SKECO

SKECO, officially the Southern Kesh Economic Cooperation Organization, is an economic union and trade bloc comprising 7 member states in southern and eastern Kesh. SKECO's main objective is the promotion of intergovernmental cooperation and facilitating economic integration between its members. The organization was founded in 1986 with the signing of the Treaty of ???, with the original purpose of stabilizing the Southern Kesh economy following the enactment of apartheid in former Democratic Ramay, now South Kesh, which caused an unprecedented economic recession in the region. Soon after its inceptions, SKECO began accepting observer members within Southern Kesh as well as Western Kesh, in an attempt to help developing economies and assist them by facilitating their introduction to the global market as SKECO began to cooperate with other states and economic organizations.

Today, though considered strictly an economic organization and trade bloc, SKECO has began to push for language, cultural and educational exchange programs and events, making it easier for SKECO citizens to move within its member states' borders, with the creation of different types of visas that have become more widely available.

History
The southern Kesh region in the 1960s and 1970s, unaffected by the turmoil happening elsewhere in the continent, was arguably the most well-off and prosperous region in the Kesh continent. Fueled by the reconstruction efforts of eastern and northern Kesh, as well as the burgeoning maritime trade sector across the globe, southern Kesh nations profitted massively from such developments, expanding the economy by magnitudes and greatly improving the quality of life for its citizens. Trade between southern Kesh nations was, on average, responsible for a third of each country's exports. Some southern Kesh nations were even rivaling those considered 'old powers', such as East Ramay and SOUTHERNCOUNTRY2. Although so, such growth and expansion was mainly constrained to individual nations and bilateral treaties without any overarching regional alliance to facilitate a multitude of issues such as trade, defense, and movement of citizens, and thus, no regional identity was ever cemented.

The period of stagnation within East Ramay and the subsequent East Ramayan civil war which transformed the country into a under the government of Democratic Ramay was a major blow towards the economies of Southern Kesh and to a lesser extent the world. With exports taking a freefall, its prices endured an extreme high in the winter of 1981, now commonly known as the 1981 Bauxite and Aluminum Shock. The once largest economy in the southern Kesh region was reduced to a fraction of its size and disrupted supply chains elsewhere, starting the 1980s "Lost Decade" of southern Kesh in general. In 1986, the leaders of Cagayan, Heiban, and Prabhat formalized the Southern Kesh Economic Cooperation Organization (SKECO) in XXX after a series of talks and negotiations between the parties in an effort to unite the fractured and crisis-laden region, and to prevent such monumental disarray as the one in East Ramay from happening again.

Over the years, SKECO has evolved from just a regional alliance promoting regional unity and fellowship through means of economic integration to a more encompassing and governing body at the regional level. Between 1986 and 2021, it advocated heavily against the in South Kesh, and conducted several trade sanctions and blockades against the country over the course of the apartheid regime's existence. After the transition of South Kesh into a more egalitarian and democratic society in October 2021, SKECO admitted South Kesh as an observer state while closely monitoring the situation in the country.