In a 2024 article, Navigating New Realities: Central Asia’s Role in Contemporary Geopolitics, my co-authors and I argued that the Central Asia was experiencing a structural change. Driven by Russia’s war in Ukraine and the growing ambitions of China, we contended that the region’s states were no longer objects of influence but were taking on a more active role in international politics. Going back to this point at the beginning of 2026, the record of experience has not only ascertained it; it has exceeded it. The speed, complexity, and multi-dimensionality of the transformation of Central Asia requires a significantly enhanced analytical structure; one that goes beyond the Russia-China dichotomy, takes into account the institutional inertia of the region, and takes seriously the material interests that have rendered Central Asia essential to virtually each of the major powers on the planet.
The argument in this article is that Central Asia has now passed a qualitative threshold. It is no longer merely a region whose importance is explained by the interest of external powers, but one which is increasingly developing its own interests and pathway in international politics. This change can be traced in five areas that are closely interconnected, including the maturation of intra-regional collaboration; the advent of critical minerals as a new geopolitical battlefield; the proliferation of external partners and diplomatic modalities; the internal institutionalization of collective agency; and the structural constraints which nonetheless condition the autonomy of the region..
Contested Space to Cooperative Community
The most notable phenomenon since we wrote in 2024 is the unification of an indigenous Central Asian regionalism. During the majority of the post-Soviet era, cooperation between Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan and Turkmenistan was intermittent, externally motivated and structurally weak. In 2005, the Central Asian Cooperation Organization was liquidated as Russia incorporated it into the Eurasian Economic Community – an event that President Putin called a favourable one, the greatest birthday gift he had ever gotten among his peers (Crossroads Central Asia, 2025). The symbolic inferiority in that commentary reflected a structural fact: Central Asian regionalism was in the mercy of Moscow.
That fact has radically shifted. A regional security structure was approved by the Seventh Consultative Meeting of Heads of State of Central Asia, which took place in Tashkent in November 2025, establishing a permanent Secretariat, and (possibly the most symbolically loaded decision made at the meeting) formally admitted Azerbaijan as a full participant, effectively turning the C5 into a C6 format (The Diplomat, 2025). The President of Uzbekistan, Mirziyoyev, described the inclusion of Azerbaijan as the reason why the voice of Central Asia in the global community would become even greater, whilst the President of Kazakhstan, Tokayev, referred to it as a historic decision (The Diplomat, 2025). The logic is strategic. By expanding its institutional boundaries to the Western coast of the Caspian Sea, Central Asia forms a continuous geopolitical space stretching from the Pamirs to the Caucasus. This connected and continuous “Middle Corridor” intensifies the region’s leverage over Eurasian transit.
The settlement of the most knotty territorial issues of the region was also important. On 31 March 2025, Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan signed a treaty that finally demarcates their almost 1,000-kilometre shared boundary, the longest-running interstate dispute in Central Asia, after the trilateral Khujand agreements of March 2025 resolved boundary issues between Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, and Uzbekistan (East Asia Forum, 2025). These deals, which are being celebrated as a landmark in the geopolitics of Central Asia, eliminate a structural barrier to regional collaboration that has long existed, and are an indication of a qualitative change in the political intent of regional leaders to take charge of their own lives without outside mediation (East Asia Forum, 2025). A “Catalogue of Security Risks in Central Asia and Measures to Prevent them in 2026-2028” codified collective responses to non-traditional threats, such as climate-related resource shortages, cyber warfare, as well as extremist spillover from Afghanistan (The Diplomat, 2025). It is not a language of the states that think of themselves as subjects of great power politics. It is the language of a fledgling security community.
The institutional picture is supported by survey data. In both Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan, more than 70 percent of the respondents now hold positive attitudes about the enhanced regional connections – a very impressive result considering bilateral relations were often very tense during the early post-independence years (PONARS Eurasia, 2025). Moreover, the 2024 Astana Summit’s agreed roadmap for 2025-2027 regional development exemplified a common long-term purpose that would have been inconceivable a decade earlier (PONARS Eurasia, 2025).
The New Geopolitical Commodity and Critical Minerals
Perhaps, the most important emerging aspect of Central Asian relevance pertains to an issue largely absent in academic literature, until recently: critical minerals and rare earth elements. Whilst hydrocarbons defined Central Asia’s strategic importance during the first post-independence decade, China’s Belt and Road Initiative brought transport connectivity to the forefront during the 2010s. Now, subsoil reserves of lithium, tungsten, cobalt, rare earths, and uranium are re-defining the relationships of the major powers in the region.
