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Opinion: A changing "Organisation of Turkic States"
29 September 2026
Until recently, the Organization of Turkic States (OTS) could best be understood in terms of identity, language, culture, and economic collaboration. This is changing.
On September 17, Baku played host to the Fifth Meeting of the Secretaries of the Security Councils of the OTS countries. In his message to the meeting, the president of Azerbaijan, Ilham Aliyev, noted that cooperation among the Turkic peoples no longer consisted of political, economic, and cultural matters only but had gained a “long-term strategic nature.” More importantly, he referred to the consultations of the national security councils as a factor facilitating the emergence of a “common security architecture.”
Clearly, it does not mean that the OTS is evolving into a military organisation of the NATO kind: there is no commitment of collective defence similar to that of NATO’s Article 5, and there is no evidence of this desire on the part of all members of the organisation. Yet, the September meeting means something different: security collaboration within the Turkic context is becoming more regular and operational.
This process has been quite gradual. The OTS started organising meetings of national security council secretaries since 2022. As of September 2026, the mechanism had attained its fifth meeting. The organisation itself considers security cooperation to be an increasingly important area of interest in relation to both conventional and non-conventional threats. This includes such areas as terrorism, transnational organized crime, drug trafficking, extremism, hybrid threats, and critical infrastructure protection. (click image to read the op-ed in full)
