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This chapter examines the legitimation efforts of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO). It shows that despite its very weak institutions and close resemblance to ‘enterprise association’, legitimation offers an important perspective for understanding the roles the SCO plays for its member states. The chapter argues that on the one hand, the SCO legitimates itself with regards to its members by addressing regional functional cooperation problems, by providing an institutionalised framework for managing relations between the region’s hegemonic powers (China and Russia), and by occupying political space in the region that could otherwise be entered by more liberal organisations and states. On the other hand, the SCO also legitimises non-liberal norms (and exceptions to otherwise applicable international norms) that are advanced by its members, especially China and Russia, and provides states that want to escape the scrutiny of Western-dominated international organisations with an institutional alternative and an attractive alternative model.

This chapter is about how spatial imagination steeped in sovereign territoriality bedeviled local efforts to achieve a viable regional political community in South Asia. I invoke functional, security community, and post-colonial perspectives to interrogate regionalism in South Asia. This chapter shows that despite all South Asian states agreeing upon the virtues of regional cooperation, their underlying expectations are very different, which frustrates regional cooperation among countries. The chapter explains why spatial imagination is cardinal to this failing. It puts in bold relief how India has addressed regionalism in its immediate surroundings and achieved little in the process. The author shows that the civil society has failed to have any impact in reversing this trend. While a few states have found sub-regional cooperation more convenient, the net result has not been very exciting so far given that such sub-regional cooperation is also subject to the familiar geopolitical dynamics unleashed by territoriality. The limited record of collaboration among India, Bangladesh, Myanmar, Nepal, Bhutan, and China in some sub-regional efforts gives an excellent account of this process.

By looking at the Union Internationale des Associations d’Alpinisme (UIAA, or International Mountaineering and Climbing Federation), an international organization created in 1932 “to promote mountaineering and climbing worldwide,” this chapter explores the “moral economy” of internationalism, or the dynamics through which internationalist groups used feelings to attribute moral values to specific beliefs and behaviors. It demonstrates that the UIAA used emotions to promote both its image and its mission. It presented alpinism as a means to engender “friendship” among nations, mimicking the League of Nations’ rhetoric and activities in this period. It also employed emotions as a tool to manage its relationships and as an essential ingredient to stage its events (e.g. international congresses and exhibitions). As such, it inaugurated a set of ideas and practices which would become normative in the subsequent decades.