Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian is also attending the summit, which marks 25 years of the SCO’s existence. The two-day summit, starting on Monday, is being held as the world grapples with the aftermath of the US-Israel war on Iran, which has upended global energy and financial markets, alongside the ongoing Russia-Ukraine war.
The summit is expected to focus on the grouping’s agenda amid mounting geopolitical tensions, including efforts to promote a multipolar world and strengthen Global South cooperation on trade and security issues as United States President Donald Trump’s unilateral foreign policy has eroded the global rules-based order.
This year’s summit is taking place in Bishkek under the motto “Together for Sustainable Peace, Development and Prosperity”.
Xi, Putin and Modi will be joined by the Iranian president and leaders of Pakistan, Uzbekistan, Belarus, Kazakhstan and others. Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres and Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) Secretary-General Kao Kim Hourn are also expected to attend.
William Yang, senior analyst for Northeast Asia at the International Crisis Group, said the ongoing wars are putting more strain on the rules-based international order. Against this backdrop, he said, the summit provides an important opportunity for several of the world’s rising great powers, including China and India, to elevate their global influence and deepen engagement and cooperation with other countries in the Global South.
“For years, SCO has been viewed as one of the avenues for China to promote the multipolar world order and form its own bloc with other developing countries. Despite its narrow scope of cooperation at the beginning, SCO member states have sought to expand the scope of their mandate and the number of member states,” Yang told Al Jazeera.
Amid the ongoing conflicts in the Middle East and Europe, Yang said China could use this year’s summit to present itself as a great power advocating peaceful resolution of the conflicts, thereby sharpening the contrast with the United States.
“However, these efforts are likely to be limited to rhetoric rather than any substantive proposal for conflict resolution,” he said.
Alicia Garcia-Herrero, chief economist for Asia Pacific at French investment bank Natixis, said the summit is particularly significant because it marks the grouping’s 25th anniversary and offers the first chance to turn last year’s Tianjin strategy, which called for a multipolar world order that fosters mutually beneficial international cooperation, into action. Last year’s summit took place in China’s Tianjin region.
“Putting Modi, Putin and Xi in the same room, with India-China border talks still live and a scheduled Modi-Putin bilateral, is a visible test of how far the recent thaw goes and how Eurasia wants to organise security, connectivity and trade without defaulting to Western institutions,” Garcia-Herrero told Al Jazeera, referring to the recent India-China talks amid the warming up of New Delhi-Beijing ties.
The SCO started in 1996 as a security bloc known as the “Shanghai Five”. It was formed by China, Russia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan to settle their border disputes following the end of the Cold War and the collapse of the Soviet Union.
In June 2001, the grouping evolved into the SCO and expanded to include Uzbekistan, with its headquarters in Beijing. In 2017, the bloc expanded to include India and Pakistan. Iran and Belarus were added as full members in 2023 and 2024, respectively.
The organisation also has 14 key dialogue partners, including Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Egypt, Turkiye, Myanmar, Sri Lanka and Cambodia.
SCO member states account for 43 percent of the world’s population and 23 percent, or almost a quarter, of the global economy.
Analysts have noted that the SCO’s expansion from its original regional security focus to trade and other Global South concerns has made it difficult to distinguish the grouping from other Global South organisations such as BRICS, an acronym derived from the initials of the founding member countries Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa.
Alejandro Reyes, adjunct professor in the department of politics and public administration at the University of Hong Kong, said the SCO has developed into a “counterbalance” to the US-led Asia Pacific alliance aimed at countering China’s rise. India is part of both groupings.
“Interestingly, India is part of the SCO, and the US appears to have dropped the Indo-Pacific nomenclature,” Reyes said.
Reyes stressed that “the SCO is not a coherent anti-US, anti-Western alliance”. He said it is better understood as a forum where countries with very different interests can demonstrate that they have alternatives and strategic room for manoeuvre in a more volatile geopolitical order dominated by China and the United States.
“It is less an anti-American alliance than a venue for countries hedging against and hinging away from American power,” he told Al Jazeera.
“The significance this year is that current US policies, especially with regard to Iran and continuing US tariff and sanctions action, may be making that hedging more attractive and necessary,” he added.
About The Author
.jpg)
Comment List