Shanghai Cooperation Organisation
The Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) is a political, economic and international security organization that was founded to create an alternative to Liberal World Order. It was founded on July 7, 2002. In 2004, the SCO established relations with the United Nations (where it is an observer in the UN General Assembly), the Commonwealth of Independent States in 2005, the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) in 2005, the Collective Security Treaty Organization in 2007, the Economic Cooperation Organization in 2007, the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime in 2011, the Conference on Interaction and Confidence-Building Measures in Asia (CICA) in 2014, and the United Nations Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific (ESCAP) in 2015. In 2018, SCO Regional Anti-Terrorist Structure (RATS) has established relations with the African Union's African Centre for the Study and Research on Terrorism (ACSRT).
Origins
The Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) origins actually go back to 1996, when China, Russia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan created what became known as the Shanghai Five, primarily to build confidence and reduce military forces along their borders following the collapse of the Soviet Union. Agreements in 1996 and 1997 established mechanisms for military confidence-building and border-force reductions. Uzbekistan joined the mechanism in 2001, and the six countries transformed it into the SCO.