The upcoming summit of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) in Tianjin, China, from August 31 to September 1, will be the organisation’s largest gathering of heads of state to date. It comes at a time when the existing liberal international order is rapidly disintegrating. But rather than offering a concrete new order, the SCO demonstrates the persistent difficulties that anti-liberal powers such as China and Russia have in agreeing and implementing a credible alternative.
Founded in Shanghai in 2001 with just six members – Russia, China, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan – the SCO has grown rapidly over the past decade. India and Pakistan joined in 2017, Iran in 2023, and Belarus in 2024. Beyond these ten member states, the SCO also has two observers – Afghanistan and Mongolia – and 14 dialogue partners, including Turkey, Egypt, Armenia and Azerbaijan, several of the Gulf states, and a number of other Asian states. If measured by population of its core member states, it is the world’s largest regional organisation.
Size clearly matters, but in the case of the SCO it creates problems rather than contributing to their resolution. The organisation did little in response to escalating tensions between India and Pakistan in the wake of the terrorist attacks in Kashmir that eventually brought the two long-standing rivals to the brink of nuclear confrontation. It took US mediation to de-escalate the violence. The SCO’s subsequent failure to condemn cross-border terrorism explicitly in a joint statement of the meeting of defence ministers at the end of June led India to refuse to sign it.
