From Fragmented Periphery to Regional Power: How Central Asia Builds its Shared Identity

Authored by: Shamil Ibragimov, Scholar-in-Residence, MIT Kuo Sharper Center for Prosperity and Entrepreneurship

Ask most people to point to Central Asia on a map, and chances are they’ll hesitate. Yet this region spanning vast steppes, celestial mountains and centuries of history sits at the crossroads of civilizations, resource-rich, culturally layered, and geopolitically central. 

So why does it remain on the margins of global attention?

Central Asia is one of the least understood regions on the planet. It’s on the map, but rarely in the headlines. Technically part of Asia, the region is a patchwork of Silk Road legacies, Turkic and Persian traditions, with Russian language and a shared Soviet past. Attempts to neatly classify it geopolitically, culturally, even linguistically always end in contradiction. We are not quite Asian, not quite European, and certainly not Middle Eastern. Perhaps only the Caucasus rivals us in complexity also yearning to belong to Europe yet remaining “other” in the eyes of Europe itself.

When thinking about the future from a place like this, it's tempting to imagine the best-case scenario. But that's often a naïve and thankless task. You’ll hear a thousand reasons why it won’t work and most of them will be right. Until time proves otherwise.

As the world becomes increasingly polarized, and regional blocs emerge as key players in global politics and economics, Central Asia faces a fundamental challenge: the need to form a regional identity. Without this foundation, there can be no talk of long-term development, resilience, or a distinct voice in global affairs. What is particularly alarming is that, at the intergovernmental level, this question isn’t even on the table, not as a strategic goal, nor even as a theoretical hypothesis. And yet it is precisely the need for a shared identity across cultural, institutional, and mental pathways that could serve as the platform for genuine integration, the starting point from which all countries in the region could build.

Yes, there are initiatives aimed at political and economic rapprochement. Several regional organizations have been created with the stated goal of integration, including the Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO), the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO), and the Eurasian Economic Union (EAEU). But few deliver on what they promise, at least not in practice. Free trade remains largely fictional: between 2005 and 2021, intra-regional trade among Central Asian countries accounted for just 4.6% to 9.1% of total trade, reflecting weak economic interdependence.

In matters of security, each country still acts alone. After intense border clashes between Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan in September 2022, Kyrgyzstan requested CSTO peacekeeping support to stabilize the situation. The organization failed to respond—underscoring its unwillingness or inability to mediate conflicts among its own members.

Regional projects often exist more on paper than in practice. They are formal, inert, and lack both public support and institutional depth.

In regions where integration has truly succeeded, the process rarely began with paper agreements; it began with shared identity and interdependence at the level of people, businesses, and cultural practices.

In the absence of meaningful political cooperation, cultural frameworks have been floated—most notably Pan-Turkism, which imagines a political and cultural unification of Turkic-speaking peoples; a concept that resonates symbolically, but not practically. It looks like a natural framework for regional unity, given the predominantly Turkic cultures of Central Asia (with the notable exception of Tajikistan, whose language and heritage are Persian). Yet this concept has never taken meaningful root, and it’s unlikely to do so. The Turkic world stretches far beyond Central Asia, encompassing Turkey, Azerbaijan, and Turkic regions within the Russian Federation such as Tatarstan and Bashkortostan. While culturally significant, pan-Turkism has never functioned as a cohesive political project. With nearly a hundred ethnic groups, Central Asia cannot anchor its future in ethnicity alone. Any viable integration must be based on a broader sense of regional belonging and shared cultural space.

Take the so-called West. It is not defined solely or even primarily, by military unions like NATO or economic unions like the European Union. The United States, Canada, and Australia are not EU members. Turkey is formally in NATO, but institutionally and culturally outside the Western cluster. What unites the West is not formal military or economic alliances, but a more subtle fabric: developed institutions, democratic norms, economic openness, civil liberties and, above all, a shared sense of belonging to the same “world.” This is what political scientists Joseph Nye and Robert Keohane, back in the late 1970s, called “complex interdependence.” This quasi-identity may not be written into law, but it works in practice.

Central Asia has the potential to become its own distinct cluster by following similar principles seen elsewhere in successful regional integration. 

The region is rich in natural, demographic, and intellectual resources, and occupies a strategically vital position in Eurasia. But without consolidation and a shared identity, this remains just potential. Realization won't come from the top down, but from the bottom up and from people and ideas.

The engine of this transformation is creative and innovative entrepreneurship. Central Asian culture has always evolved; it is thousands of years old and still changing. Today, as each nation strengthens its individual identity, we must also recognize and support the growing cultural exchange across the region. In Central Asia, where culture and commerce have long been intertwined from the caravans of the Silk Road to today’s startups, creative entrepreneurship doesn’t just build markets, it builds meaning. A designer in Almaty or a filmmaker in Tashkent isn’t just selling a product; they’re shaping what it means to be Central Asian in the 21st century.

This isn’t a loss of tradition, but the emergence of new forms, ideas, and expressions shaped by the region’s diverse influences. Through entrepreneurship, not just in business, but in art, media, design, cuisine, and storytelling, Central Asia is cultivating a shared cultural identity rooted in both its diversity and its deep common heritage.

Centralized political structures, by their very nature, are incapable of initiating such processes. Their mission is not to dictate, but to step aside and create the conditions. Real integration unfolds organically. Like any ecosystem, its growth is complex, gradual, and resilient. And we’re already seeing the first signs. In fashion, cuisine, and architecture, images are emerging that are unmistakably Central Asian blending elements from across the region into something coherent, distinct, and new.

In The Prosperity of Paradox, Christensen et al. advocate for market-creating innovation as the key to prosperity. Their examples from Henry Ford’s Model T, which catalyzed U.S. infrastructure investment, to Samuel Insull’s innovations in electricity distribution show how entrepreneurship can reshape entire economies by unlocking unmet demand, creating jobs, and generating tax bases for long-term development.

In 21st-century Central Asia, the opportunity for shared prosperity lies not just in infrastructure, which is relatively well developed, but in building a new, integrated regional market, projected to reach 100 million people by 2050. This future won’t come by decree—it will be built by creators, entrepreneurs, and storytellers whose ideas transcend borders. Entrepreneurship, not bureaucracy, may be the most powerful force for regional integration, one that builds prosperity from the ground up, not the top down.

Regional identity is not an abstract concept. It is the foundation without which we can have neither resilience, nor progress, nor agency. Central Asia cannot remain indefinitely a space “between” China and Russia. We will either define ourselves as a unified region with a shared vision—or remain a fragmented periphery, shaped by others’ agendas rather than our own.