Not Just a Game: Discussing Geopolitics in Central Asia

Central Asia’s geopolitical centrality is a tired trope, cast in the guise of a playing field for the Great Game or a transit corridor, the Silk Road of old born again. Alexander Morrison last month took these formulations to task for EurasiaNet, writing that while cliches “can sometimes serve a useful purpose,” such references to Central Asia “are much less innocent.” Rather than simplify the region’s dynamics to make them accessible, he argues, the so-called Great Game and the Silk Road “deeply distort the past.”

Both cliches, Morrison noted, are concepts that reduce Central Asia to little more than “a backdrop to a grand geopolitical narrative.” In modern usage, they “tend to ignore the agency and interests of ordinary people, in favor of those of great powers.”

A historian, Morrison approaches the issue with a long view and the attention to local details as befits his profession. As well-reasoned as his argument is (and I made a similar plea to stop using the phrase “Great Game” in 2016), relations between states like China and Russia in the area in-between – Central Asia – as well as if, how, and why the United States should or should not care about the region, remain of serious interest to analysts looking at the machinations of “great” powers rather than the day-to-day interests of ordinary people.

This isn’t to dismiss Morrison’s argument; his judgement on this matter is sound. Neither the Great Game nor the Silk Road are precisely what that pair of two-word phrases conjure in the mind. Neither take the board – Central Asia itself – into serious consideration.

The term “Great Game” was first used by Arthur Conolly, an intelligence agent and a captain for the British East India Company, in an 1840 letter to Major Henry Rawlinson, the recently appointed British agent in Kandahar.

“You've a great game, a noble game, before you,” Conolly wrote, referring to British relations with Russia, Persia, the Afghans, the Amir in Bukhara and other Central Asian powers of the era. Conolly was executed in 1842 in Bukhara, where he’d been dispatched to try and secure the release of another British officer, Charles Stoddart. Stoddart had been sent to get the Amir to sign a friendship treaty. Needless to say, he didn’t sign on and both men lost their heads.

“Everything about the term ‘Great Game’ as it is used to describe inter-state relations in Central Asia is wrong – it was wrong in the 19th century, and it is wrong now,” Morrison wrote. “It suggests a set of mutually-understood rules, clear strategic and economic goals, and a mixture of adventurousness and rational calculation in pursuit of these goals.”

While the British may have viewed Russian advances into Central Asia as encroachment on their Indian possessions, the Russians conceived of their expansion as a securing of their own frontier. At the same time, the rulers in Central Asia – such as the Amir of Bukhara and the Khan of Khiva – while far from their ancestors whose empires stretched from Persia and India, were quite far from passive actors in this game. Conolly discovered this the hard way.

As a historical term, “Great Game” lacks nuance and as a modern geopolitical conception, these simplistic roots render it insufficient.

This touches on an old battle for Central Asianists, perhaps most widely disbursed via Alexander Cooley’s 2012 book, Great Games, Local Rules: The New Great Power Contest in Central Asia, which gave the governments of the region their due in settling the “local rules” of the modern game.

But if, as Walter Russell Mead argued in a 2014 article for Foreign Affairs, geopolitics have returned in a big way, it has been on the backs of revisionist powers like Russia, China, and Iran, which, he argued, never really bought into the post-Cold War order. Central Asia’s independence is a part of that post-Cold War order while the states themselves operate very much with systems rooted in the past.

As two of the “resurgent” powers Mead referenced – Russia and China – rub up against each other most clearly in the realm of Central Asia, there will be no shortage of roads or games, real and symbolic. Small – economically and politically – relative to Russia and China, it’s no surprise outside analysts looking at the machinations of major states neglect the influence Central Asian countries wield in directing the process.

For Russia and China, Central Asia is a theater in which each can act out its own grand designs. At the same time, regional states are not passive extras in the play. Both Russia’s Eurasian Economic Belt and China’s Belt and Road initiative are primarily designed to benefit Moscow and Beijing, respectively; Central Asian states have found ways to derive benefits as well, and if not, to indelibly stall progress on projects that aren’t necessarily useful to their domestic needs.

Central Asianists are devoted to a neglected region. Sitting on the outskirts of understanding for the international affairs generalists who write nonfiction bestsellers and ramble on cable television about the modern workings of great powers, Central Asia hardly ever escapes the realm of cliche in global understanding. Unfortunately, renewed focus on Russia and China (and their potential for cooperation or conflict) means that “Great Game” and “Silk Road” references will proliferate.