The Central Asian five republics generate about half of all the uranium in the world and contain large deposits of minerals needed in the green energy transformation and high-tech defence systems (Standish 2025). President Tokayev of Kazakhstan has called rare earths the new oil, and President Mirziyoyev of Uzbekistan has announced a 76-project initiative in 28 of the 2025-2028 critical minerals (Carnegie Endowment, 2025; TRENDS Research, 2025). In 2014, Kazakhstan endorsed a Comprehensive Plan for the Development of the Rare and Rare Earth Metals Industry 2024-2028, aiming to grow investment and volume of production by 40 percent (TRENDS Research, 2025).
These domestic policy decisions are being taken with the complete understanding of their geopolitical valence. The first presidential-level critical minerals summit in the United States, November 2025 C5+1 in Washington, was expressly structured around the critical minerals agenda, with all five Central Asian presidents meeting with President Trump (East Asia Forum, 2025). The summit had notable bilateral results: Kazakhstan signed a 1.1 billion tungsten mining agreement with the U.S. based Cove Kaz Capital, with the Kazakh state corporation Tau-Ken Samruk keeping a 30 per cent stake. The U.S. CEO of the company admitted that Trump and Commerce Secretary Lutnick had negotiated the deal specifically to prevent Chinese companies from developing the deposit (Standish, 2025). Moreover, a Memorandum of Understanding on critical minerals and rare earths was signed between Kazakhstan and U.S, underscoring Kazakhstan’s reserves and production capacity for nearly half of the 54 minerals that the U.S. geological survey has declared as being important to national security (ECFR, 2026).
China, as usual, was quick to retaliate. A few days after the Washington summit, the Chinese Foreign Minister, Wang Yi, went on a three-country tour of Central Asia, reasserting Beijing as the biggest trade partner in the region (Standish, 2025). The second C5+China summit was in Astana in June 2025, which had already delivered the Treaty on Eternal Good-Neighbourliness, Friendship and Cooperation, as well as trade, green mining of rare earths, and scholarships initiatives (PONARS Eurasia, 2025). China’s involvement with Central Asian states differentiates by country: in Kyrgyzstan, it has been centred on extraction, with an MOU between Presidents Japarov and Xi in February 2025 targeting lithium, cobalt and rare earths. Meanwhile, in Tajikistan, engagement has shifted towards processing capacity, including support for its first major iron ore enrichment plant, constructed in April 2025 (TRENDS Research, 2025).
What this competition game has shown is that Central Asia has successfully armed its mineral endowment, not in the sense of a weaponry, but as a source of leverage in a number of great power relationships. The leaders in the region know that structural rivalry between Washington and Beijing- notably, vital supply chains- will continue irrespective of the temporary diplomatic ups and downs. The incorporation of Central Asia to midstream processing and regional value chains is not a short term diplomatic issue but one of long term sustainability, as one Kazakh analyst opined before the Washington summit (Kazinform, 2025). The difficulty, as analysts at Carnegie Endowment have warned, is to see that this mineral wealth is a source of actual development and not increased commodity dependency. To ensure this, Central Asian states should increase processing capacity, develop cross-border value chains, and demand value-adding partnerships that do not merely strip it of its resources (Carnegie Endowment, 2025).
Multiplication of External Partners
The idea of Central Asia emerging out of the Russia-China dichotomy into a more diversified form of external relations was one of the keystones of our 2024 article. This direction is confirmed by the events of 2025 at an empirical density that we could not have predicted.
High level C5+1 bilateral summits reached a historic peak in 2025. Initially pioneered by Japan in 2004, this framework has since been adopted by other great powers, with the EU (April), the US (November), and Russia (October) all convening summits throughout the year. In April 2025, the EU hosted the first Central Asia-EU summit on a presidential level in Samarkand, declaring investments of up to 12 billion euros in the framework of Global Gateway, with special focus on energy, infrastructure, and the Middle Corridor- effectively, a new strategic partnership (ECFR, 2026). The Trans-Caspian International Transport Route has already increased its fees twofold within the span of two years and is estimated to deal with up to 10 million tons per year (Kazinform, 2025) – an impressive logistical success that demonstrates the long-lasting investment by various external powers and the Central Asian nations themselves.
Turkey and India have also become significant regional players. Turkey’s linguistic and cultural connections with the predominantly Turkic countries of Central Asia have offered a natural basis of economic interaction. Indeed, Ankara has intensified its investment in Middle Corridor infrastructures, especially since Azerbaijan is a major transit country (Soufan Center, 2025). Central Asia’s emergence as a site for strategic diversification is being further accelerated by the involvement of middle powers- most notably India, who feels it has to lessen its reliance on Chinese-dominated mineral supply chains. The B5+1 forum, which was initiated by the United States in 2024 as a business version of the diplomatic C5+1, is another institutional layer at which foreign entities want to institutionalize their presence with Central Asia countries (Clingendael, 2025).
