South Korea is set to welcome the heads of the five Central Asian states for the first-ever presidential summit between Seoul and the region, a meeting local media have dubbed “historic”. Wednesday’s summit, preceded by bilateral meetings between South Korean President Lee Jae Myung and leaders of Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan, Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan, aims to deepen economic engagement between Central Asia and the host, and put them on a more permanent footing. The summit will raise a dialogue that has existed since 2007 to the level of heads of state.
But the real test is whether it produces a workable agenda in critical minerals, energy, digital technologies and transport,” Sanat Kushkumbayev, from the Kazakhstan Institute for Strategic Studies, told Al Jazeera. I would expect a framework for regular high-level cooperation, followed by more detailed bilateral deals.” Central Asian states, which are increasingly positioning themselves as a bloc known as C5+, are looking for investments, access to technology and to diversify their international partnerships beyond Moscow and Beijing, analysts said, while South Korea needs to diversify its economic and supply-chain dependencies. Central Asia can offer South Korea critical minerals, energy, alternative production opportunities and greater supply chain diversification.
Korea, in return, can provide technology, capital and industrial expertise,” said Sabina Insebayeva, a political scientist at Nazarbayev University. She explained that the K-Silk Road initiative, South Korea’s strategy for Central Asia launched in 2024, aims to go beyond securing raw materials to develop processing, manufacturing and technology capacity in partnership with local companies. Central Asia no longer wants to position itself as an exporter of raw materials.
Instead, it is seeking the skills and technology needed for domestic industrial hubs. South Korea can act as a long-term partner to achieve this goal, particularly in Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan. The difficult part will be moving from assembly and memorandums to genuine localisation and commercial production,” Kushkumbayev explained.
By the end of 2025, the lump-sum volume of South Korea’s direct investment in Central Asia reached about $6.4bn. But its appeal in Central Asia goes beyond its potential as an investor and technology provider, as a social connection has long been in place. In 1937, at the order of Joseph Stalin, more than 170,000 Soviet Koreans were forcibly relocated from the USSR’s Far East to Soviet Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan, under the pretext of preventing Japanese sabotage.
That winter they lived with local Kazakh people who supported them and deportees from other countries,” said Roman Zakharov, a half-Korean artist from Kazakhstan. His grandparents waited for a year to receive housing from the authorities, but as deportees, they had no permission to leave the collective farms they worked on until Stalin’s death. The deportees and their descendants, collectively called Koryo-saram, have sought to stay connected to their roots, but this has not been easy.
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