Aisha Mukasheva,
Head of the Department Of European and American Studies
KazISS under the President of the Republic of Kazakhstan
When I studied international relations, my university years fell in the early 2000s. It was a time when globalization was gathering momentum. The world was becoming “smaller,” and the narrative of peace and good-neighborly relations was taken as a background norm of the international system. Frankly, at the time I did not fully appreciate the real significance of the security mechanisms gradually taking shape across Eurasia, particularly the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (which grew out of the “Shanghai Five” established in 1996) and the Conference on Interaction and Confidence Building Measures in Asia (CICA), initiated by Kazakhstan at the UN General Assembly in 1992. From my perspective as a student, they seemed more like an extension of diplomatic etiquette than instruments of security.
Twenty years later, the question is different: not “are they useful?” but “will we be able to?”
The Seventh CICA Summit concluded in Baku with the adoption of the Baku Declaration. The sheer breadth of the document is telling. Economic ties, transport, energy, digital connectivity, and the management of artificial intelligence risks are all part of the security agenda. Security has long ceased to be confined to the military dimension.
One observation in President Tokayev’s address deserves particular attention. He noted that the foundations of the international security architecture are gradually eroding, and that the growing tendency for force to prevail over law is alarming. This is not empty rhetoric. Data from the Uppsala Conflict Data Program (UCDP) indicate that in 2025 the number of interstate conflicts worldwide reached its highest level since 1946. In the past year alone, more than 37,000 civilians were killed in armed conflicts, while the global number of forcibly displaced people remains at 117 million.
Against this backdrop, CICA’s institutional transformation – its evolution from a forum into a fully fledged international organization – takes on concrete meaning. The process was launched at the Astana Summit in 2022. In Baku, the Head of State reiterated the expectation that the CICA Charter would serve as a “road map.” A more specific proposal was to establish a preventive diplomacy mechanism. As he noted, preventing conflicts is preferable, both in its nature and in terms of cost, to managing a crisis after it has erupted.
Given CICA’s scale, this transformation is far from a peripheral issue. Its participating states cover approximately 90% of Asia’s territory and account for more than half of the world’s population. This is a platform with a substantial geographic foundation. If the Charter is adopted and the preventive mechanism becomes operational, it will at the very least provide the 28 member states with a structured channel for dialogue – before disagreements escalate.
It would be inappropriate to overstate the role of any single party. Ultimately, however, whether the mechanism can endure and acquire genuinely binding force depends on member states’ willingness to delegate a measure of sovereignty in favor of common rules. CICA stands at precisely this threshold. As the logic of force returns, the very existence of rules and platforms for dialogue becomes a scarce resource.
