Published online by Cambridge University Press: 16 September 2025
The last chapter treated the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO)'s reaction to three crises occurring in its very own region. It revealed that the organization invokes the same ‘rules’ for international relations in all of these conflicts. Furthermore, it noted that the SCO and its member states in all three cases acted in accordance with the organization's formalized norms, including an interpretation of non-interference that corresponds with the interpretation of the norm China promotes unilaterally. This chapter turns to three international security issues outside the immediate SCO region: the Syrian Civil War, the Russo-Georgian War of 2008, and the Ukraine crisis and war since 2014. SCO member state Russia has been militarily involved in each of these conflicts, which runs counter to some of the most characteristic norms of the SCO, such as non-interference, non-military action, and searching for peaceful, diplomatic solutions. Thus, the analysis that follows not only highlights the SCO's response to non-regional issues but also provides empirical insight into what happens when one of the most powerful members of a regional organization – in this case, Russia – acts in contradiction to a norm promoted by the other leader and fails to ‘institutionalize’ the norm ‘in action’. The investigation sheds new light on China's ability to promote its norms with the help of the SCO and qualifies some of the findings of the previous chapter. After examining the organization's reactions to the three external crises separately, I will discuss and summarize the SCO's norms ‘in action’ in the context of all six crises treated in this and the previous chapter.
To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure no-reply@cambridge.org is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.
Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.
Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.
To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.
To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.