By Kenneth M. Stokes* – Article sent to Other News by the author
Introduction
The Tianjin Declaration is less a diplomatic communiqué than a symptom of breakdown—an attempt by Eurasian powers to stabilise a world where every intervention spawns new contradictions.
The 25th Council of Heads of State of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO), held in Tianjin in September 2025, represents a critical inflection point in the organisation’s evolution. Officially, the summit’s agenda traversed the entire spectrum of politics, security, economics, technology, and culture. Yet, the Tianjin Declaration emerges less as a mere collection of commitments and more as a symptom of the planetary polycrisis and a laboratory of metamorphosis where every action escapes policy makers intentions and enters a systemic ecology of interactions, generating unforeseen and often contradictory effects. The SCO’s ambition to consolidate Eurasian multipolarity illustrates precisely such an ecology: actions intended to stabilise may generate new uncertainties and contradictions.
This reflection reinterprets the Tianjin Declaration through the lens of complexity thinking, which—unlike conventional political economy approaches—reveals how crises overlap, feed back on one another, and generate unexpected outcomes that no single cause-and-effect explanation can capture. It does so by examining eight thematic dimensions through dialogical, recursive, and a mirror-like perspective in which every fragment carries the imprint of the whole. By combining geopolitical analysis with insights from complexity thinking, the aim is not to prescribe solutions but to uncover the tensions and contradictions at work—showing the Declaration as more than strategy alone, as a complex act marked by uncertainty and open to transformation.
The following sections explore these themes in detail, beginning with the geopolitical dimension, where the SCO situates itself against the backdrop of contested multipolarity.
Geopolitical Repositioning: Dialogics of Multipolarity
The Declaration foregrounds a commitment to a “fairer and more representative multipolar world,” explicitly opposing Western unipolar dominance. The co-existence of antagonistic logics helps reveal the ambivalence here. Multipolarity is both a project of emancipation and a source of fragmentation. By invoking antifascist memory and the founding of the United Nations, SCO members attempt to legitimate their project as a continuity of historical struggles. Yet historical references are always selective reconstructions, embodying both memory and forgetting.
From the complexity perspective, multipolarity is not a stable equilibrium but a polycentric dynamic prone to bifurcations. India’s hedging within the SCO exemplifies how sovereignty-first logics may simultaneously strengthen and destabilise the bloc. The mirror-like perspective further reminds us that each member’s national politics mirrors the contradictions of the whole: China’s ambitions, Russia’s existential struggle to withstand NATO’s aggression, Iran’s confrontation with political decapitation and regime change, and Central Asia’s balancing acts each refract the multipolar project differently.
Financially, the push for local-currency settlements is an effort to move trade and finance away from increasingly problematic dependence on the US dollar. It is not a one‑time adjustment but part of an ongoing process aimed at reshaping global flows while reducing exposure to financialized neocolonialism. Yet every attempt to reduce dependence threatens to generate new risks: liquidity shortages, convertibility traps, and the possibility of financial Balkanisation. Sanctions-hedging strategies may fragment the global economy in ways that exceed the SCO’s control.
Reform of Global Institutions: Recursive Aspirations
The SCO’s calls for reform of the UN, IMF, and World Bank exemplify the repeating cycle of aspiration and frustration. By demanding inclusion, SCO members enact the paradox that reformist discourse both legitimises and delegitimises the institutions it seeks to transform. Institutions often preserve themselves by absorbing criticism, yet this very act of integration can generate fresh contradictions and tensions within their structures.
Looked at through the lens of complexity, these reform calls are less like straight‑line demands and more like repeating cycles. If they succeed, they reshape existing institutions; if they fail, they strengthen the SCO’s resolve to create alternatives. In either case, the dynamics set in motion go beyond the original intent and cannot be fully controlled.
Security Architecture: The Ecology of Antagonisms
Security has long been the SCO’s anchor, and the Tianjin Declaration reinforces its concerns with terrorism, separatism, and extremism. Understanding order and disorder as dialogically intertwined suggests that securitisation is both stabilising and destabilising where governments may co-produce the very resistance they fear. This dynamic is evident in the Declaration’s condemnation of the 2025 U.S. and Israeli war on Iran, which frames sovereignty as stability while simultaneously deepening geopolitical confrontation.
Seen from a complexity perspective, regional security is not simply about removing threats. Each action taken changes the overall landscape, setting off new reactions and ripple effects. Rising insurance costs, heightened monitoring by SCO’s Financial Action Task Force of illicit transfers, and the spread of militarised development corridors are not just side effects but part of the way the system itself co-evolves. In this view, disorder is not a problem to solve but a force that ambiguously shapes what comes next.
Economic Integration: Towards Parallel Systems
The Declaration’s economic ambitions—the SCO Development Bank, interbank cooperation, Belt and Road Initiative reaffirmation—reflect attempts to construct an alternative financial architecture where economic institutions serve both as tools and as goals, creating the very web of interdependence they rely on.
Yet systems are inherently polycentric and dialogical. The Trump administration’s recent imposition of sanctions on India have had the unintended effect of pushing it closer to China, while efforts to trade in local currencies may still leave economies vulnerable to clandestine speculative attacks. Paradoxically, the SCO’s economic experiments is creating a complex dynamic that both sustains them yet risks destabilising them.
