BAKU, Azerbaijan, September 1. The Shanghai
Cooperation Organization (SCO) Bishkek Summit is an important
indicator of global power shifts, a professor at Uludağ University
in Türkiye, Mehmet Yüce, told Trend.
"It's not right to approach the SCO Summit as just another
meeting of the organization. The summit is not only a demonstration
of the SCO's institutional transformation and its growing
geopolitical weight, but also an important indicator of a larger
power shift taking place within the international system," he
said.
According to him, the evolution of global politics from a
unipolar structure to a multi-centered and multi-level system in
recent years increases the importance of the SCO.
"Initially a regional organization focused mainly on Central
Asian security issues, the SCO has today become a large-scale
Eurasian cooperation mechanism that unites China, Russia, India,
Iran, Pakistan, and Central Asian countries on a single
platform.
The fact that the organization's agenda has expanded beyond the
security sphere to encompass a wide range of areas, such as energy,
transport, trade, technology, artificial intelligence, information
security, nuclear security, climate change, and economic
cooperation, is one of the most obvious indicators of this
transformation.
The documents adopted at the Bishkek Summit also show that the
SCO should no longer be perceived as a security organization in the
classical sense," he noted.
Yüce added that it is more realistic to approach the SCO not as
a military alliance or a single ideological bloc, but as a
strategic maneuver and dialogue platform where different power
centers can cooperate on the basis of common interests.
"In fact, this is precisely the uniqueness of the SCO. States
that compete with each other or have different priorities can come
together under the same institutional umbrella in order to identify
areas of common interest. This situation also shows that the modern
international system is increasingly moving away from classical
alliance models.
To understand the broader significance of the Bishkek Summit, it
is necessary to look at the transformation in the international
system. The U.S.-centered unipolar structure that emerged after the
end of the Cold War no longer plays the decisive role it once did,"
he stressed.
The professor said that in this new era, instead of choosing a
bloc in the traditional sense, states are trying to expand their
strategic maneuvering capabilities by simultaneously establishing
relations with various power centers.
"The Bishkek Summit should be closely watched, especially from
the perspective of Türkiye, Azerbaijan, and the Turkic world.
This is because Central Asia is one of the geopolitical centers
for both the SCO and the Turkic world. The position of the
countries of the region – especially Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, and
Uzbekistan – within the SCO is an important strategic factor in
terms of the Turkic world’s relations with major powers such as
China, Russia, India, and Iran. At this stage, it would be more
correct to approach the Organization of Turkic States and the SCO
not as competing institutions, but as platforms that can complement
each other and have different functions.
The SCO provides the Turkic states with a multilateral platform
on which they can develop their relations in the economic, energy,
transport and security fields within the wider Eurasian region,"
Yüce noted.
