Central Asia rarely takes center stage in debates about Europe’s political future. Yet the European Union’s growing partnership with Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan deserves closer attention. In April 2025, the EU and these five countries agreed to deepen their cooperation through a strategic partnership. How that partnership develops will matter for democracy, equality, and each individual’s ability to shape their own futures. The collapse of the Soviet Union raised hopes for democratic change in Central Asia. In parts of the region, active civil societies and independent media opened new possibilities for political participation. Today, those possibilities face sustained pressure. Restrictions on civic organizations and press freedom, the imprisonment of political opponents, and challenges to gender equality undermine democratic aspirations. Russia and China’s support for authoritarian governments in the region further complicates the prospects for reform.
Thus, closer cooperation with the EU carries particular importance. How can this partnership relate to the value of democracy? What should count as a successful partnership? And how do citizens, especially those who will become the next generation of decision-makers, understand democracy, the rule of law, equality, and human rights? Their answers will help determine whether the partnership’s commitments translate into meaningful changes in everyday life. These questions guide the research group Europe and Central Asia in the World. It brings together scholars and students from Abai Kazakh National Pedagogical University, the American University of Central Asia, Bard College Berlin, and Hochschule Fulda. The group places gender equality at the heart of its understanding of democracy, examining the legal, economic, and social structures that advance or obstruct equal participation. This special issue introduces some of the themes explored by the group and opens a conversation that its work will continue to expand through a conference in the spring of 2027 as well as a new syllabus to be taught across universities across the world.
Europe in the postliberal World
Claudia Wiesner argues that as the EU and its Member States grapple with repositioning themselves within a changing global order, economic, (geo)political and ecological conflict lines become intertwined with broader ideological conflicts. The EU’s values are contested in the changing world order. (Geo)political, economic, and ecological challenges and conflicts are decisively linked to ideational conflicts relating to values, ideas and concepts.
Women’s Political Representation in the EU and Central Asia
The existence of gender quotas does not determine their effectiveness in increasing women’s participation in political decision-making. Nonetheless, as Kamila Mateeva argues, the experience of Belgium demonstrates that candidate quotas are more effective when combined with placement requirements and enforceable sanctions, while the Kyrgyz legal framework provides relatively strong guarantees of women’s descriptive representation through candidate, district and mandate rules.
Signal, Strategy, or Self-Repair: Three Ways to Read the EU’s New Partnership with Central Asia
Early analysis of the recent €12 billion Global Gateway Initiative points to three distinct ways of understanding the partnership: as a geopolitical strategy to secure critical raw materials like lithium along historic Silk Road routes, as moral signaling that ties trade to democratic values, and as a project of domestic identity reinforcement.
The Dynamic Values-Based Partnership of the European Union and Central Asia
Berit Ebert and Bernardo Carvalho Gomes examine the EU’s expanded access to and participation in the Internal Market by progressively integrating gender equality into Union law. They argue that a competence-based and differentiated model informs the EU’s engagement with Central Asia by building on shared values through those fields in which cooperation is both legally possible and mutually accepted, while simultaneously leaving room for distinct national institutions and paths of development.
The Evolving EU-Central Asia Partnership
Bermet Tursunkulova outlines how EU-Central Asia relations operate through a combination of regional and bilateral frameworks. If the regional dimension provides mechanisms for addressing common and crossborder priorities, bilateral agreements and institutional mechanisms allow the EU to adapt its cooperation to the specific priorities and situation of individual Central Asian countries.
