Experts weigh in on the role of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization

As part of his four-day state visit to Kazakhstan, President Xi Jinping is attending the 17th meeting of the Council of Heads of State of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) in Astana.

During this year’s Astana summit, India and Pakistan will complete the process of joining the SCO, the first expansion of the organization after its foundation in 2001.

The membership of the two South Asian countries has made the SCO the world's most populous regional cooperative organization and the largest by area.

However, Alexander Lukin, head of the Department of International Studies at the Higher School of Economics in Moscow told "Dialogue with Yang Rui" that the development of the SCO is faced with multiple challenges, and economic cooperation should be prioritized.

“I hope there will be a push in the economic direction because frankly speaking, economic cooperation is rather weak at the moment, the security is much better,” Lukin said.

Since becoming observer countries of the SCO in 2005, India and Pakistan have been actively participating in the affairs of the SCO and seeking to become full members for a long time.

However, some people are worried about their relationship within the SCO because the two countries are locked in a territorial dispute over Kashmir. Saibal Dasgupta, China correspondent of the Times of India, thinks the SCO should not be the platform for them to hash out their differences.

“Now the point is this. Will the SCO start discussing Kashmir? India doesn’t want the Kashmir issue to be solved in a multilateral platform. India wants it to be done in a bilateral platform.

Will China and Russia allow Pakistan to raise the Kashmir issue in SCO? If that happens, we’ll have a problem. Because if SCO stays out of territorial disputes and focuses on its main mission of fighting terrorism, the three evils, there won’t be any problem,” said Dasgupta.

An observer country that has been actively seeking the SCO membership is Iran, which has yet to be accepted into the organization due to Tajikistan’s opposition, according to Russian media. Li Li, senior fellow and deputy director of the Institute of South and Southeast Asian and Oceania Studies thought, the reason lies in Iran itself.

“Actually, in my understanding, I don’t think what is happening in the Middle East will be a problem for Iran to join the SCO. I think the major problem may be Iran itself. Because of the Iranian nuclear issue, it was under the UN sanction. So there’s hesitation from the SCO to have it joined,” said Li.

(CGTN)