Since the start of the Russian war in Ukraine, media reporting has shown an unfortunate tendency to observe international politics from a “friend or foe” perspective. For the sake of simplicity, anything that defies this scheme is placed on one side or the other: Those who are not with us are against us – and vice versa. Interpreting the summit meeting of the SCO in Samarkand, Uzbekistan, as an attempt to establish a new anti-Western axis of evil also falls short. For the organisation’s members, the SCO’s most important function has always been to balance interests among its major members. This is more true than ever against the background of ongoing geopolitical confrontations.
Not a Eurasian counterpart to NATO
The SCO was founded in June 2001 as the successor organisation to the “Shanghai Five”, an alliance that had existed since 1996 and consisted of Russia, the People’s Republic of China, and their three Central Asian neighbours Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, and Tajikistan. With its transition to the SCO, Uzbekistan also joined. Subsequently, the organisation, which also included India and Pakistan in 2017, established itself as a supraregional security policy format, which observers have always seen as …read more
Source:: German Institute for International and Security Affairs
