Abstract:

The growing body of literature has intended to provide worthwhile studies to comprehend the factors that affect a new political leader's foreign policy choices and establish parallel relationships with external and domestic facets involved in the external policy-making processes. The scholars focused on of these factors that possess marginal significance in explaining the current tendency in Uzbekistan's active regional policy, leaving behind the strategic national interests. As a result, these studies focused on narrow explanations and lacked a broader regional power politics dynamics analysis.

From this point, to address this research puzzle, this work offers to consider Central Asian countries' efforts to build trustful relations, strengthening intergovernmental cooperation in maintaining regional security, extracting economic benefits by promoting regional economic cooperation and improving regional unity in the power politics with external actors such as China, Russia and the US.

Particularly, this study aims to examine the domestic factors that influenced the foreign policy shift of Uzbekistan toward Central Asia after the leadership transition, with a special focus on the role of political leaderships' efforts to build political trust in the region. My methodology based on the content analysis of the leaders' speeches.