Identity and Multi-Vector Foreign Policy in Central Asia
https://doi.org/10.24833/2071-8160-2026-2-107-172-187
Abstract
This article explores the role of identity in shaping and legitimizing the multivector foreign policies of the Central Asian states. Since gaining independence, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan have consistently presented multi-vectorism as a core principle of their external action, embedding it in official doctrines, strategic documents, and diverse formats of international cooperation. Yet the actual structure of their political, security, trade, investment, and migration ties reveals the continued predominance of Russia and China as the region’s principal partners. This creates a gap between the declared pluralism of foreign policy and the real hierarchy of external relations.
The article uses the concept of identity to explain this discrepancy and assesses whether identity discourse can serve as an instrument for promoting and legitimizing a multi-vector foreign policy course. It argues that Central Asia’s identity landscape is highly complex and multilayered. It includes primordial forms of belonging rooted in family, clan, tribe, locality, and regional solidarities; national identity shaped by post-Soviet nation-building; Islamic identity, whose influence is growing but remains uneven across the region; post-imperial and post-Soviet identity linked to language, memory, and shared historical experience; and pan-identities, especially Eurasian and Turkic, promoted through regional integration projects.
The article concludes that this multidimensional identity matrix both enables and constrains multi-vectorism. On the one hand, it provides political elites with symbolic resources for balancing among external partners and avoiding exclusive alignment with any single center of power. On the other hand, the coexistence of partially competing identities limits the state’s ability to construct one dominant identity as the foundation of a stable foreign policy vector. Identity discourse can therefore help justify and reproduce multi-vector foreign policy, but it cannot fully determine or consolidate it.
Supporting agencies: This article was prepared with the support of a grant from the Ministry of Science and Higher Education of the Russian Federation for major scientific projects in priority areas of scientific and technological development No. 075-15-2024-551 “Global and regional centers of power in the emerging world order”.
About the Author
S. A. Pritchin
Primakov National Research Institute of World Economy and International Relations of the Russian Academy of Sciences
Russian Federation
Russian Federation
Stanislav A. Pritchin – Cand. Sci. (History), Head of Sector of Central Asia Center Post-Soviet Studies
Profsoyuznaya St., 23, Moscow, 117997, Russia
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Review
For citations:
Pritchin S.A. Identity and Multi-Vector Foreign Policy in Central Asia. MGIMO Review of International Relations. 2026;19(2):172-187. (In Russ.) https://doi.org/10.24833/2071-8160-2026-2-107-172-187
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