In this series of our conversation and knowledge sharing as we are exploring Shanghai Cooperation Organization, I trace how China, Russia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan transformed a militarized and disputed frontier into a framework based on consultation, transparency and practical rules.
The Shanghai Cooperation Organization did not begin with a grand plan for Eurasian integration. It began with existing mistrust and finding common ways to manage this mistrust in a way to avoid conflicts.
Today, the SCO discusses security, trade, transport, energy, technology and culture. Its first achievement, however, was more basic.
China, Russia and three newly independent Central Asian states found a way to manage mistrust before it produced another conflict.
A border carrying the weight of history
The frontier between China and the Soviet Union carried the weight of nineteenth-century treaties, territorial disagreements and the political breakdown between Beijing and Moscow. The Sino-Soviet split transformed former ideological partners into strategic rivals. Armed clashes in 1969 showed that the danger was real.
Normalization came slowly. Border negotiations resumed during the final years of the Soviet Union, but the collapse of the USSR in 1991 changed the problem. China no longer faced one state across its northern and western frontier. It now shared the former Sino-Soviet boundary with Russia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, and Tajikistan.
The three Central Asian republics had acquired sovereignty, but they also inherited sections of an unsettled and militarized border. None could afford a prolonged confrontation with China. Beijing needed a stable western frontier for domestic development and security in Xinjiang. Russia wanted to preserve its security role while reducing the burden of confrontation.
Their interests converged around one urgent objective: prevent the border from becoming a source of war.
The unusual 1+4 formula
In September 1992, China, Russia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan agreed in Minsk to continue the earlier Sino-Soviet negotiations on military confidence and force reductions. Russia and the three Central Asian states formed a joint delegation. In practice, the talks followed a 1+4 formula, with China on one side and the four former Soviet republics acting collectively on the other.
The arrangement preserved earlier negotiations while recognizing that four sovereign states had replaced the Soviet Union along the border. It also kept the talks focused on the shared frontier with China, without pulling disagreements among the successor states into the same process.
This was not yet the multilateral SCO we know today. It was a carefully designed method for solving one security problem.
Trust was converted into procedures
The first major result came on 26 April 1996, when the five states signed the Agreement on Confidence-Building in the Military Field in the Border Area in Shanghai. It required them to avoid military activities directed against one another, exchange information about forces, limit exercises, provide advance notification of significant military activity and invite observers under defined conditions.
Enhanced transparency measures applied within a 100-kilometre belt on both sides of the frontier. If suspicious activity arose, a state could request an explanation, and the other side had to respond within a set period. Trust was treated as something to be produced through repeated conduct, not assumed from diplomatic language.
The second agreement, signed in Moscow on 24 April 1997, addressed the mutual reduction of armed forces in the border area. It set limits for troops and equipment, established data exchange and inspections, and created a joint supervisory mechanism to handle implementation and interpretation. The remaining forces were to be kept at levels consistent with self-defence and good-neighborly relations. These two agreements became the legal foundation of the Shanghai Five process. SCO Secretariat
The sequence is important. The five states did not create an organization and then search for a purpose. They addressed a shared danger, mistrust and then developed working habits, tested implementation and only then widened the agenda.
From border management to regional cooperation
Once the risk of military confrontation had been reduced, cooperation moved beyond the frontier. The 1998 Almaty meeting placed the five countries on a more equal multilateral footing and expanded discussion to terrorism, separatism, extremism, transnational crime and economic cooperation.
The 2000 Dushanbe Declaration called for a broader regional structure. Uzbekistan joined the process, and the SCO was formally established in Shanghai on 15 June 2001. SCO anniversary declaration
This history corrects the assumption that the SCO was simply designed by major powers and extended into Central Asia. Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan were not passive territory between China and Russia. Their sovereignty, security concerns and participation were essential. Central Asian agency remains central to understanding the SCO today.
The lesson for Pakistan
Pakistan will assume the rotational chairmanship of the SCO Council of Heads of State and Council of Foreign Ministers for 2026–27 and will host the SCO summit in 2027. Pakistan Ministry of Foreign Affairs
The founding history offers Pakistan a useful lesson. Regional cooperation becomes credible when political commitments are tied to a defined problem, an agreed procedure, measurable obligations and follow-up.
Pakistan’s stronger contribution may come from selecting a few practical areas where consensus can become delivery. Trade facilitation, poverty alleviation, counterterrorism coordination and research cooperation all require the discipline that shaped the early Shanghai process: begin with the problem, define the obligations, assign responsibility and review implementation.
The SCO did not emerge because its future members trusted one another completely. It emerged because they recognised that unmanaged mistrust had become too dangerous and too costly.
That may be the most important lesson from the organization’s beginning. Durable regional cooperation often starts with one consequential decision: to replace uncertainty with rules, confrontation with consultation and suspicion with a process that can be tested.
As Pakistan prepares to lead the organization, which shared problem should it place first on that practical agenda?
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Dr. Farhat Asif
Dr. Farhat Asif is President of the Institute of Peace and Diplomatic Studies, Chairperson of the Diplomatic Insight Group, and Founding Editor of The Diplomatic Insight. With more than 17 years of experience in diplomacy, foreign policy research, strategic communication, publishing, and public diplomacy, her work focuses on Pakistan’s engagement with South Asia, Central Asia, the SCO, and the wider Eurasian region. The views expressed are her own and do not necessarily reflect the positions of the institutions she represents.
