Geopolitics in Central Asia

Due to Central Asia’s strategic location as well as the presence of hydrocarbons, for the past 30 years the region has been of great interest to global and regional powers such as Russia, China, the United States, the EU, India, Iran, and Turkey. The states of the region (Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan) have adopted multivector foreign policies to balance outside interests. Through their flexible and pragmatic foreign policies, these states have avoided outside domination and exploited competition between external powers to advance the interests of their (predominantly) authoritarian regimes. Because of great and regional power interest in the region, Central Asian regimes have a great deal of opportunity to extract benefits from these powers, but they rarely do so collectively. To date, efforts to form coherent, robust regional Central Asian institutions have failed. Among the many reasons for these failures include the colonial legacy of undelimitated borders as well as a lack of economic interdependence, the entrenchment of personalist autocratic regimes in the region, and the establishment of externally sponsored international organizations such as the Russian-led Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO) and the Chinese-led Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO). Although Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is having profound effects on the region, it remains unclear whether, in the short or medium term, a regional hegemon will emerge or a regional organization will form.