Nargiza Matqurbanova
When Shavkat Mirziyoyev hosted the Organization of Turkic States summit in Samarkand in November 2022, the choreography was hard to miss. Uzbekistan, a country that spent the better part of two decades on the margins of regional diplomacy, was suddenly at the center of a five-nation family photo, hosting a gathering that renamed the old Turkic Council into something grander: an “organization,” with a secretariat, a council of elders, and a strategy stretching to 2040. Three years on, it is worth asking what that membership has actually delivered, beyond the photographs and the motifs of shared ancestry.
The honest answer is: quite a lot in trade and connectivity, almost nothing in binding commitments, and a great deal in reputational capital that Tashkent has learned to spend carefully. That distinction matters more than it sounds, because it is precisely what makes the OTS useful to a country like Uzbekistan, which has spent the Mirziyoyev era trying to open outward without tying itself down.
Start with the numbers, since they are the part diplomats like to cite. Intra-OTS trade turnover reached roughly 1.17 trillion dollars in 2024, with the organization setting a target of 100 billion dollars for trade specifically among member states by 2025, and Uzbekistan posting one of the bloc’s stronger growth rates, at 6.5 percent. Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan together account for well over a quarter of a trillion dollars in combined turnover with fellow members. A Turkic Investment Fund, agreed at the Samarkand summit, was meant to give the bloc its first shared financial instrument. None of this is trivial for a landlocked economy that depends on transit routes through neighbors it does not always control.
Yet none of it required Uzbekistan to sign away very much. This is the feature that scholars of the organization keep returning to: the OTS coordinates without constraining. As one recent assessment of the bloc’s evolution put it, the organization offers members a genuine platform for policy coordination precisely because it avoids the binding treaty obligations that would otherwise limit their freedom of maneuver in foreign policy. For Tashkent, which under Islam Karimov spent years wary of entangling alliances and under Mirziyoyev has tried to diversify partners without picking sides among Russia, China, and the West, that looseness is not a design flaw. It is the entire appeal.
The clearest illustration is the gap between the organization’s declared ambitions and what it has actually bound its members to do. The 2025 summit in Azerbaijan floated a draft “Treaty on Strategic Partnership, Eternal Friendship and Brotherhood,” explicitly framed as an attempt to move cooperation from a symbolic level to a binding basis. The fact that this still needs finalizing, sixteen years after the Nakhchivan Agreement first established the Turkic Council, tells its own story. Security and defense cooperation entered the agenda only around 2023, and even now it consists largely of dialogue mechanisms rather than mutual obligations comparable to, say, the Collective Security Treaty Organization that Uzbekistan pointedly left in 2012. Tashkent’s own diplomacy in the OTS has followed the same logic: pushing initiatives, hosting summits, sponsoring the trade facilitation strategy, while keeping its options with Moscow and Beijing entirely open.
There is also a cultural dividend that is easy to dismiss as decorative but should not be. Programs built around a shared Turkic identity, the Turkic World Vision 2040, joint tourism branding, education exchanges, and cooperation with bodies like Turkey’s TİKA agency give Uzbekistan low-cost access to soft-power infrastructure it could not build alone. This matters for a government trying to rebrand the country internationally after decades of isolation, and it costs Tashkent comparatively little in sovereignty.
The risk, and it is a real one, is that the OTS remains permanently a body that talks more than it commits, leaving members to discover its limits exactly when a crisis tests them. Scholarship on the organization has repeatedly flagged this vulnerability: enthusiasm has waxed and waned before, most notably through the 1990s and 2000s when summits went years without producing anything substantive, largely because Russia’s re-assertion of influence through the Commonwealth of Independent States crowded out the space for a rival Turkic project. Nothing guarantees that history will not repeat, particularly if Ankara’s own regional ambitions start to diverge from what Central Asian capitals want.
For now, though, the calculation for Uzbekistan looks rational rather than sentimental. The OTS lets Tashkent diversify its economic and cultural ties, raise its diplomatic profile, and hedge against overdependence on any single power, all without committing to anything it would regret. Whether that remains true once the pending strategic partnership treaty is actually signed, converting soft coordination into hard obligation, will be the real test of how much Uzbekistan’s Turkic bet was ever about kinship at all, and how much it was about keeping every option open.
Nargiza Matqurbanova, 3rd year student at the University of World Economy and Diplomacy, majoring International Law
