The Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) now represents 3.4 billion people and a quarter of global GDP, as its members seek a greater role in shaping a multipolar international order.

Despite a roll-up of all the ‘baddies’ in Western eyes, the latest meeting of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (31 August – 1 September) elicited little interest from the ‘white man’s media’. Even SBS, which would prefer to think itself distinct from such a moniker, could only describe the meeting in its evening news on Tuesday 1 September as “an Eurasian gathering”.

Chaired under its rotating chair structure, the Heads of State Council, the supreme governing body of the SCO, met under the leadership of the president of the Kyrgyz Republic, Sadr Japarov, in Bishkek, the capital of the Kyrgyz Republic, with the motto ‘25 years of SCO: Together for a sustainable peace, development, and prosperity’.

Chief among those attending were Xi Jinping, Vladimir Putin and Narendra Modi. Notably present were Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian and Alexander Lukashenko, the Belarusian president.

The current members of the SCO are China, Russia, India, Pakistan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan, along with those who have joined recently, the Islamic Republic of Iran (2023) and........

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