Russia is still a major player, with its trade with the Central Asian block reaching over $45 billion last year (Soufan Center, 2025). The conditions of the Russian involvement, however, have radically changed. In October 2025, Putin announced the need to strengthen trade and infrastructure relationships, resulting in a Joint Action Plan for 2025-2027 (Aktaş 2025). Nevertheless, this bilateral cooperation came against a backdrop of escalating tension regarding Russian treatment of Central Asian migrant workers; Russian authorities are accused of engaging in mass deportations and detentions, in an environment of increasing public Islamophobia (Soufan Center, 2025). These trends are eroding the, once strong, social and cultural links supporting Russian influence in Central Asia, in a manner that cannot be easily reversed in any concerted action plan. The growing economic dependence of Russia on China, has, counter-intuitively, seen Moscow become more accommodative of the growing influence of Beijing in Central Asia, weakening its own relative position even more (Crossroads Central Asia, 2025).
Agency Without Alignment: Multi-vector Diplomacy Logic
Underlining these developments is the conscious and more masterful practice of what the governments of Central Asia refer to as multi-vector foreign policy. This is not a new concept: initially developed in Kazakhstan in the early years of independence, the practices are more advanced and the institutional bases stronger. The main reasoning is simple: by having diversified relationships with great and middle powers, Central Asian states become less dependent on a particular patron, increasing their bargaining power to maintain the sovereign independence that the people of the post-colonial world cherish so deeply.
In practice, this has meant simultaneously engaging Russia within CIS and CSTO frameworks, deepening trade ties with China under the Belt and Road Initiative, pursuing EU connectivity agreements, and courting Gulf capital and Turkish institutional partnerships. The result is a layered web of interdependencies that individual powers find difficult to unravel unilaterally, affording Central Asian governments a degree of sovereign autonomy that earlier, more mono-directional alignments did not permit. Figures like President Tokayev, for example, are now attuned geopolitical analysts, practicing fundamentally different statecraft when we compare with the prior decades of reactive hedging (East Asia Forum, 2026). Trump’s message at the Washington summit- that the leaders of Central Asia no longer needed to isolate themselves from Russia or even make a commitment to democratic reforms- was a shift in U.S. posture; one that actually simplifies the diplomatic arithmetic of the region as it deprives the region of the conditions which had hitherto made engagement with the West hard (East Asia Forum, 2026).
This dynamic can be elucidated with the help of theoretical literature on small state agency and asymmetric bargaining. The idea of ‘great games, local rules’ by Cooley was significant in that the states of Central Asia had learned how to play major powers off against each other. Yet, that framing still imagined agency in reactive terms. This is more proactive in 2025-2026, exemplifying states with agendas, institutionalizing regional structures, and mobilizing their resource endowments in a strategic, instead of merely responsive, way. The difference is analytic. It is the distinction between one area which enjoys immense power rivalry and another area which proactively frames the conditions of its operation with several great powers at once.
The bargaining power of Central Asia is significantly magnified by the adoption of combined positions in C5+1 formats, i.e. the involvement of all five states as one negotiating bloc that includes the EU, China, Russia, the United States, and others. The formation of a permanent Secretariat of the Consultative Meetings of Central Asian Heads of State and the adoption of the Central Asia 2040 Concept gives reason to believe that the region is gaining the institutional framework to ensure that collective agency will be maintained over the course of political cycles and changes in leadership (PONARS Eurasia, 2025).
Formal Restrictions and the Bounds of Change
Intellectual honesty demands recognition of the structural limitations conditioning the agency of Central Asia, and which do not allow for any simple story of triumphant regionalism. The geographical isolation that has traditionally been considered as a drawback is a root limitation. The Middle Corridor, which is hailed as the alternative to Russian transit routes, entails multi-modal travel through Kazakhstan, the Caspian Sea, Azerbaijan, the rest of Turkey, and Europe. Although cargo volumes are also increasing, the route is both more costly and unreliable than the Northern Corridor via Russia when the latter is fully operational (Eldem 2022). The construction of the infrastructure and logistical potential to transform the Middle Corridor into a truly competitive one should be a decades-long process, not years-long one.
Primary commodities, including oil and gas, cotton, minerals, fruit and vegetables, continue to dominate Central Asia’s economic base, although there has been long-standing policy talk of diversification (East Asia Forum, 2025). In its October 2025 Regional Economic Outlook, the IMF forecasted that Central Asia and the Caucasus regions will experience real GDP growth of 5.6 percent and the poorest states in the region, Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan, would grow at 8.0 and 7.5 percent respectively, with energy exporters, such as Turkmenistan, growing at a slower pace of 2.3 percent (East Asia Forum, 2025). These divergent paths represent structural heterogeneity which makes it difficult to take collective action and, instead, provides varying incentive structures to engage external partners.
