When the Soviet Union broke up in 1991, a sense over euphoria swept over a Türkiye that had just seen its application to join the European Community rejected. The emergence of five Turkic-majority states in the Caucasus and Central Asia provided an alternative possibility to European integration: Türkiye could look east and seek to build a new confederation of Turkic states.

The idea was vigorously embraced but soon appeared stillborn for a number of reasons. For one, the Turkic nations of the former USSR had just gotten rid of one overlord and were not in the market for another. The sometimes haughty tone of Turkish officials toward them did not help either. Besides, Türkiye was beset by internal problems – a rising PKK insurgency in the southeast, a troubled economy with runaway inflation, and a surge of Islamist politics that frightened the secular leaders of Central Asia and Azerbaijan.

For two decades thereafter, Central Asia and the Caucasus did not figure prominently in Turkish foreign policy. Economic realities forced Türkiye to look again toward the EU in the 2000s. After consolidating power, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and his AKP government turned south – jumping headfirst into the frayed politics of the Middle East, a region that would keep Türkiye preoccupied for over a decade. But a combination of internal and external shocks in the 2010s led to a domestic realignment in a nationalist direction, which also led to a renewed interest in the Turkic states of Central Asia and the Caucasus.

As this volume will detail, Türkiye has been actively pursuing its influence in the region bilaterally but also multilaterally, through the upgrading of Turkic cooperation with the creation of the Organization of Turkic States.

It is worth pausing for a minute on the ethnolinguistic aspect of Türkiye’s approach to the region. While Türkiye continues to maintain bilateral relations with non-Turkic states like Georgia and Tajikistan, there is a clear emphasis on ethnic and linguistic ties in Türkiye’s approach. In this sense, Türkiye differs markedly from Russian and Chinese approaches in Central Asia and the Caucasus. Because neither Russia nor China can appeal to common identity markers, these powers have focused mainly on economic and security issues as they have devised their regional mechanisms, such as the Eurasian Economic Union or the Shanghai Cooperation Organization. Whatever the faults of these instruments – and there are many – they are at least inclusive, in that they do not differentiate between regional states on the basis of identity. Türkiye’s approach, by contrast, stresses common identity markers and makes them central to its bid for influence in the region. Indeed, increasingly the language used both during OTS meetings and in bilateral meetings of Turkish and regional leaders stressed “brotherhood” of fellow Turkic peoples. This is in one sense an asset that other regional powers cannot compete with. On the other hand, emphasizing the ethnolinguistic commonality between Türkiye and Turkic peoples risks alienating the non-Turkic peoples of the region and feeding the existing sentiments in Georgia and Tajikistan – not even to speak of Armenia – countries whose own nationalist narratives have been motivated in part by enmity against Turks, past or present.

That being said, Türkiye’s renewed involvement with Central Asia and the Caucasus is one of the most significant developments in the region in the past several years. It complements the rise in regional cooperation in Central Asia, as well as between Central Asia and Azerbaijan. And importantly, at a time when relations between the West and Russia are at an all-time low and Western relations with China are deteriorating, Türkiye’s growing influence in Central Asia and the Caucasus provides much-needed opportunities for regional leaders to expand their international relations. In the foreign policy strategy adopted by regional leaders, balance is key. Their continued sovereignty and independence depends on establishing relations with other powers that help counterbalance their relations with Russia and China. Since the U.S. and EU have thus far been unwilling to provide enough of a regional presence to generate such a balancing force, Türkiye’s involvement is a welcome opportunity for regional states to build ties with outside powers that are not shy to get involved in security and military affairs.

Nearly all commentators on the evolution of the countries of Central Asia, Mongolia, the Caucasus, and Afghanistan, (i.e., the “CAMCA” countries) have concentrated on older adults and ignored younger men and women. This collection focuses instead on members of the younger generation whose outlooks have been largely neglected until now.

But what, we must ask, is a generation? For a century Europeans and Americans have coined cliches to describe each rising cohort of young people. Early on they defined their subject as young men and women in their late teens and early twenties. Now the definition commonly stretches further back into the earlier teen years. At the same time, the concept of a generation has itself changed. It was once commonly defined in biological terms, which meant a period of twenty or more years. Today –at least in the West— a social and political “generation” is often shortened to only a single decade.

Why are the views of members of the rising generation in the CAMCA countries (Central Asia, Mongolia, the Caucasus, and Afghanistan) of importance? Very simply, because their life experience differs so starkly from that of both their parents and grandparents. Their parents were raised by people born and educated in the Soviet Union or in Mongolia, under Soviet influence. In every one of these countries the current generation of parents has also been challenged by personal contact with the modern world on a global scale and by their national governments’ efforts to respond to it. As a consequence, they sit uneasily on two stools, past and present, institutional and personal, and bravely try to seek a workable balance between them. As is clear from the essays below, they do not always succeed at this. It is no exaggeration to say that parental influence on source offspring across the region has diminished.

