Tariq Saeedi
For most of the post-Soviet period, Central Asia was described in the passive voice. It was a space traversed by pipelines, contested by larger neighbors, and periodically revisited by Washington, Moscow, and Beijing whenever their own priorities required it.
That description no longer fits.
Over the past three years, something distinctive has been taking shape among Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan — and now, with Azerbaijan’s accession, a widening circle beyond them.
It is not integration in the European sense, and it would be a mistake to force it into that mold.
It is better understood as strategic convergence: five, now six, sovereign states arriving independently at shared positions, shared institutions, and a shared voice, without surrendering the individual prerogatives that each guards closely.
The distinction matters, and the region’s own leaders have been careful to insist on it. When Uzbekistan’s President Shavkat Mirziyoyev called last November for the creation of a “Central Asian Community,” he paired the proposal with an explicit disclaimer: the new framework must rest on sovereignty, equality, and non-interference, and no one should import foreign models or build supranational structures on top of it.
That is not the language of a bloc in the making. It is the language of governments that have watched integration projects elsewhere generate friction, and have chosen a different path — one where cooperation deepens precisely because no one is asked to give anything up.
What makes this convergence worth taking seriously is that it is now producing outcomes, not just declarations. The seventh Consultative Meeting of Heads of State, held in Tashkent this past November, moved from rhetoric to institutional substance: a joint Concept of Regional Security built around a shared catalogue of risks. This is the instrument of states that intend to keep coordinating for the long term, arrived at without a treaty obliging them to do so.
The results already on the ground are harder to dismiss as mere atmospherics.
The long-simmering border disputes in the Fergana Valley have been resolved. Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan, whose border conflict cost lives as recently as a few years ago, signed a historic settlement in March 2025 — a resolution reached without external mediation, grown instead out of the trust accumulated through years of the leaders sitting across from one another.
Intra-regional trade has roughly doubled since 2017, approaching eleven billion dollars, with the region’s leaders now openly targeting twenty billion. None of this required anyone to cede a ministry to a regional authority. It required, instead, a sustained habit of talking, coordinating, and quietly narrowing the distance between national positions.
That habit is now visible externally as well as internally. — In 2025 the five governments engaged in an unprecedented run of collective summitry with outside powers — with China, with Russia, with the European Union, and, in a genuine milestone, with the United States, whose president hosted all five Central Asian leaders in Washington for the first time last November.
A region that once negotiated its external relationships one capital at a time is increasingly showing up as a coordinated interlocutor, and finding that this makes it a more legible and more valuable partner to everyone it deals with — not a rival bloc to any of them, but a more coherent one to work with.
Azerbaijan’s entry into the format, formalized at the same Tashkent meeting, extends this logic outward rather than diluting it. Baku’s growing role as a trade and transit partner, particularly since the war in Ukraine reshaped regional logistics, gives the grouping a natural bridge toward the South Caucasus and the wider Caspian energy corridor — precisely the kind of connectivity gain that strategic convergence is suited to deliver, since it asks for coordination on shared interests rather than the harmonizing of national systems.
None of this is to suggest the work is finished, or that convergence resolves every open question.
The Taliban’s canal construction on the Amu Darya is a reminder that shared water security depends on a neighbor the region does not fully control. The growing external interest in Central Asia’s rare-earth deposits is a reminder that great-power attention can crowd a region’s own agenda as easily as it can support it. These are not flaws in the model; they are the next tests of it, and the region’s leaders have shown, over the past three years, a consistent capacity to meet such tests through patient coordination rather than dramatic gestures.
What is emerging, then, is not a Central Asian Union and should not be mistaken for one. It is something arguably better suited to the region’s circumstances: a strategic convergence that lets five sovereign states act with one voice when it serves them, retain their own compass when it does not, and build, meeting by meeting, an architecture of trust that no single treaty could have designed in advance.
It is a quieter kind of achievement than a flag and an anthem. It may also prove a more durable one. /// nCa, 11 July 2026