Paper short abstract:

Study of the shifting patterns of Uzbek foreign policy through an analysis of Uzbek foreign policy communication. Communications in Russian language were scraped from the website of the Uzbek Ministry of Foreign Affairs (26,391 documents, 2001-2021) and examined through a Structural Topic Model.

Paper long abstract:

Uzbekistan represents an interesting example of post-Soviet economic transition in Central Asia as its path of reform was a more gradual transition from a socialist to a mixed economic model compared to other post-Soviet countries. Protectionism and trade differentiation have been described with the concept of economic ‘self-reliance’. Furthermore, the literature on Uzbekistan’s nation-building depicts the construction of the Uzbek state as an exercise of nationalistic identity-building focused on decolonisation, Islamisation/Turkification and derussification. The focus on identity-building is common in the academic debate on Uzbek regional policy along with a list of domestic drivers of foreign policy. Among these, ‘regime survival’ is vastly the most quoted, together with ‘national independence’. The latter is characterised in practice as ‘non-alignment’ and is designed around either an ideological sense of ‘recognition’ as an independent international actor, again the policy of ‘self-reliance’, or as a function of pragmatic national interest. Under Islam Karimov’s rule, Uzbekistan’s foreign policy was distinctive in Central Asia, as the country did not stably join Russian-led endeavours and, at the same time, did not chose a completely isolationist approach.

Uzbek foreign policy was often described as ‘multivectoral’ as it maintained good relations with countries or international organisations with contrasting roles in the international arena. Yet, different moments in time have signified shifting loyalties, particularly with Russia and the United States. The most stable vector of Uzbek foreign policy, the Asian vector, is often overlooked, particularly in terms of the puzzling success of Sino-Uzbek relations, in a context of Uzbek wariness of close relations with great powers. China’s economic and political relevance in Shavkat Mirziyoyev’s Uzbekistan is based on a successful engagement in the past which helped building stable ties between the two countries. This paper tries to examine the shifting patterns of Uzbek foreign policy empirically through a quantitative analysis of Uzbek foreign policy communication between 2001 and 2021. Each available piece of external communication in Russian language was scraped from the website of the Uzbek Ministry of Foreign Affairs (26,391 documents) and analysed through a Structural Topic Model (Roberts et al, 2014). The objective is to focus attention of the ideational shifts in Uzbek external self-representation to shed light on this puzzle. The research is part of larger project to analyse Sino-Uzbek relations in the 21st century and will be complemented by a similar document analysis of Chinese sources and semi-structured elite interviews in Uzbekistan and China in 2022.

[This page (https://www.centraleurasia.org/conferences/summer/individual-paper-proposals-summer-conference-2022/) said 250-400 words, so I followed that advice. If it's 250 words as it says on the form on this page, please consider only the second paragraph.]