ABSTRACT
The Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) has been gaining increasing international visibility since its establishment in 2001. This is in large part due to the number of traditional geopolitical interpretations that have depicted the SCO as a counterweight to NATO. Characterizations of the SCO as a traditional security alliance between Russia and China led many to conclude that it must be centred on opposing the growing US presence in Central Asia since 2001, and an anti-Western agenda in general. Such references to the traditional components of power politics have also been utilized by the SCO to assert its importance as a regional organization. It has made much of the combined size of the territory, populations and military power of its members; the SCO membership comprises one-quarter of the world’s population, three-fifths of the territory of the Eurasian continent and two nuclear powers and permanent UN Security Council members. However, the grandeur that these statistics are supposed to inspire does not conceal the manifold internal security challenges facing its members, in particular the Central Asian Republics (CARs). Post-Soviet Central Asia has been the site of numerous security threats and challenges of an interstate, sub-state and transnational nature, with many of its states’ internal security landscapes containing features of all three typologies. 2 Map of membership of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO). https://s3-euw1-ap-pe-df-pch-content-public-p.s3.eu-west-1.amazonaws.com/9780203422496/84b35142-f16a-4630-bee6-7fa0ac57f848/content/map8_1_B.jpg" xmlns:xlink="https://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"/>