Normative Contestations: Sovereignty and its Blind Spots
Alongside these material and institutional experiments, the SCO also frames its project in normative terms, particularly in contesting Western claims to universal standards. The SCO’s insistence on rejecting “double standards” in human rights highlights a sovereignty-first ethic. This illustrates the blindness of knowledge—that which illuminates in one register (protection of sovereignty) obscures in another (defending sovereignty can also provide cover for unwelcome practices). Complexity demands that we see both dimensions together, refusing the comfort of moral simplification.
This divergence could steer the SCO’s vision of global governance onto two opposing economic blocs: one sustaining neocolonial forms of financialisation, the other advancing SCO-aligned state finance conceived as a public good. The tension between them may not be resolved, but it must be managed.
Emerging Technologies: Navigating Uncertainty
Beyond geopolitics and ethics, the Declaration also looks forward to new technological frontiers, where uncertainty and competition are especially intense. The Declaration’s focus on AI, cyber, and space resonates with the call to embrace uncertainty as method. Technological futures cannot be predicted; they are crossroads where small shifts can send the future in very different directions. Data localisation, digital sovereignty, and satellite infrastructures exemplify how each technological advance multiplies interdependencies and vulnerabilities.
Policies designed for efficiency may generate surveillance dystopias; space cooperation may escalate into militarisation. Our complexity paradigm reframes these domains as metastable systems, oscillating between integration and disruption.
Civilisational and Cultural Narratives: Plurality against Universalism
The SCO’s cultural cooperation efforts reflect the idea of unity through diversity. By highlighting Eurasian traditions, the SCO pushes back against Western claims of universal values. But such civilisational messages are double‑edged: they can encourage openness and pluralism, yet they can harden into rigid ideology.
Tourism flows, educational exchanges, and soft-power initiatives constitute recursive circuits between identity and economy. But every affirmation of identity risks producing exclusion. The systems ecology of cultural action is always double-edged.
Institutional Consolidation: Towards a Metamorphosis?
Merging the observer and dialogue categories into a single “partner” status points to a clearer structure. But this should be seen less as a final outcome and more as part of an ongoing dynamic. Like living systems, institutions adapt and reorganise through crises. Institutional consolidation can bring greater unity even while it intensifies internal tensions.
Institutional consolidation thus embodies the polycrisis of organisation: to grow is to risk incoherence; to simplify is to risk rigidity. The SCO’s evolution will hinge on whether it can cultivate requisite variety to match the complexity of its environment.
Conclusion: The Declaration as a Complex Act
Taken together, these thematic strands point to an organisation navigating multiple tensions. The concluding assessment gathers these insights to highlight the Declaration’s overall significance. Seen through a geopolitical lens informed by complexity thinking, the Declaration is less a fixed roadmap than a complex act, shaped by uncertainty, feedback loops, and competing tensions.. It is at once:
– A manifesto of multipolarity, challenging Western unipolarity while reproducing new dependencies.
– A recursive reform project, seeking to transform global institutions while legitimising their existence.
– A security compact, stabilising through sovereignty while contributing to new insecurities.
– An economic experiment, building alternatives whose dynamic may destabilise as much as they integrate.
– A cultural project, affirming plurality while risking closure.
The SCO’s bid to reshape world order is a high-stakes gamble within the polycrisis, significant less for solving contradictions than for making Eurasia a stage where complexity is institutionalised. Its trajectory is less about immediate outcomes and more about the institutionalisation of multipolar governance. Policymakers should prepare for a geopolitical environment where Eurasia steadily consolidates alternative financial, security, and technological architectures—creating long-term challenges to Western leadership and responses.
Anticipated Western Responses: Accommodation and Resistance
Western strategies are likely to oscillate between gestures of inclusion and mechanisms of constraint. Limited reforms within the IMF and World Bank may signal responsiveness, yet simultaneously preserve entrenched hierarchies. Financial infrastructures such as SWIFT and IMF liquidity tools will be reinforced, while regulatory thresholds raise the cost of SCO-linked alternatives.
In the normative domain, Western actors will attempt to dress their waning authority in the language of inclusivity, reframing human rights and governance even as their own practices reveal the late-stage barbarism of endless war, sanctions, and surveillance. Narrative campaigns will continue to brand SCO members as authoritarian, a projection that obscures the erosion of rights within the West itself. At the same time, coalitions in the Global South may be assembled to diffuse the SCO’s influence, though such efforts increasingly betray the bankruptcy of the very values they claim to defend.
In emerging domains, efforts to secure leadership in AI, cyber, and space will unfold through multilateral forums and new partnerships with India, ASEAN, and Africa. Expanded cultural and educational diplomacy will complement these moves, contesting Eurasian soft power.
Ultimately, the Western response is likely to remain ambivalent: accommodating enough to weaken the SCO’s case for parallel systems, yet resistant enough to constrain its institutional diversification. The paradox of recognition without transfer of power will define the terrain on which the SCO must navigate its high-stakes gamble within the polycrisis.
*Kenneth M. Stokes, Ph. D., President at World Sustainability Forum.