SCO and Cybersecurity: Eastern Security Vision for Cyberspace

Cyberspace is presenting not only new challenges for states but also new opportunities for power projection. Thus, analyzing how non-Western perspectives have been developed around this subject becomes relevant to understand some dynamics of contemporary international relations. In this way, in order to understand how China and Russia have been behaving in this area, the present paper seeks, through a constructivist approach based on the perspective of the regional complexes, to develop an exploratory research toward the existence of an Eastern regional strategic thinking to cybersecurity, materialized by the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO). To achieve this objective, the paper will use the qualitative document analysis as a method, seeking not only to verify if such Eastern thought for cyberspace is cohesive within the organization, but also to explain what the implications for international society of this thought are.