SCO emerging as Global South power, Pakistani scholar says

Zamir Ahmed Awan, who leads the Global Silk Route Research Alliance, sat down recently with China Daily to discuss what he sees as a fundamental shift in how the world's developing nations are organizing themselves. The Shanghai Cooperation Organization, he argued, is no longer simply a regional security forum. It has become something larger: a vehicle through which countries of the Global South can gather, design their own economic and political strategies, and do so without waiting for permission or guidance from established Western powers.

The SCO, which includes China, Russia, India, Pakistan, and several Central Asian states, has been expanding its reach and deepening its work across multiple domains—security, trade, cultural exchange, and development cooperation. Awan's observation is that this expansion matters precisely because it happens at a moment when traditional power centers are reasserting themselves. While Western nations continue to exercise influence through established institutions and alliances, the SCO is offering an alternative architecture.

What makes this platform distinctive, in Awan's view, is its focus on self-determination through resource management. The Global South nations that participate in the SCO possess substantial human capital and natural resources. For decades, the relationship between these countries and the developed world has often been structured around extraction, debt, or conditional aid. Awan suggests the SCO creates space for a different arrangement: countries working together to harness their own assets—their labor, their minerals, their agricultural capacity, their energy—to reshape their own development trajectories.

This is not merely rhetorical. The SCO has been negotiating trade agreements, coordinating infrastructure projects, and building mechanisms for joint investment. Member states have been discussing everything from energy cooperation to educational exchanges. The organization has also been selective about expansion, recently granting membership to Iran and Belarus, moves that signal a deliberate strategy to broaden the coalition of nations operating outside traditional Western-led frameworks.

Awan's framing—that the SCO will "emerge as a Global South power"—reflects a reading of geopolitical momentum. He is not claiming the organization has already displaced Western influence globally. Rather, he is identifying a trajectory: as the SCO matures and its members coordinate more effectively, it will accumulate sufficient collective weight to shape outcomes in regions and sectors where it operates. For nations in Asia, Central Asia, and increasingly the Middle East and Africa, this could mean having a genuine alternative when making decisions about partnerships, investment, and development strategy.

The timing of this analysis is significant. Global South nations have grown increasingly vocal about their exclusion from decision-making in international institutions designed after World War II. They have also watched as geopolitical competition between the United States and China has intensified, often at their expense. The SCO, from this angle, represents an attempt to move beyond being a theater for great-power competition and instead become a forum where developing nations set their own agenda.

Whether the SCO can sustain this role depends on factors Awan does not elaborate: whether member states can resolve their own bilateral tensions, whether they can agree on priorities despite competing interests, and whether they can actually deliver tangible benefits to their populations. But his core claim—that the organization has shifted from a security club to a comprehensive platform for Global South coordination—reflects a real institutional evolution that observers across the political spectrum have noted.