SIPRI Policy Paper No. 17

While all these phenomena are somewhat under-researched, the forms taken by multilateralism in the area of the former Soviet Union have been particularly little studied. There is a widespread assumption in the West that, because they involve imperfectly democratic states and often reject externally defined norms of governance, such groups are bound to be illegitimate or ineffective or both. This Policy Paper sets out to test and challenge such generalized views by looking in detail at the most dynamic and complex of such groupings, the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO).

Founded in 2001, the SCO includes China as well as the Russian Federation and the Central Asian states Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan. Its deeper goals thus include managing potential Sino-Russian tensions or competition, but its overt activities are directed first at transnational threats and, additionally, at economic and infrastructure cooperation. The present study seeks to illuminate the motives and experiences of the SCO’s members—with the help of two chapters contributed by a Russian and a Chinese expert, respectively—and to offer a dispassionate analysis of the organization’s qualities, strengths, weaknesses and effects. The judgements that emerge are mixed but include the recognition that the SCO makes some real impact on the security of the wide territories it covers and that it has real potential for further development.

Dr Pál Dunay (Hungary) is Director of the Hungarian Institute of International Affairs. Until March 2007 he was a senior researcher with the SIPRI Euro-Atlantic, Regional and Global Security Project. Before joining SIPRI he worked at the Geneva Centre for Security Policy between 1996 and 2004. He is co-author of Ungarns Aussenpolitik 1990–1997: zwischen Westintegration, Nachbarschafts- und Minderheitenpolitik [Hungarian foreign policy 1990–1997: at the crossroads of Western integration, neighbourhood and minority policy] (Nomos Verlag, 1998) and Open Skies: A Cooperative Approach to Military Transparency and Confidence-Building (United Nations Institute for Disarmament Research, 2004).

Dr Pan Guang (China) is the Director of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization Studies Center in Shanghai, the Shanghai Center for International Studies, and the Institute of European and Asian Studies at Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences. His research interests include international studies, Asian studies, Middle East studies and Jewish studies. He has published books and articles on a variety of topics including 2000 years of Asia–Europe relations, China–Central Asia–Russia relations, China’s role in the war on terrorism, contemporary international crises, China’s involvement in the Middle East, and Islam and Confucianism. In 2005 he was appointed to the UN High-Level Group on the Alliance of Civilizations, which reported in 2006.

Mikhail Troitskiy (Russia) is an associate professor at Moscow State Institute of International Relations (MGIMO University) and Deputy Director of the Academic Educational Forum on International Relations, Moscow. In 2005–2006 he was a Fulbright–Kennan research scholar at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, Washington, DC, and a BP visiting fellow at Clare Hall, Cambridge University. He has published on Russian foreign policy (including energy issues), Eurasian security, Russian–US and EU–Russian relations. He is the author of Transatlanticheskii soyuz 1991–2004 [The transatlantic union 1991–2004] (Institute for US and Canadian Studies (ISKRAN), 2004) and Institutionalizing U.S.–Russian Cooperation in Central Eurasia, Kennan Institute Occasional Paper no. 293 (June 2006).

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