarkable feature may be that it functions at all given the tensions among its members.

India and China fought a war in 1962 and have clashed repeatedly along their disputed Himalayan border, most recently in 2020 when soldiers died in hand-to-hand combat. India and Pakistan's rivalry is even more intense—four wars, an ongoing insurgency in Kashmir, and regular nuclear saber-rattling.

Yet all three sit on the SCO's Council of Heads of State. They attend the same summits. Their officials participate in the same working groups.

This doesn't mean they've resolved their differences. Far from it. But it suggests the SCO provides something valuable enough that even bitter rivals choose to participate. Perhaps it's the economic opportunities. Perhaps it's the desire not to be excluded from a major regional forum. Perhaps it's the shared interest in the "multipolar world" concept—even if they disagree about almost everything else.

India's participation is particularly noteworthy given its growing strategic partnership with the United States. New Delhi seems to be pursuing what analysts call "multi-alignment"—maintaining strong ties with Washington while also engaging with Beijing and Moscow through forums like the SCO. In a multipolar world, why choose sides if you don't have to?

The September 2025 Summit

The most recent SCO gathering took place in Tianjin, China in September 2025. Ten heads of state or government sat around the table: leaders from Belarus, China, India, Iran, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Pakistan, Russia, Tajikistan, and Uzbekistan.

One notable moment came when Chinese leader Xi Jinping met with Myanmar's military ruler Min Aung Hlaing and expressed support for promoting Myanmar to full membership. Myanmar's military government, which seized power in a 2021 coup and has been fighting a civil war ever since, would represent yet another expansion of the SCO's embrace of governments the West considers pariahs.

What It All Means

The Shanghai Cooperation Organisation is not going to replace NATO or the United Nations. It lacks the military integration of the former and the universal legitimacy of the latter. Its members often disagree on fundamental issues.

But that may be precisely the point.

The SCO represents a different model of international cooperation—one based on what its members call "non-interference in internal affairs." In practice, this means authoritarian governments won't face pressure from fellow members about human rights, elections, or press freedom. It means sovereignty is paramount and "humanitarian intervention" is viewed with deep suspicion.

For countries frustrated with what they see as Western moralizing and double standards, this is appealing. For human rights advocates, it's alarming—a mutual protection society for autocrats.

The SCO also represents the institutional infrastructure of that "multipolar world" its founders declared in 1997. Every summit, every joint exercise, every memorandum of understanding builds connections that don't run through Washington. Over time, these networks create alternatives. Countries that might once have had no choice but to work within Western-led institutions now have options.

Whether this produces a more stable world order or a more dangerous one remains to be seen. The twentieth century's great power rivalries, after all, were also "multipolar"—and they produced catastrophic wars. The American-led order that followed, for all its flaws, delivered decades of relative peace among major powers.

The Shanghai Cooperation Organisation is betting that balance is better than hegemony. The next few decades will test that theory.