Regional organizations outside OSCE area

In past years, the OSCE has garnered considerable interest from regional organizations outside of the OSCE area, such as the Shanghai Co-operation Organization, the Conference on Interaction and Confidence-Building Measures in Asia, the Organization of the Islamic Conference, the Arab League and the African Union. The 2001 OSCE Bucharest Plan of Action for Combating Terrorism referred to the need to broaden the dialogue with such entities beyond the OSCE’s borders, and the 2003 Maastricht Strategy further called to continue developing such contacts and to consider ways in which OSCE norms, principles, commitments and values could be shared with other regions, in particular neighbouring areas.

In line with these decisions, the OSCE explored several work areas in which the Organization can exchange best practices and lessons learned with regional organizations, such as: 

• counter-terrorism efforts;
• mechanisms and institutions of conflict prevention and early warning;
• support of democratic elections;
• dialogue of civilizations, cultures and religions;
• small arms and light weapons issues; and
• field activities and deployment of field missions.