“Southeast Asia’s engagement with the SCO has been slow to develop, for obvious reasons. While ASEAN and its member states have long-standing ties with both China and Russia, the same cannot be said about their relations with the states of Central Asia. In addition, it was not until 2008 that Southeast Asian countries could apply for a dialogue partnership. Only three countries have done so, all of them in mainland Southeast Asia: Cambodia, Myanmar and Laos. Those countries’ desire to interact with the SCO is mainly a reflection of their close relations with Russia and China rather than burgeoning diplomatic or trade links with Central Asia. The other two mainland Southeast Asian states, Thailand and Vietnam, have not applied to become SCO partners, preferring instead to become partners of BRICS (Brazil-Russia-India-China-South Africa), which is more trade- and investment-focused.”
“In maritime Southeast Asia, the links with the SCO are tenuous. While Indonesia and Malaysia are both keen to promote the interests of the Global South and attended the Tianjin Summit, neither has applied for SCO partnership. The Philippines (because of its fractious relationship with China over the South China Sea dispute) and Singapore (which imposed financial sanctions on Russia following its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022) are unlikely to apply either.”
“ASEAN’s institutional engagement with the SCO has been distant, consisting primarily of pro forma meetings between the two organisation’s secretary-generals. The first formal contact between the two organisations was in October 2002 when President Putin’s special representative to the SCO visited the ASEAN secretariat in Jakarta. Two years later, when ASEAN’s then-Secretary-General Ong Keng Yong met his counterpart Zhang Deguang at the SCO secretariat in Beijing, they agreed to establish formal institutional ties. A 2005 Memorandum of Understanding called for the two organisations to cooperate to address transnational crime, including terrorism and illegal trafficking in people, arms and drugs. However, little practical cooperation on tackling these issues has occurred…”