Researchers call for review of “outdated” perception of Central Asia   

Central Asia has begun to emerge in recent years as an independent international player, shaking off the old perception about it as a passive object of competition between larger powers.  

Recognising the shift, the Washington-based Carnegie Endowment for International Peace has launched a new initiative, “Reimagining Continental Asia”, calling for a review of outdated concepts about this part of Asia.  

“The vast Eurasian landmass is not just where the interests of several major powers intersect but also where local players now exercise greater agency for independent action and coalitional self-help than ever before,” the think tank said ahead of the online launch on 4 October. 

Opening the event, Carnegie Vice President Evan Feigenbaum said that many Western ideas about Asia were “rooted in imperial histories, colonial pathologies and Cold War”.

“We are three decades on from the end of the Cold War and it is time for some new thinking,” Feigenbaum, who is also a former US undersecretary of state for Central Asia, said. 

He said one of the factors that had pushed the Central Asian nations to become more self-reliant was the US failure in Afghanistan, which had made outside powers “a lot less relevant” in the region. 

It had given the Central Asian countries “the opportunity to take the lead in promoting regional connectivity and diplomatic engagement and they are discussing among themselves strategic and economic futures in ways which are, I think, unprecedented.” 

“They are doing that with confidence, not fear,” Feigenbaum said.  

Jennifer Murtazashvili, a Carnegie non-resident scholar in the Asia Program, said that the US military performance in Afghanistan discredited the US government in the eyes of the Central Asian governments and left many people in the region “disheartened”.  

Despite concerns about the Taliban’s return to power in Afghanistan, the Central Asian governments “were able to deal with them, comfortably”, negotiating various infrastructure and trade deals with them, Murtazashvili said.   

She also said that prospects for regional cooperation were better than ever in Central Asia following the change of leadership in Uzbekistan in 2016. The former late Uzbek President Islam Karimov opposed any integration projects. 

Asel Doolotkeldieva, a non-resident fellow at The George Washington University, who also took part in the launch, said that Central Asia’s growing confidence was also linked to the ongoing process of national re-identification, i.e. further steps in asserting independence from Russia.  

She said that the issue of discarding or reducing the use of the Russian language was “the number one challenge” for many in the region. 

In Kazakhstan there is a growing grassroots movement to understand the nation’s colonial traumas, “and finally speak up about them and make sense of what it has done to them”, Doolotkeldieva said. 

However, she noted, the political elites were not prepared for a full political separation from Russia because of the continued authoritarian dynamics in the region.

Temur Umarov, an expert on China and Central Asia, and a fellow at the Carnegie Russia Eurasia Centre, noted that the Central Asian nations had not shown open support for Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. 

Similarly, they had avoided becoming fully economically dependent on China, he said. Instead, they are “very pragmatically” choosing in which directions and how far they want to go with every specific partner, Umarov said. 

Nicole Grajewski, a Carnegie Fellow in the Nuclear Policy Program, noted Iran’s continued efforts “to use its geographical location”, i.e. access to the sea, to forge closer ties with the Central Asian nations. 

However, in recent years Iran has shifted its focus from cooperation in the cultural and religious spheres, which did not go down well because of fears in Central Asia that it seeks to export conservative Islam, to issues of internal security and stability. 

Although not mentioned by the Carnegie experts, it should be noted that Central Asia’s new proactive international stance is led by the region’s two biggest countries, Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan. 

Both countries have undergone transitions of power in recent years from their respective long-serving Soviet-era leaders to relatively younger ones.

The new Uzbek President Shavkat Mirziyoyev has been considerably more open to the outside world than his predecessor. Kazakh President Kasymzhomart Tokayev, in power since 2019, had previously for many years served as the country’s foreign minister, promoting, in that role, a multi-vector foreign policy.  

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