Sovereignty and alliance purpose in regional international society: the case of the CSTO in Eurasia

Abstract

The Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO) presents a persistent puzzle in international relations scholarship: despite two decades of existence and largely stable membership, the alliance deployed military forces to a member state only once, in Kazakhstan in January 2022, while remaining inactive in the face of numerous other conflicts involving member states. Existing scholarship typically frames the CSTO as either an instrument of Russian influence or as a functionally irrelevant “paper alliance.” This thesis argues that neither interpretation adequately accounts for the continued investment member states make in the organization, nor seeks to identify internal logic guiding its selective activation. Drawing on English School (ES) theory, this thesis examines how Eurasian regional international society has developed a differentiated conception of sovereignty as a primary institution, and how this regional understanding shapes the perceived purpose of the CSTO as a secondary institution. Using framing analysis applied for a corpus of Russian-language documents from the CSTO’s website, this study traces discourse across five instances of member-state challenges to sovereignty between 2010 and 2024. The analysis reveals that the CSTO operates according to a two-threshold legitimacy structure that reflects a regionally elevated conception of Westphalian sovereignty. Simultaneously, the alliance exhibits a comparatively permissive attitude toward pooling domestic political and legal resources, reflecting lower emphasis on domestic sovereignty consistent with its members’ authoritarian regime type. The CSTO’s consistent framing of threats in non-state actor terms further delimits where the alliance is considered an appropriate instrument of security provision. Rather than evidence of dysfunction, these patterns reveal a coherent regional security logic with implications for how scholars understand alliance behavior in non-Western contexts.