Elvira Kadyrova and Liliya Zhirnova
In 1991, Turkmenistan became independent with no foreign ministry to speak of, no seat at any regional table, and no diplomatic tradition of its own to draw on. Thirty-five years later, it is difficult to name a domain of regional life in Central Asia — security, water, transport, gender policy, even the affairs of trade unions — where Turkmenistan has not, at some point, proposed that the countries of the region stop cooperating episodically and start cooperating permanently.
That is the thread worth pulling on this anniversary: not a list of achievements, but a habit of mind.
Faced with a shared problem, Turkmenistan’s characteristic move has not been to hold another meeting. It has been to propose a standing mechanism — a centre, a dialogue, a chairmanship, a secretariat — built to outlast the meeting that created it.
An instinct, not an accident
A single proposal could be coincidence. A pattern repeated across security, environment, connectivity, gender policy and professional associations, over three and a half decades, is something closer to a foreign-policy reflex. It shows up whether the subject is nuclear non-proliferation or needlework cooperatives, whether the audience is the UN Security Council or a conference of trade unionists on the shore of Issyk-Kul. The scale changes; the instinct does not.
The region: security as the founding case
The clearest test case is also the oldest of Turkmenistan’s own initiatives: the United Nations Regional Centre for Preventive Diplomacy for Central Asia, established in Ashgabat in December 2007 at the initiative of all five Central Asian states, after several years of consultation between the region’s governments and the UN.
Nearly two decades on, UNRCCA is no longer a proposal to be evaluated; it is an operating institution, monitoring early-warning signals, building confidence measures, and increasingly extending its reach toward Afghanistan.
The UN General Assembly marked its tenth anniversary in 2017 with a resolution — initiated by Turkmenistan and co-sponsored by 57 countries — explicitly crediting the Centre with fostering political dialogue on the region’s most contentious issues.
Turkmenistan has continued building on that foundation: a Zone of Peace, Trust and Cooperation of Central Asia secured by UN resolution in 2022; a Group of Friends of Neutrality convened in 2020; and, in 2026, a fresh package of proposals — an Academic Centre for the Study of Peace, Neutrality and Preventive Diplomacy, a Chamber of Mediation for Peace, and a UN Office of Counter-Terrorism programme office for Ashgabat — each intended to give the region’s diplomatic architecture another permanent room.
The longer lineage: water and environment
If UNRCCA is the sharpest example, the deeper lineage runs through water. The International Fund for Saving the Aral Sea, founded by the five Central Asian heads of state in 1993, predates UNRCCA by fourteen years and remains the region’s longest-running attempt to manage a shared ecological catastrophe collectively rather than nationally.
Turkmenistan’s own chairmanship of the Fund, from 2017 to 2019, did not simply administer the existing structure — it used the position to open a new Aral Sea Basin Action Programme, push a Central Asian Water Strategy, and stand up a permanent Executive Committee building in Ashgabat, flags of all five founding states raised together over its entrance.
That same instinct is still active: a proposed Regional Centre to Combat Desertification, advanced through ESCAP, would be — if realized — the world’s first intergovernmental institution dedicated specifically to sustainable land management in sandy desert environments.
A parallel proposal for a Regional Centre for Climate-Related Technologies, and an expanding Caspian Environmental Forum, round out what is now a coherent environmental-governance package rather than a set of isolated ideas.
Connectivity: from a declaration to a decade
Turkmenistan’s approach to transport followed the identical arc, compressed into a decade. A 2014 Ashgabat conference produced the Ashgabat Declaration; the UN General Assembly turned it into resolution that same December.
A second resolution followed in 2015, leading to the first Global Sustainable Transport Conference, held in Ashgabat in 2016 and attended by three heads of state and forty-two transport ministers. What became known as the Ashgabat process has since been renewed by the General Assembly in 2017, 2021 and 2023, culminating in the proclamation of a full United Nations Decade of Sustainable Transport, 2026 to 2035 — ten years of multilateral transport policy traced directly back to a single Turkmen initiative, alongside a parallel track of resolutions on energy connectivity and a new Trans-Caspian Coordination Platform linking the corridor more firmly to European markets.
Gender: the newest institutional lineage, and among the sturdiest
Less remarked upon internationally, but structurally identical to the others, is the Dialogue of Women of Central Asia, launched in December 2020. Its architecture will look familiar by now: a founding declaration, a rotating chairmanship — Uzbekistan first, then Turkmenistan in 2022, then Kazakhstan, then Kyrgyzstan — and outcome documents formally adopted into the record of the UN General Assembly.
During its own chairmanship year, Turkmenistan did not treat the platform as ceremonial; it proposed a regional Society of Needlewomen as a concrete, if modest, act of institution-building within the Dialogue.
The Dialogue shows every sign of institutional durability rather than diplomatic fashion — a regional mechanism for women’s cooperation is, increasingly, simply part of how Central Asia does business.
Youth, and the smallest scale of all
A parallel, if younger, lineage runs through youth policy: a Central Asian Youth Dialogue, an annual Government-Youth Dialogue convened under UNRCCA’s Preventive Diplomacy Academy, and a 2025 Ashgabat youth forum that produced its own roadmap for EU–Central Asian cooperation.
At a July 2026 conference on trade-union rights in Kyrgyzstan’s Issyk-Kul region, Turkmenistan’s delegation proposed a modest but telling addition to the pattern: a unified regional information and legal platform for trade unions across Central Asia.
No General Assembly resolution will mark this one. It matters precisely because nothing forced the proposal — the instinct operates whether or not anyone outside the room is watching.
The world: the same logic, exported
The same reflex extends beyond the region. Turkmenistan’s neutrality — recognized by the UN General Assembly in 1995 and revisited in a further resolution thirty years later — has increasingly been treated not as a passive legal status but as raw material for institution-building: the Group of Friends of Neutrality, proposed Guidelines on the observance of neutrality developed jointly with the UN, and a Global Security Strategy initiative resting explicitly on international law rather than bloc politics.
The logic is the same one applied at home — permanent structure over one-off gesture — aimed outward at a UN system that Turkmenistan has spent three decades arguing needs more standing mechanisms for prevention, not more emergency sessions after the fact.
Thirty-five years on
None of this reads as triumphant if set against Turkmenistan’s own founding condition in 1991: a state more often described by what it withheld from regional and world affairs — non-alignment, formal neutrality, a low external profile — than by what it built.
The record of the past thirty-five years complicates (and corrects) that description. A country frequently characterized mainly by its neutrality has spent much of that neutrality’s practical life proposing the scaffolding — centres, dialogues, chairmanships, secretariats — that other states, and the UN system itself, now lean on.
Several of the newest proposals, the Global Security Strategy among them, are still in motion rather than settled fact.
That, more than any retrospective tally, is probably the more accurate way to mark the anniversary: not a finished record, but a habit that shows no sign of stopping. /// nCa, 17 July 2026