At a moment when the architecture of global power is being quietly renegotiated, the Shanghai Cooperation Organization is drawing the attention of scholars who see in it something more than a regional forum. Zamir Ahmed Awan, writing through China Daily, argues that the SCO has matured into a platform through which nations long positioned at the margins of international decision-making may begin to author their own futures — drawing on their own resources, their own labor, and their own collective will. It is a claim about trajectory more than arrival: not that Western influence has ended, but