The 2026 Bishkek Summit marks the twenty-sixth meeting of the Council of Heads of State of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) and the twenty-fifth anniversary of the organization’s founding. Under the theme “25 Years of the SCO: Together for Sustainable Peace, Development and Prosperity,” the summit reflects the SCO’s evolution from a regional confidence-building mechanism into a broad platform linking counterterrorism, diplomacy, economic development, education, public health, poverty reduction, and environmental responsibility. At a time of geopolitical tension and transnational insecurity, the organization can demonstrate that security and development are mutually reinforcing foundations of a peaceful international order.
Since its establishment in 2001, the SCO has grown from six founding states into a ten-member organization whose collective scale has given it substantial influence on the global stage. Its members account for 42 percent of the world’s population and about 23 percent of global nominal GDP, with an even larger share when output is measured by purchasing power parity. This demographic and economic weight strengthens the SCO’s capacity to shape cooperation on connectivity, food and energy security, digitalization, poverty reduction, climate resilience, and green development. For the Global South, the SCO experience offers a practical model of how diverse states can protect policy autonomy while pursuing shared priorities. Developing countries can benefit by adapting-not simply copying-its targeted approaches: align regional infrastructure with local employment, pair technology transfer with vocational training, focus poverty programs on vulnerable communities, modernize agriculture through water-efficient methods, expand affordable health and education, and measure cooperation by improvements in livelihoods. Such partnerships should remain transparent, locally owned, environmentally responsible, and attentive to unequal gains so that regional integration delivers broad-based social uplift rather than growth alone.
The SCO’s most immediate contribution is its sustained campaign against terrorism, separatism, and extremism. These threats cross borders and exploit illicit networks involving weapons, narcotics, human trafficking, and illegal financing. No state can eliminate them through isolated action. The SCO therefore enables governments to exchange intelligence, coordinate law-enforcement efforts, strengthen border security, align legal measures, and prepare joint responses. Its Regional Anti-Terrorist Structure provides permanent coordination, while recurring anti-terrorist exercises test procedures and improve cooperation among national agencies. Exercises such as “Sahand-Antiterror-2025” and specialist conferences in Tashkent illustrate how the SCO builds professional networks, shares operational experience, and develops common responses to both conventional and emerging threats.
Eliminating terrorism, however, requires more than policing and military action. Extremist groups often recruit where unemployment, illiteracy, exclusion, weak governance, and lack of opportunity produce frustration and despair. An effective SCO strategy must address violent networks and the conditions that sustain them. Governments should combine lawful security measures with investments in schools, employment, social inclusion, community resilience, digital literacy, and opportunities for young people. Prevention, rehabilitation, intercultural dialogue, and respect for human dignity are essential if counterterrorism is to produce durable peace rather than temporary suppression.
Peace and stability are equally central to the SCO’s mission. Instability in one part of Eurasia can spread through refugee flows, organized crime, interrupted trade, and radicalization. The organization can reduce these risks through preventive diplomacy, political dialogue, confidence-building, and peaceful dispute settlement. Its leadership is also visible in cooperation with the United Nations. The SCO has held observer status in the UN General Assembly since 2005 and has developed working relationships with bodies concerned with counterterrorism, drugs and crime, education, food security, and humanitarian affairs. By connecting regional experience with global institutions, it helps translate multilateral principles into practical action without becoming a military bloc.
Lasting stability also depends on the prosperity that reaches ordinary people. Transport corridors, energy cooperation, digital connectivity, and simpler trade procedures can connect landlocked economies to markets, lower costs, encourage investment, and create employment. Shared prosperity gives states a stake in keeping peace, but growth must be inclusive. Small businesses, rural communities, women, young people, and vulnerable groups should benefit from regional integration. Transparent financing, fair procurement, responsible debt management, and social and environmental safeguards are therefore indispensable. The SCO’s recent emphasis on the digital economy, sustainable energy, and green industry shows how it can guide economic cooperation toward long-term resilience rather than short-term gain.
Education and literacy deserve a prominent place on this agenda. Literacy enables citizens to understand public information, participate in economic life, resist misinformation, and engage peacefully with different ideas. The SCO can promote scholarships, academic exchanges, teacher training, multilingual resources, vocational education, scientific cooperation, and digital access. Networks among universities and research institutions can advance work in public policy, technology, medicine, and climate science. Special attention to rural communities and education gaps would improve productivity while reducing the appeal of intolerance and extremist propaganda.
The same principle applies to global health. Disease outbreaks ignore borders, making early-warning systems, transparent information-sharing, resilient medical supply chains, trained health workers, and equitable access to medicines essential. The SCO can support cooperation among public health agencies, research institutions, hospitals, and emergency-response bodies. Joint action on maternal and child health, infectious diseases, nutrition, medical training, and healthy lifestyles would improve daily life and strengthen preparedness for future crises. Health cooperation also builds trust because its benefits are visible to citizens across national boundaries.
Poverty elimination should unite the SCO’s security, economic, educational, and health programs. Poverty increases vulnerability to hunger, disease, displacement, exploitation, and extremist recruitment. Reducing it requires productive employment, affordable healthcare, food and water security, rural development, digital inclusion, and access to finance. The SCO’s Special Working Group on Poverty Alleviation provides a practical example: its experts have examined climate-resilient social protection and ways to shield vulnerable groups from disasters and economic shocks. Likewise, cooperation with the Food and Agriculture Organization on climate-smart agriculture, water efficiency, and resilient food systems shows how regional leadership can advance global development goals while improving rural livelihoods.
Sustainability links present development with future peace. The SCO region faces extreme heat, melting glaciers, drought, floods, water scarcity, pollution, and land degradation. These pressures can damage agriculture, increase migration, intensify competition over resources, and reverse progress against poverty. Regional cooperation on water management, disaster preparedness, renewable energy, climate-resilient agriculture, environmental monitoring, and green technology is therefore indispensable. Programs promoting sustainable energy, green industry, and better resource management show how the SCO can turn environmental risk into an opportunity for scientific and policy leadership.
Taken together, these priorities give the SCO a significant role in a changing, increasingly multipolar world order. Its purpose should not be to replace one form of dominance with another, but to support multilateralism, international law, sovereign equality, dialogue, and a stronger voice for developing countries. Its outreach to the United Nations and other regional organizations allows it to bridge national policies and international solutions. Leadership in such a system should be measured by the ability to prevent conflict, uphold common rules, and deliver shared public goods in security, health, education, food, and environmental protection.
The Bishkek Summit can therefore serve as more than an anniversary gathering. It can reaffirm that counterterrorism, peace, prosperity, literacy, health, poverty reduction, and sustainability belong to one comprehensive vision. The SCO’s effectiveness will ultimately depend on implementation: clear commitments, accountable institutions, measurable outcomes, and cooperation that improves citizens’ lives. If member states convert declarations into coordinated action, the organization can become an influential model of regional cooperation and responsible global leadership. Its greatest achievement would be not merely the suppression of terrorist networks, but the creation of societies in which violence loses its appeal because people possess security, dignity, knowledge, health, opportunity, and hope.
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