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.
