A 1996 border pact grew into the world's largest regional organisation
The Shanghai Cooperation Organisation began as five neighbours agreeing to build military trust along their borders. Three decades on, its ten members cover about a quarter of the planet's land and roughly 42 per cent of its people, making it the biggest regional bloc by both area and population.
Its forerunner, the Shanghai Five, formed on 26 April 1996 when China, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Russia and Tajikistan signed a treaty on military confidence in border regions. A year later in Moscow they agreed to cut forces along those frontiers, and in May 1997 Boris Yeltsin and Jiang Zemin signed a declaration calling for a multipolar world. Annual summits followed in Almaty, Bishkek and Dushanbe, where members pledged to resist outside intervention justified on humanitarian or human rights grounds.
In 2001 the summit came back to Shanghai. Uzbekistan joined, and on 15 June the six leaders signed a declaration founding the SCO as a deeper political and economic partnership. A charter signed in Saint Petersburg in June 2002 took effect in September 2003, by which point councils of heads of state, heads of government and foreign ministers were in place, along with a permanent secretariat in Beijing. At the 2005 Astana summit, attended for the first time by India, Iran, Mongolia and Pakistan, Kazakhstan's president Nursultan Nazarbayev told guests they represented half of humanity.
Expansion came in stages. India and Pakistan were approved in 2015 at Ufa and became full members in June 2017, Iran joined in July 2023 and Belarus in July 2024. Because India and Pakistan are parliamentary democracies, their prime ministers sit on the heads of state council, which meets once a year and is the organisation's highest authority. The group also works with the United Nations, where it holds observer status in the General Assembly, and with ASEAN.
Security is central. The Regional Anti-Terrorist Structure, based in Tashkent, coordinates action against what members call the three evils of terrorism, separatism and extremism, and its director serves a three-year term, as does the secretary-general. Chinese and Russian are the official languages. As of 2024 the members produced about 23 per cent of world nominal GDP and some 36 per cent measured by purchasing power.
Source: Shanghai Cooperation Organisation
