Shanghai Cooperation Organisation

• 1. Introduction

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  The Shanghai Cooperation Organisation covers at least 24 percent of the world's total land area and is home to 42 percent of the world's people. That makes it the largest regional organisation on earth by both geography and population. Yet most people in the West have never heard of it. What is this body, where did it come from, and why does it matter who sits at its table?

• 2. The Shanghai Five

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  On the 26th of April 1996, the heads of state of China, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Russia, and Tajikistan gathered in Shanghai to sign the Treaty on Deepening Military Trust in Border Regions. That single document created what became known as the Shanghai Five. The treaty was about something practical and pressing: the borders these nations shared had been inherited from the Soviet era, and nobody was entirely sure where they stood or how many troops each side should station along them.

  One year later, on the 24th of April 1997, the same five countries reconvened in Moscow and signed the Treaty on Reduction of Military Forces in Border Regions. On the 20th of May 1997, Russian President Boris Yeltsin and Chinese leader Jiang Zemin signed a declaration calling for a multipolar world. The phrasing was pointed. A world with multiple power centers was, by definition, one where no single country called every shot.

  The group then held annual summits: in Almaty, Kazakhstan in 1998; in Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan in 1999; and in Dushanbe, Tajikistan in 2000. At that Dushanbe meeting, members agreed to oppose outside intervention in each other's affairs on humanitarian grounds and to support one another's sovereignty. The Shanghai Five had found a shared language, and that language would grow into something larger.

• 3. From Five to Organisation

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  On the 15th of June 2001, all six heads of state, the original five plus Uzbekistan as a new addition, signed the Declaration of Shanghai Cooperation Organisation in Shanghai. The name itself announced ambition: this was no longer an informal group but a formal body, one that intended a higher level of cooperation than the Shanghai Five had offered.

  The SCO Charter followed in June 2002, signed at a meeting in Saint Petersburg, Russia. It laid out the organisation's purposes, principles, structures, and forms of operation, and entered into force on the 19th of September 2003. By that year, the SCO had a Council of Heads of State, a Council of Heads of Government, a Council of Foreign Ministers, and a permanent Secretariat based in Beijing.

  At the July 2005 summit in Astana, Kazakhstan, four countries, India, Iran, Mongolia, and Pakistan, attended as guests for the first time. Kazakhstan's president, Nursultan Nazarbayev, greeted those guests with a line that no head of state had used in quite that way before: "The leaders of the states sitting at this negotiation table are representatives of half of humanity." By 2007, the organisation had launched more than twenty large-scale projects in transportation, energy, and telecommunications.

• 4. Security and the Three Evils

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  At a summit in Tashkent, Uzbekistan, on the 16th and the 17th of June 2004, the SCO formally established the Regional Anti-Terrorist Structure, known as RATS. Its headquarters went to Tashkent, and it was given a clear mandate: counter what the SCO calls the three evils of terrorism, separatism, and extremism. Each member state sends a permanent representative to RATS, and its director is elected to a three-year term.

  The scope of that security mission widened quickly. In October 2007, the SCO signed an agreement with the Collective Security Treaty Organization in Dushanbe, broadening cooperation on crime and drug trafficking. By 2010, the organisation had added cyberwarfare to its list of concerns, declaring that the spread of information harmful to a state's spiritual, moral, and cultural spheres constituted a security threat. A 2009 accord had already defined information war as an effort by one state to undermine another's political, economic, and social systems.

  Through RATS, the SCO reported that by 2017 it had disrupted 600 terror plots and extradited 500 suspected terrorists. In December 2025, Iran hosted the Sahand 2025 drills, the first time Iran had ever held military exercises with six other SCO member states on Iranian soil. The exercises followed a period the source describes as the post-war of Israel and Iran.

• 5. Economic Ambitions

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  In September 2003, the SCO member states signed a Framework Agreement to deepen economic cooperation. At that same meeting, Chinese premier Wen Jiabao proposed a long-term goal: a free trade area spanning the entire bloc. A follow-up plan with 100 specific actions was signed exactly one year later, on the 23rd of September 2004.

