Tariq Saeedi
On December 12, 2025, delegates from around the world will gather in Ashgabat to mark three decades of Turkmenistan’s permanent neutrality. But this is no ordinary anniversary. What began as a simple commitment to non-alignment has evolved into something far more remarkable—a living demonstration of how a small nation can become a force for peace not by standing apart from the world, but by engaging with it in entirely new ways.
There is a common misconception about neutrality. — We imagine it as a kind of withdrawal, a nation closing its doors and watching from the sidelines as history unfolds elsewhere.
Turkmenistan has proven this notion profoundly wrong. Its neutrality is not a wall but a window, not silence but a different kind of voice, not inaction but a carefully calibrated response to human need wherever it arises.
Think of a kaleidoscope. The same glass fragments create entirely new patterns with each gentle turn. This is how Turkmenistan’s neutrality works. The principle remains constant—non-alignment, impartiality, peace—but its expression shifts and adapts to meet each challenge the world presents.
When neighboring Afghanistan faces humanitarian crisis, neutrality becomes aid: electricity flowing across borders, a maternity hospital rising in Herat province, students welcomed into classrooms, trade corridors kept open. When water scarcity threatens the region, neutrality becomes cooperation: shared management of precious resources, pilot programs for climate adaptation, proposals for a Regional Center for Climate Technologies under UN auspices. When new technologies emerge that could either divide or unite humanity, neutrality becomes engagement: conferences on artificial intelligence in education, partnerships with UNESCO, preparation for a digital future that leaves no one behind.
This is not charity.
It is not strategic maneuvering dressed up as altruism. It is something simpler and more profound: the recognition that in an interconnected world, your neighbor’s crisis is your own, your region’s stability is your security, humanity’s challenges are challenges you cannot escape simply by declaring yourself neutral.
Turkmenistan has understood that true neutrality in the twenty-first century must be active, must be responsive, must be—to use a word that might seem strange in this context—generous.
Consider what this means in practice. Since 2007, Ashgabat has hosted the UN Regional Center for Preventive Diplomacy for Central Asia. The city has become more than a capital; it has become a space where difficult conversations can happen, where adversaries can meet without losing face, where the machinery of peace—the quiet rooms, the patient facilitators, the guaranteed confidentiality—is always ready.
And when the weather allows, there is Awaza, with its Caspian beaches, proving that even peace negotiations need not be grim affairs.
The agricultural work tells its own story. With support from the Food and Agriculture Organization, Turkmenistan is developing drought-resistant crops and sustainable farming practices—not as national secrets to be hoarded, but as regional solutions to shared threats.
Climate change does not respect borders. Neither does food insecurity. The country’s response reflects this reality: innovation pursued in partnership, knowledge shared freely, resilience built collectively.
The same philosophy extends to energy and infrastructure.
The TAPI pipeline project—linking Turkmenistan, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and India—is often discussed in terms of economics and energy security. But look deeper and you see something else: a web of mutual dependence that makes cooperation more attractive than conflict, that gives nations reasons to talk rather than fight, that creates stakeholders in each other’s success.
This is infrastructure as peacebuilding, cables and pipes as threads binding neighbors into a fabric too valuable to tear.
Water, that most contentious of resources in Central Asia, becomes another arena for this active neutrality. Turkmenistan has completed trainings on climate-smart water planning, testing approaches that combine integrated resource management with climate adaptation. The goal is not merely national resilience but a model that other countries can adopt. When resources are shared, solutions must be too.
Even culture becomes an instrument of this kaleidoscopic neutrality. By celebrating shared heritage, hosting international festivals, preserving sites that speak to common history, Turkmenistan creates spaces where political differences matter less than human connection.
Culture is the language everyone speaks, the meeting ground where understanding begins.
What makes all of this work is consistency of principle combined with flexibility of application. The commitment to neutrality never wavers, but its manifestation changes with circumstance.
Humanitarian need calls forth one response, diplomatic deadlock another, environmental crisis a third. Each time the kaleidoscope turns, the same fundamental elements—peace, impartiality, cooperation—create a new pattern suited to the moment.
The December conference arrives at a moment when the world desperately needs such patterns. The International Year of Peace and Trust, declared by UN resolution at Turkmenistan’s initiative and co-sponsored by eighty-six nations, culminates in this gathering.
Thirty years after the UN General Assembly first recognized Turkmenistan’s permanent neutrality on December 12, 1995, and months after Central Asia itself was designated a zone of peace, trust, and cooperation, this forum will explore how multilateral efforts can advance the Sustainable Development Goals, how conflict prevention mechanisms can be strengthened, how regional cooperation can deepen.
But the real significance lies not in what will be said in conference halls, however important those words may be. It lies in what Turkmenistan has demonstrated over three decades: that neutrality, far from being passive or irrelevant, can be one of the most active and relevant postures a nation can adopt. That by refusing to be pulled into great power competition, a country creates space for the kind of cooperation that aligned nations often find impossible. That by maintaining principles while adapting approaches, you can address an almost infinite variety of challenges without compromising your core identity.
There is something hopeful in this. In an age of rigid ideologies and zero-sum thinking, when nations often seem locked into positions they cannot abandon without humiliation, Turkmenistan offers a reminder that there are always more possibilities than we imagine. The same principles can create different patterns. The same commitment to peace can express itself in humanitarian aid, diplomatic facilitation, technological cooperation, environmental stewardship, cultural exchange.
Each turn of the kaleidoscope reveals something new.
This is what three decades have built: not a monument to neutrality frozen in time, but a living practice that grows and adapts, that responds to new challenges while remaining true to founding principles. It is neutrality as organism rather than doctrine, as verb rather than noun, as continuous creative response to an ever-changing world.
As delegates gather in Ashgabat this December, they will be celebrating an anniversary. But they will also be witnessing something more: a demonstration that even in our fractured age, there are still nations willing to believe that cooperation is possible, that shared challenges can produce shared solutions, that neutrality rightly practiced becomes not a retreat from the world but a different kind of engagement with it—one that may be exactly what our collective future requires.
The kaleidoscope turns. New patterns form. And in those patterns, if we look carefully, we may see glimpses of the world we hope to build. /// nCa, 3 December 2025