Crossroads Asia | Diplomacy | Central Asia

When Is a Central Asian Leaders Summit Not a Summit?

The latest gathering of Central Asian leaders, plus Azerbaijan’s president, saw the signing of a declaration, but the “C5” have not quite become a “C6.”

Kyrgyzstan has been earning its long-time moniker as the “Switzerland” of Central Asia of late, having already hosted a flurry of senior diplomatic visits this summer, ahead of a busy few weeks that will see the Shanghai Cooperation Organization celebrate its 25th anniversary with a summit in Bishkek, and the biannual World Nomad Games again setting up camp on the banks of Issyk-Kul. 

In regional terms, the most significant of these visits to Kyrgyzstan arguably came at the end of July, when the five leaders of the Central Asian republics were joined by Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev at the resort town of Cholpon-Ata for a high-level get-together.

This was the group’s first gathering since November 2025, when Baku was formally welcomed as a participant at the seventh official Consultative Meeting of Heads of State of Central Asia, the region’s annual leaders summit.. 

At first glance, the one-day summit had all of the hallmarks of a typical Consultative Meeting. It was used as an opportunity to announce trade deals — such as the expansion of the Kyrgyz-Azerbaijani Development Fund from $100 million to $200 million — and featured the platitudes regularly offered and proposals regularly made by Central Asia’s presidents. 

Uzbekistan’s leader, Shavkat Mirziyoyev, for example, commended Kyrgyzstan on its recent election as a non-permanent member of the United Nations Security Council, paid tribute to the “common regional identity” taking shape, and stressed the importance of strengthening interstate coordination via the “Central Asia Plus” negotiating format. Tajik President Emomali Rahmon, meanwhile, suggested the building of a large regional oil refinery — likely on the back of Central Asia’s recent fuel crisis, which has been especially acute in Tajikistan.

The only problem is that what happened at Cholpon-Ata wasn’t a Consultative Meeting at all. The get-together was billed as an informal gathering rather than a full-fledged leaders summit, the eighth of which is scheduled to take place in Turkmenistan in early October.

The distinction, as Kyrgyz political scientist Shairbek Juraev pointed out, is puzzling. While there is nothing unusual about regional leaders convening in whatever format they please, the point of the Consultative Meeting format in the first place was that it was inherently a flexible arrangement, an informal format that tended to avoid the sovereignty pooling, binding obligations, or other hallmarks of Western-style regional institutionalization. 

Thanks to this additional layer of unofficiality, the recent summit turned out not to be a summit, leaving some regional observers slightly unclear as to why the summit-non-summit really “needed to be convened at all,”........

© The Diplomat