New and Old Regionalism: The Shanghai Cooperation Organization and Sino-Central Asian Relations

The ‘Shanghai Cooperation Organization’ (SCO) developed out of the

‘Shanghai Five Heads Convocation Mechanism’.1 The latter was established

when on April 26, 1996, Kazakhstan President Nazarbayev, Kyrgyzstan

President Akayev, Tajikistan President Rakmonov, Russian President Yeltsin

and China’s President Jiang Zemin signed the five-country ‘Treaty on

Strengthening Trust in Military Affairs in the Border Regions’.