Leadership Transition and Foreign Policy: Uzbekistan under the Governments of Islam Karimov and Shavkat Mirziyoyev (1991-2023)

Abstract

This article seeks to analyze Uzbek foreign policy under the administrations of Islam Karimov and Shavkat Mirziyoyev. The study, analyzed under the comparative method of foreign policy, is justified by the scarcity of works in Portuguese on the subject and, secondly, by the certainty that Uzbekistan plays a prominent role in discussions relevant to International Relations in the Asian continent and Central Asia. It questions whether the quest for legitimization of Uzbek sovereignty and projecting its influence in an initially unfavorable scenario reveals that the country’s foreign policy was pragmatic, especially in the first half of the 2000s, by taking advantage of negotiation opportunities offered by the International System, rather than being merely erratic. Furthermore, it intends to test the hypothesis that the power vacuum left by the Soviet Union (USSR), amidst regional violence and the fear of national disintegration, were fundamental factors for Uzbekistan's behavior in both internal and external environments. In this sense, both the structural macro-processes and the conjunctural events at regional and international levels justify the discontinuous, unstable, and volatile movements and the antagonistic positions of Uzbek foreign policy. The investigation also argues that the active foreign action of the country under Mirziyoyev was actually the realization of a previous intention, formulated by Karimov but limited by the occurrences of his time.