The expanded meeting of the Council of Heads of State of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO), Astana, Kazakhstan, June 9, 2017 (Sputnik photo by Vladimir Astapkovich via AP).

For much of its 16 years of existence, the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, or SCO, has carried perhaps the greatest promise of any multilateral organization in Eurasia. Made up of Russia, China and four of the five Central Asian states—Turkmenistan, characteristically, kept the organization at arm’s-length—the SCO hasn’t just provided a high-level forum for discussing regional counterterrorism efforts. It has offered an outlet for Moscow and Beijing to coordinate their security and, increasingly, economic policies without concerns of Western input. The SCO was never quite a “counterweight to NATO” as some asserted, but it provided the groundwork for cohesion to come. […]

Sri Lankan university students shout anti-government slogans during a protest, Colombo, Sri Lanka, May 17, 2017 (AP photo by Eranga Jayawardena).

Editor’s Note: This article is part of an ongoing WPR series about education policy in various countries around the world. In Sri Lanka, controversy surrounding a private medical university has led to months of demonstrations and fierce debate on the merits of private education institutions in general. Last month, in Colombo, police used tear gas to disperse thousands of protesters who, according to the Associated Press, ignored an official protest ban to make their case that the medical university, the South Asian Institute of Technology and Medicine, should be shut down. In an email interview, Nisha Arunatilake, a fellow with […]