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Roger N. McDermott is an Affiliated Senior Analyst, Danish Institute for International Studies, Copenhagen, Senior International Fellow, FMSO, Fort Leavenworth, Advisory Scholar, Military Affairs, Centre for Research on Canadian-Russian Relations (CRCR), Georgian College Ontario, Canada, and Senior Fellow in Eurasian Military Studies, Jamestown Foundation, Washington, DC; he has also served as a visiting Professor in the Department of International Relations, Kazakhstan National University, Almaty. McDermott has briefed Western planning staffs and lectured at the NATO School in Oberammergau, Germany. He specializes in Russian and Central Asian defence and security and is a member of the editorial board of Central Asia and the Caucasus and The Caucasus and Globalization, and a member of the scientific board, Journal of Power Institutions in Post-Soviet Societies. He has extensive experience of Kazakhstan's defence and security policy and published numerous articles on the reform of the country's armed forces and steps towards building peacekeeping forces.

The Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) plays an important role in the foreign, defense, and security policies of the Central Asian member-states (Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, and Uzbekistan). It is likely to face further fine-tuning of its security capacity in response to various factors, such as the North Atlantic Treaty Organization's (NATO) withdrawal from Afghanistan and changes in how leading actors conduct and conceptualize modern warfare capabilities. Western experts and policy makers' perceptions of the SCO, however, can often be influenced by their attention to the presence of the two leading members: China Russia. This article questions the extent to which this focus may misrepresent the internal dynamics of the organization as it continues to evolve to meet real and emerging security challenges in Central Asia. It explores these themes by examining the security focus of the SCO from Kazakhstan's perspective. I do not consider the wider economic, humanitarian, or other focal points on the SCO's horizons or the thorny issue of potentially welcoming new members in the future. Instead, I concentrate on how the SCO contributes to regional security and assess its operational limitations or potential to act in a real crisis. Round-table discussions held in Almaty in October 2011 at the Faculty of International Relations of the Al-Farabi Kazakh National University explored the nature of the country's role and influence within the SCO in these terms. Such insights, coupled with an awareness expressed at the official and expert levels that the organization needs to meet genuine security challenges, proved critical in understanding Kazakhstan's role and perceptions of the regional security body. Adapted from the source document.