When Is a Central Asian Leaders Summit Not a Summit?

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,” in Juraev’s phrasing. 

Yes, the leaders all signed the Cholpon-Ata Declaration, a document that Kyrgyzstan’s national news agency described as reflecting the “high level of mutual trust,” “commitment to the principles of peace,” and “good neighborliness” between the Central Asian states and Azerbaijan. But the text was not published, continuing a trend toward increased confidentiality begun at the seventh Consultative Meeting last November, which saw no joint documents released. (Previous meetings had tended to make at least their final declarations public.)

Nevertheless, in the view of some observers the declaration offers concrete proof of a “new era” of expanded regional partnership, brought about now that the Central Asian states have finished “solving [their] own internal issues,” as Filippo Costa Buranelli, senior lecturer in International Relations at the University of St. Andrews, previously put it to me. 

Indeed, much coverage of the Cholpon-Ata summit — and of Azerbaijan’s presence there — has framed the meeting as evidence of the real progress in regional cooperation made in recent years. The newfound focus on trans-Caspian connectivity, so the argument goes, and the commercial, transport, and investment opportunities discussed, marked a significant departure from earlier editions, where Central Asia’s leaders were more preoccupied with managing disputes or more circumspect about regional partnership. 

At the fourth Consultative Meeting in July 2022, for example, only Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, and Uzbekistan put pen to paper on a Treaty of Friendship, Good-Neighborliness, and Cooperation for the Development of Central Asia in the 21st Century, a document setting a framework for tangible future coordination, with Tajikistan demurring until last summer, and Turkmenistan only signing the document this July 1.

If the Friendship Treaty is anything to go by, however, questions remain as to Azerbaijan’s place among the Central Asian states. Baku has not signed the treaty, nor does it currently seem likely that it will be allowed to do so. 

Moreover, Aliyev is not slated to take part in the next iteration of the “C5+1” diplomatic forum, which will see the five Central Asian presidents travel to Seoul on September 16-17, meaning that reports of the birth of a “C6” may have been slightly exaggerated. 

The point, as Buranelli recently told local media, is that the new era of Central Asian regionalism will likely be defined by whether, how, and how quickly the Friendship Treaty is implemented. And on this account, seeing as the agreement was largely unmentioned beyond remarks by Kazakh President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev that highlighted the completion of the signing process, Cholpon-Ata offered few clues.