A second and obvious issue that distinguishes the young generation in all of the countries under study is their massive access to cellphone technology and the internet. This development, which contrasts to the experience of some but not all of their elders, gives them access to world-wide “neighborhoods” of like-minded people. This constitutes second and non-institutional forms of education, which contrasts sharply with what is offered in schools, but which is very powerful nonetheless. The scale of contact with this world among members of the young generation is immense. However, it often occurs at the price of reduced communication with their more diverse physical neighbors at home. Moreover, as is clear from the reviews included in this collection, the attention of young people is also focused as much or more on music and pop culture as on the subjects that dominate traditional newspapers, radio, and TV.

All of these pressures and tensions bear directly on educational systems across the entire region and beyond. Educational reform in a post-Soviet spirit has indeed gone forward in all the countries under study, but it has been slow, tentative, and bureaucratic. Worse, to the extent it exists at all, reform has been concentrated at the university level. In some countries the rising generation has been emancipated from Soviet-type training in lower schools by the appearance of a few private institutions, but these are few in number and accessible only to the well-to-do. For the most part, younger men and women across the region are still the product of Soviet-type lower schools. While this results in high competence in mathematics and basic science, it lags in both the social sciences and humanities, leaving these fields wide open to informal learning from the internet and other non-traditional sources.

It goes without saying that the contemporary world is full of continuities that often go unnoticed. Upbringing in the family, the impact of neighbors, religion, traditional life-cycle customs, and deep-rooted musical traditions all remain much as they were in the past. Yet, acknowledging this, it is hard to imagine three generations whose life experiences differ more radically from each other than those of a typical CAMCA family over the course of recent decades.

In a first effort to map at least the outlines of the rising generation across the CAMCA region, the Central Asia-Caucasus Institute turned to its own region-wide team of experts, the 280 men and women from all ten countries who have participated in the fellowship program launched fifteen years ago by the Rumsfeld Foundation and our Institute. Now a diverse band of highly accomplished members of their societies, these leaders of business, government, the professions, and press train and hire older members of the rising generation and work closely with them on a daily basis. Many also observe the young through their own children and through their children’s friends and schoolmates.

As editors, we will resist the temptation to extract conclusions from the diverse evidence in this report or to propose implications for each of the ten societies included and for the larger region of which they are all a part. This is instead the challenge which our CAMCA contributors set before each reader. To guide such reflection, we offer the following five questions: First, is it possible to speak of this region’s rising generation as a single cohort and, if so, what are its boundary ages? Second, is it possible to speak of common generational features across the entire region, or should we focus instead on smaller groupings or even on the distinct generational identities of individual countries? Third, looking forward, what degree of discontinuity should we anticipate on a national, sub-regional, and regionwide basis? Fourth, are the CAMCA countries prepared to deal with the discontinuities and changes that the rising generation may generate? And, fifth, to what degree is the entire CAMCA region coming to participate in what French sociologist Claude Levi-Strauss called “the global monoculture”?

Central Asia is often portrayed through metaphors such as a “Grand Chessboard” or a “Great Game,” which suggest that the players in the game are the great powers, and the Central Asian states are merely pawns in this game. The problem with this analysis is that it denies agency to the Central Asian states. This might have been a plausible argument immediately upon their independence, when these states were indeed weak. But today, thirty years into independence, it is abundantly clear that the situation has changed.

Even though China, Russia, and the West are still able to influence the evolution of Central Asia in various ways, the Central Asian states are increasingly capable of defining their individual and joint interests and translating them into concrete programs.  While institutionalization of their collaboration has lagged, the Taliban takeover in Afghanistan, Russia’s war in Ukraine, and other great power actions have promoted the regional governments to link arms as never before. Since 2016 this process has advanced rapidly, accompanied by more proactive strategies by the five regional governments themselves. While Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan have emerged as leaders in this process, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan and Turkmenistan are all engaged with this new direction, as is their neighbor across the Caspian, Azerbaijan.

It remains to be seen whether and in what ways major powers will acknowledge this development.  What is already clear, however, is that “divide and conquer” policies will no longer be effective tools for dealing with the states of Central Asia, which will increasingly use their power of agency to ameliorate and shape the approaches of major powers.

The United States and Europe can take stock of this process to expand their partnership with Central Asian states. This includes expanding Western investment in the Trans-Caspian transportation corridor, while working closely with Central Asian states to prevent sanctions evasion. Western powers should also recognize the primacy of security in Central Asian realities, and support processes of reform in the defense and security sector to help Central Asians defend themselves against the encroachments of neighboring great powers. Last but not least, the U.S. should follow the example of the EU and raise the level of its interaction with Central Asia to the highest political level.