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The Shanghai Corporation Organisation arose from a set of desired ideals in the Eurasian region bolstered primarily by countries such as Russia and China. With diverging cultural, political, religious, and economic values, the security and economic values were primate on the Organisation’s Agenda giving way to the formation of a strong regional alliance that grew from a five Member State Organisation. Within the Organisation, the ideals of human security, regional security, information sharing and economic development with cooperation find common ground. Though challenged differing values, the work traverses the historical, legal, and other journeys to one that has successfully found its way into the international arena with the likes of the United Nations. This paper reviews the work.

In 2021, the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) turned 20 years old. With “Shanghai Spirit” as its guiding principle, the scope of SCO’s activity has significantly expanded, recently adding India and Pakistan to its members. As a result, SCO policy has heavily influenced the Central Asia region. In response, in 2019, the EU launched a new strategy for Central Asia, adopting “connectivity” as its core concept. As a result, both SCO and EU strategies in Central Asia tend to conflict with each other, thus leading to uneven and inconsistent development of the region. Therefore, this paper aims to identify contradictions between SCO’s “Shanghai Spirit” guiding principle and the EU’s concept of “connectivity” by comparing the SCO and EU strategies toward Central Asia. The methodology in the paper involves a qualitative comparative method, including two qualitative case studies, represented by the SCO’s “Shanghai Spirit” and the EU’s concept of “connectivity” in their strategies on Central Asia. The article concludes that contestation between the SCO and the EU policies in Central Asia impedes stable development of the region, and therefore, a compromise between both policies in Central Asia is suggested.

Since China and Russia have moved their comprehensive strategic partnership forward towards an unprecedented height, people have wondered what the motives are behind the two huge land powers to crave this end. Historically, China and the former Soviet Union had forged the formal alliance throughout the 1950s due to the common security concerns, the shared ideologies and the strategic interests of the day. Yet, they also split into the arch rivals for nearly two decades until the early 1980s. Realist scholars believe that China and the former USSR and now Russia are doomed to compete with each other in light of their geographical vicinity and the lack of mutual trust resulted from the pursuit of greatness and historical memories. However, since the collapse of the USSR, China and Russia have developed their overall ties steadily and substantially. To well grasp the raison d’être of Sino-Russian strategic partnership, it is necessary to analyze the rationales behind the current relations between Beijing and Moscow stemming from their consensus, or «the shared views» that the future world order will be founded on multilateralism rather than unilateralism, in which China and Russia must be appropriately placed alongside the United States and other major players.

This article explores some of the ways in which language was central to the construction of Shanghai spirit, an idiom that has been used to capture multilateral cooperation between China, Russia, and the independent Central Asian states since 1996. That year the heads of China, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, and Russia met in Shanghai to enhance confidence-building measures across their common borders. In 2001, this ad hoc mechanism was superseded by the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO), a chartered organization with standing bodies. The SCO was designed for wide-ranging cooperation in a globalizing world, a goal conveyed through a lexicon of cooperation that characterized its formal statements and communiqués: "good neighbourliness"; "win--win"; "mutually beneficial and comprehensive cooperation"; "political multipolarity"; "economic and information globalization". But today there is discord between the language of cooperation and the SCO's achievements: over the previous fifteen years, SCO member states have entered into bilateral security agreements with outside countries (including the United States), and trade between SCO countries was, and is, negotiated bilaterally, such as Chinese and Russian investments in Central (and South) Asia. Nevertheless, the vocabulary of cooperation remains important as a space-making exercise envisioning new political configurations in a globalizing world. These new geographical imaginaries of Eurasia have retained the promise of cooperation even if success remains limited. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]