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Both Russia and, increasingly China, have been viewed as the main revisionist challengers to the liberal international order. The main vehicle for these counter-ordering efforts have been new economic and security regional organizations established by Moscow and Beijing to project their agendas and check the influence of Western counterparts. For Russia, this has included founding the Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO) as a regional security alternative to NATO, while in the economic sphere Russia has pushed for ever-increasing regional integration through the Eurasian Economic Union. For China, the most important of these new organizations is the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) founded in 2001. And in 2016 China also founded the Quadrilateral Cooperation and Coordination Mechanism (QCCM), established to promote regional anti-terrorist coordination and security cooperation between Tajikistan, Afghanistan and Pakistan. Around the same time investigative reports revealed that Beijing concluded an agreement to establish a military base in Tajikistan, with Chinese troops given the authority to patrol large swathes of the Tajikistan-Afghanistan border.

the Central Asians states attend more summits, working groups and interagency groups convened by Russia and China than they do for the liberal ordering organizations

In the 2000s the West’s patronage monopoly was dramatically broken by the rise of both Russia and China as goods providers

Not only did transnational actors promoting liberal ordering lose their influence, but the region has witnessed the rise of actors now promoting illiberal norms in a variety of settings. The SCO and the CIS began openly criticizing the inappropriateness of political liberalism, while also creating new formal and informal legal frameworks that allowed, in the extraterritorial actions against political exiles in name of counterterrorism,  including rapid extradition requests, investigations and even renditions.

we argue that Central Asian provides compelling evidence as to why this time transformations in the liberal international order are likely to prove far more significant and enduring. During the 1990s, the norms, institutions and actors associated with liberal ordering were pretty much the only source for integrating the new Central Asian states into global governance. However now, Central Asia is a far more dense and contested region, where different sources of order and norms openly co-exist, compete and interact with one another.