Russia in the SCO: The Story of a Changing Attitude

Regional organizations have long been perceived as entities securing peace and amity in a region. They are also meant to promote certain shared norms and visions on the world affairs. Until now the literature has mostly focused on regional democratic organizations – those formed by explicitly democratic countries or those set up by well-established democracies (Gibler & Wolford, 2006; Horowitz & Tyburski, 2016). However, as noted by many (Libman & Obydenkova, 2013; Mattes & Rodríguez, 2014; von Soest & Grauvogel, 2017), the participation of non-democratic and especially authoritarian regimes in multilateral institutions did not attract scholarly attention until recently. This research intends to contribute to this relatively new topic with the case study of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (the SCO). It is the only institution in Central Asia that unites post-Soviet countries and is presided by both regional superpowers at the same time – Russia and China. Therefore, any fluctuations in the attitude of one of the two may signal changes within the SCO. I analyse how the attitude of one of the establishers – Russia – has changed over time and what might be the determinants of this switch. For that reason, I will look at the official discourse of Moscow voiced by the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs (that implements and executes foreign policy according to the Constitution), as it signals fluctuations at the highest level. The research focuses on the position of Russia in the organization and vis-à-vis its former vassals (are they interested in and dependent on each other?). The empirical basis of the paper consists of the online archive of the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs in the years 2000-2016. The analysis is done with the help of computer-assisted content analysis and provides information on the attitude (positive, negative, or neutral) of the country. The main goal is to find out how (and if) the sentiment has changed over time and what might constitute the change. Although the paper is mainly descriptive and empirically-driven, several hypotheses explaining growing positivity of Russian attitude towards the SCO will be brought.