In a 2024 article, Navigating New Realities: Central Asia’s Role in Contemporary Geopolitics, my co-authors and I argued that the Central Asia was experiencing a structural change. Driven by Russia’s war in Ukraine and the growing ambitions of China, we contended that the region’s states were no longer objects of influence but were taking on a more active role in international politics. Going back to this point at the beginning of 2026, the record of experience has not only ascertained it; it has exceeded it. The speed, complexity, and multi-dimensionality of the transformation of Central Asia requires a significantly enhanced analytical structure; one that goes beyond the Russia-China dichotomy, takes into account the institutional inertia of the region, and takes seriously the material interests that have rendered Central Asia essential to virtually each of the major powers on the planet.

The argument in this article is that Central Asia has now passed a qualitative threshold. It is no longer merely a region whose importance is explained by the interest of external powers, but one which is increasingly developing its own interests and pathway in international politics. This change can be traced in five areas that are closely interconnected, including the maturation of intra-regional collaboration; the advent of critical minerals as a new geopolitical battlefield; the proliferation of external partners and diplomatic modalities; the internal institutionalization of collective agency; and the structural constraints which nonetheless condition the autonomy of the region.. 

Contested Space to Cooperative Community

The most notable phenomenon since we wrote in 2024 is the unification of an indigenous Central Asian regionalism. During the majority of the post-Soviet era, cooperation between Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan and Turkmenistan was intermittent, externally motivated and structurally weak. In 2005, the Central Asian Cooperation Organization was liquidated as Russia incorporated it into the Eurasian Economic Community – an event that President Putin called a favourable one, the greatest birthday gift he had ever gotten among his peers (Crossroads Central Asia, 2025). The symbolic inferiority in that commentary reflected a structural fact: Central Asian regionalism was in the mercy of Moscow. 

That fact has radically shifted. A regional security structure was approved by the Seventh Consultative Meeting of Heads of State of Central Asia, which took place in Tashkent in November 2025, establishing a permanent Secretariat, and (possibly the most symbolically loaded decision made at the meeting) formally admitted Azerbaijan as a full participant, effectively turning the C5 into a C6 format (The Diplomat, 2025). The President of Uzbekistan, Mirziyoyev, described the inclusion of Azerbaijan as the reason why the voice of Central Asia in the global community would become even greater, whilst the President of Kazakhstan, Tokayev, referred to it as a historic decision (The Diplomat, 2025). The logic is strategic. By expanding its institutional boundaries to the Western coast of the Caspian Sea, Central Asia forms a continuous geopolitical space stretching from the Pamirs to the Caucasus. This connected and continuous “Middle Corridor” intensifies the region’s leverage over Eurasian transit. 

The settlement of the most knotty territorial issues of the region was also important. On 31 March 2025, Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan signed a treaty that finally demarcates their almost 1,000-kilometre shared boundary, the longest-running interstate dispute in Central Asia, after the trilateral Khujand agreements of March 2025 resolved boundary issues between Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, and Uzbekistan (East Asia Forum, 2025). These deals, which are being celebrated as a landmark in the geopolitics of Central Asia, eliminate a structural barrier to regional collaboration that has long existed, and are an indication of a qualitative change in the political intent of regional leaders to take charge of their own lives without outside mediation (East Asia Forum, 2025). A “Catalogue of Security Risks in Central Asia and Measures to Prevent them in 2026-2028” codified collective responses to non-traditional threats, such as climate-related resource shortages, cyber warfare, as well as extremist spillover from Afghanistan (The Diplomat, 2025). It is not a language of the states that think of themselves as subjects of great power politics. It is the language of a fledgling security community. 

The institutional picture is supported by survey data. In both Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan, more than 70 percent of the respondents now hold positive attitudes about the enhanced regional connections – a very impressive result considering bilateral relations were often very tense during the early post-independence years (PONARS Eurasia, 2025). Moreover, the 2024 Astana Summit’s agreed roadmap for 2025-2027 regional development exemplified a common long-term purpose that would have been inconceivable a decade earlier (PONARS Eurasia, 2025).

The New Geopolitical Commodity and Critical Minerals

Perhaps, the most important emerging aspect of Central Asian relevance pertains to an issue largely absent in academic literature, until recently: critical minerals and rare earth elements. Whilst hydrocarbons defined Central Asia’s strategic importance during the first post-independence decade, China’s Belt and Road Initiative brought transport connectivity to the forefront during the 2010s. Now, subsoil reserves of lithium, tungsten, cobalt, rare earths, and uranium are re-defining the relationships of the major powers in the region. 

The Central Asian five republics generate about half of all the uranium in the world and contain large deposits of minerals needed in the green energy transformation and high-tech defence systems (Standish 2025). President Tokayev of Kazakhstan has called rare earths the new oil, and President Mirziyoyev of Uzbekistan has announced a 76-project initiative in 28 of the 2025-2028 critical minerals (Carnegie Endowment, 2025; TRENDS Research, 2025). In 2014, Kazakhstan endorsed a Comprehensive Plan for the Development of the Rare and Rare Earth Metals Industry 2024-2028, aiming to grow investment and volume of production by 40 percent (TRENDS Research, 2025). 

These domestic policy decisions are being taken with the complete understanding of their geopolitical valence. The first presidential-level critical minerals summit in the United States, November 2025 C5 1 in Washington, was expressly structured around the critical minerals agenda, with all five Central Asian presidents meeting with President Trump (East Asia Forum, 2025). The summit had notable bilateral results: Kazakhstan signed a 1.1 billion tungsten mining agreement with the U.S. based Cove Kaz Capital, with the Kazakh state corporation Tau-Ken Samruk keeping a 30 per cent stake. The U.S. CEO of the company admitted that Trump and Commerce Secretary Lutnick had negotiated the deal specifically to prevent Chinese companies from developing the deposit (Standish, 2025). Moreover, a Memorandum of Understanding........

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