Water is a source of tension that cannot be addressed completely by the border demarcation. The unresolved conflicts between upstream and downstream states on river flows and irrigation rights will become even more acute as the temperatures increase and the glaciers melt away. The security catalogue of the Consultative Meeting 2026-2028 recognizes climate-related scarcity of resources as a threat, yet the political economy of water management is hotly debated and not susceptible to easy institutional solutions (The Diplomat, 2025).
The governance aspect is also worthy of open evaluation. Although the Central Asian states have shown a high level of strategic competence in their foreign policy, domestic politics remains highly centralized, characterised by little political competition and limited civil societies. This creates difficulties with its Western engagement. The European Union and the United States, for instance, have linked deeper trade access and investment guarantees to measurable progress on rule of law, anti-corruption frameworks, and civil liberties — conditions that Central Asian governments tend to regard as external interference rather than constructive conditionality. This tension does not preclude engagement, but it does set a ceiling on its depth and shape its political costs for both sides. The elimination of democratic conditionality for productive U.S.-Central Asia relations by the Trump administration might make short-term diplomacy easier, but fails to answer the long-term question of whether multi-vector diplomacy by the elites can be maintained in the face of societal pressures. The post-colonial mood – which our 2024 article had observed had been increasing – cuts in several different directions: anti-Russian cultural hegemony, anti-Chinese economic hegemony, and, in certain aspects, anti-perceived Western paternalism.
The 2025 $6-billion construction of the China-Kyrgyzstan-Uzbekistan railway exemplifies the opportunities and frictions of Chinese involvement (Standish 2025). Anti-Chinese feeling in Kyrgyzstan has been a notable feature, with labour conflicts between the local and Chinese workers pointing to the social tension which can be created when massive investment in infrastructure is seen to be importing labour, rather than creating local capacity (Standish 2025). The social imperative of equitable development does not necessarily coincide with the strategic imperative of connectivity. While Beijing prioritises the speed and quality of delivery that comes from deploying its own contractors and workforce, host communities measure the value of such projects by the jobs, transfer of skills, and local procurement they generate. When expectations remain unfulfilled, even regionally transformative infrastructure projects can deepen local grievances rather than resolve them, resulting in a legitimacy deficit that poses challenges for both governments and investors.
Theorizing Central Asia’s New Role
The current vocabulary of International Relations (namely, of buffer states, secondary power, objects of great power competition, rentier states) does not explain what we are witnessing. A more effective model is regional actorness: the ability of a geographically delimited set of states to, not just react, but influence the international environment (Crossroads Central Asia, 2025).
The coexistence of structural opportunity and political will is what makes the present moment special. Structural opportunity characterises this sincerely multipolar outer world where no one power can dictate to the region; ongoing war in Ukraine, which keeps Russia distracted and economically constrained; necessity by China of the Middle Corridor as an alternative passageway; the fact that the region is endowed with extraordinary mineral reserves at just the same time that those resources have become indispensable geopolitically and the urgent need of Western economies to diversify their critical mineral supply chains away from single-source dependency. Political will, in turn, is embodied in a new generation of leaders, especially in Astana and Tashkent, who have internalised the logic of collective agency, and have invested in the institutional infrastructure of collective agency, including the C5+1 format, and the Central Asia summits, to maintain it.
The interplay of these forces does not assure an easy ride. The existent structural constraints, the high level of internal heterogeneity of the region, and the tremendous leverage of the great powers are real. But the crossing point that has been made is not in vain. Central Asia is no longer a field of rivalry of the strong states; it is a region where states establish the conditions of rivalry. The idea of Central Asia as a place of creation and not a geopolitical confrontation, formulated by President Tokayev during the first China-Central Asia summit, was more than a diplomatic rhetoric. It was a political declaration that developments in 2025 – the institutionalisation of the China-Central Asia mechanism, the conclusion of the Russia-Central Asia Joint Action Plan and the aggressive posture of the region at multilateral forums- are all being gradually implemented. This change is open to a two-fold interpretation: analytically, it can be evaluated as a structural change in the regional balance of agency; personally, to scholars and policy-makers, it has a more profound echo, as it signifies the materialisation of visions which had been central to an entire generation of post-independence statecraft. Scholars and policymakers currently impacting the foreign policy of Central Asia were raised in states that were defined by others. The desire to self-definition, not to be, as one of the regional analysts put it, a static thing, but to have a certain negotiating power and manoeuvre is no longer a mere desire (Makocki and Popescu 2016). It is, more and more, a geopolitical fact.
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Further Reading on E-International Relations