  Energy sat at the center of the economic agenda from early on. In October 2005, during a Moscow summit, the SCO secretary-general announced that the organisation would prioritise joint energy projects, including oil, gas, and water resources. At the same summit, members agreed to create an SCO Interbank Consortium to fund joint projects. Russia pushed the idea of an SCO Energy Club at the 2007 Moscow summit, though other members did not commit.

  At the 2007 summit, Iranian vice president Parviz Davoodi floated a more radical notion. He argued that the SCO was a good venue for designing a new banking system independent from international banking systems. Russian president Vladimir Putin, speaking at the same meeting, said that the defectiveness of the monopoly in world finance had become clear and that Russia intended to take part in changing the global financial structure. In June 2009, at the Yekaterinburg Summit, China announced plans to offer a ten-billion-dollar loan to other SCO member states to support economies struggling after the 2008 financial crisis. Ideas about trading in local currencies rather than US dollars came up at the 2019 Bishkek summit, raised by Pakistani Prime Minister Imran Khan.

• 6. An Expanding Membership

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  India and Pakistan formally joined the SCO in June 2017 at a summit in Kazakhstan, after a process that began with a decision at Ufa, Russia in July 2015 and continued with a memorandum of obligations signed in Tashkent in June 2016. Their addition brought the membership to eight full states. Iran joined in July 2023, and Belarus followed in July 2024, bringing the total to ten.

  Turkey's relationship with the SCO has followed an unusual path. Turkey applied for dialogue partner status in 2011 and obtained it in 2013, even while remaining a NATO member and an EU candidate. Turkish prime minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan stated publicly that he had discussed trading Turkey's EU candidacy for full SCO membership. On the 23rd of November 2016, Turkey was given the chairmanship of the SCO energy club for 2017, making it the first country to chair a club in the organisation without holding full membership. On the 11th of July 2024, Erdogan told the US publication Newsweek that Turkey did not see NATO membership as an alternative to joining the SCO and BRICS.

  Turkmenistan presents a different case. The country declared itself permanently neutral, a status recognised by the United Nations General Assembly in 1995, which effectively rules out full membership in the SCO. Nevertheless, Turkmenistan's head of state has attended SCO summits as a guest since 2007. The most recent summit, held in Tianjin, China from the 31st of August to the 1st of September 2025, was described as the largest in the organisation's history.

• 7. Geopolitics and Internal Friction

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  The United States applied for observer status in the SCO in 2005 and was rejected. At that same Astana summit, with US forces stationed in Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan during the Afghanistan and Iraq wars, the SCO asked Washington to set a clear timetable for withdrawing its troops from member states. Shortly after, Uzbekistan asked the US to leave the K2 air base.

  In September 2023, the United Nations voted on a resolution titled "Cooperation between the United Nations and the Shanghai Cooperation Organization." Eighty countries voted in favour, two voted against, and forty-seven abstained. The United States and Israel were the only countries to vote against it.

  Despite being called an anti-NATO alliance by the European Council on Foreign Relations in 2022, the SCO has struggled to act as a unified geopolitical bloc. During the 2008 Russo-Georgian war, China used its influence in the SCO to prevent the organisation from endorsing Russia's actions, citing principles of territorial integrity and sovereignty. After Russia's 2022 invasion of Ukraine, many SCO members and even members of the related Collective Security Treaty Organization distanced themselves from military cooperation with Russia.

  In June 2025, India refused to endorse a joint statement at the SCO defence ministers' meeting in Qingdao, China. India objected that the statement did not mention the 22nd of April 2025 Pahalgam attack, in which 26 Indian tourists were killed, while the statement did reference militant activity in Balochistan. Defence Minister Rajnath Singh argued the statement aligned with Pakistan's narrative. India's foreign ministry spokesman Randhir Jaiswal put it plainly: India wanted its concerns on terrorism reflected in the document, and that was not acceptable to one particular country, so no joint statement was adopted. The tensions between member states had grown pointed enough that Indian commentators had taken to calling the body the "Shanghai Contradiction Organisation."