Security Governance in Central Asia: Assessing the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation's Contributions and Limitations Across Security Domains

Abstract

The Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) presents itself as the principal security governance framework for Central Asia, mandated to address terrorism, separatism, extremism, and drug trafficking — collectively the "three evils" plus narcotics. Yet systematic, domain-by-domain assessments of its actual contribution remain scarce in the academic literature, with most studies either accepting self-reported institutional claims or dismissing the organisation as a "talking shop." This article applies a structured qualitative framework, drawing on primary SCO legal instruments, RATS operational reporting, and external UNODC evidence, to assess the organisation's security governance performance across four domains between 2001 and 2024. The findings demonstrate that SCO's contribution is strongest in counterterrorism, where the Regional Anti-Terrorist Structure (RATS) has generated routinised intelligence sharing and verifiable organisational outputs, though outcome attribution is constrained by reliance on self-reported data. Conversely, in the drug trafficking domain, outcome dynamics are overwhelmingly driven by Afghanistan's opium production cycles and trafficking market economics, limiting plausible attribution to SCO mechanisms. In the extremism and separatism domains, SCO outputs are primarily normative — institutionalising non-interference norms and territorial integrity commitments — rather than operational, and these outputs serve member states' regime-security interests as much as they address genuine population-level threats. The article contributes a replicable evidence-grading protocol applicable to assessments of regional organisations' security claims, and advances the theoretical debate between institutional effectiveness literature and authoritarian regionalism frameworks.