Forging New Alliances: Sri Lanka’s Diplomatic Push into Central Asia

On August 21, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Sri Lanka, together with The Geopolitical Cartographer, a Colombo-based think-tank specializing in the Indian Ocean, organized a forum on Central Asia. The event took place in two sessions, one in the morning focusing on transport and logistics in Central Asia and another in the evening centering on economic ties. Both were overseen by the Foreign Ministry’s Central Asia and South-East Asia Affairs Division and attended by academics, diplomats, and ministry officials.

The forum, which was also attended by Minister of Foreign Affairs Ali Sabry, took place against the backdrop of a series of consultations that the ministry organized with governments of Central Asian countries in 2023 and 2024. The latest of these, with Turkmenistan, happened in May of this year. A month before that, the Foreign Ministry held consultations in Astana, Kazakhstan, where both sides agreed to set up embassies in each other’s country. Sri Lanka is presently accredited to the Central Asian region through diplomatic missions in India, Pakistan, and Russia.

Sri Lanka’s Motives in Central Asia

Colombo has been eyeing Central Asia for quite some time. Between 2011 and 2021, it sent delegations to Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan. While these engagements went some way in bolstering diplomatic relations and provided a basis for further engagements, they do not seem to have been followed up with additional efforts. 

In one sense, the latest round of consultations can be described as a second phase in Sri Lanka’s relations with the region, at a time when both Sri Lanka and Central Asia are recalibrating their foreign policies. The war in Ukraine and tensions in the Middle East and Eurasia have forced the five Central Asian states – Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan – into a delicate balancing act. While not outright endorsing Russia’s actions in Ukraine, they have been careful not to anger Moscow. Once part of the Soviet Union – which held the world’s sixth largest Muslim population – they have since evolved their foreign policy, which scholars typically refer to as “multi-vector” – essentially, a strategy of extending outward to as many regions and countries as possible without overtly taking sides.

At first glance, this appears to be Sri Lanka’s strategy too. Since the crisis in 2022, which saw a sitting president being unseated by angry protesters over queues for and shortages of basic necessities, the government has been trying to chart a new course in its foreign relations. Given the scale of the crisis – the worst in Sri Lanka’s post-independence history – it has been compelled to prioritize some countries and deprioritize others while balancing them with one another. 

India remains at the top of the list, while China – which, since 2007, has lent extensively to Sri Lanka, even if one disregards the lurid sensationalism of the popular debt trap narratives – has taken a backseat. Sri Lanka’s engagements with the United States and its allies, over areas like humanitarian aid and even infrastructure development, have grown as well.

There are obvious differences between Central Asia and Sri Lanka. Central Asia is a heavily landlocked region, while Sri Lanka is a small island-state. Yet there is some congruence in the security pressures governing the foreign policy of these countries: Central Asia from Russia, Sri Lanka from India. 

Following the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991, the Central Asian region underwent a period of economic restructuring. This had mixed results, with some countries recording growth and others plunging into recession.

After the September 11 attacks, Central Asia revived its ties with Russia, and in turn with the United States, which at the time was close to Moscow and Vladimir Putin. Since 2010, however, the region has been expanding relations with China. The latter’s dramatic ascent since 2005 has convinced the region of the benefits of closer integration with Beijing, vis-à-vis transport networks such as the Trans-Caspian Route. That has consolidated bilateral trade, which has grown from $25.9 billion in 2009 to almost $90 billion in 2023.

Central Asia has also become a strategic consideration for Western powers. After the invasion of Afghanistan, which borders Central Asia, in 2001, Washington built military bases and expanded security cooperation with these countries. However, the region experienced a fallout from the Bush administration’s interventions in the Middle East. That soured relations between Central Asia and the U.S. 

In the United States, the Biden administration has been trying to forge closer ties with the region, which has become important following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. According to one analyst, the Biden administration is now using Russia’s aggression in Ukraine as an opening to restore those relations. It remains to be seen whether such tactics will work. 

The European Union as well as individual European governments are also rapidly stepping up their exchanges with Central Asia, with an eye toward the region’s position regarding the Russia-Ukraine war.

In all this, Central Asia has been prioritizing its autonomy. Thus, while maintaining ties with Russia, it is also reaching out to China through platforms such as the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO), which held its most recent summit in July. At the same time, while voting in favor of Palestine at the United Nations, the region, Kazakhstan in particular, has been maintaining ties with Israel. 

In the early 2000s, the U.S. invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq and the resulting fallout pushed Central Asia into other regions. These included South Asia. Initially covering Afghanistan, Pakistan, and India, Central Asia is set to expanded its diplomatic presence to Dhaka, with Uzbekistan announcing plans to open an embassy there.

India has responded positively to these developments. In 2012, the Manmohan Singh administration held the first India-Central Asia Dialogue in Bishkek. Under Narendra Modi, such interactions have widened. Pertinently, platforms like the SCO have provided opportunities for India as well as China, to say nothing of countries like Turkey, to consolidate ties with the region.

Overall, a recent study showed that Central Asia has increased its interactions with other countries from 60 in 2015 to 158 in 2023. Such strategies are typical of states engaged in balancing acts, including Sri Lanka.

The Gambit: Opportunities and Challenges

Given the many parallels in the foreign policies of Central Asia and South Asia, in particular India, does Sri Lanka’s Central Asia gambit make sense? 

Without overlooking the obvious differences – in size and potential – between them, it must be noted that Central Asia and Sri Lanka have both been guided by two imperatives: a balancing act on the one hand and a more long-term “extending outward” strategy on the other. For Sri Lanka, the balancing act has played out between India, China, and the United States. For Central Asia, it appears to be playing out between China and Russia, even if the latter two are too intertwined to let ties with one region, even of mutual strategic importance, overdetermine other aspects of their relationship.

Sri Lanka and Central Asia thus seem to be placed in a positive conjuncture, a crossroads in their histories, that has made a strategic alliance both feasible and plausible. While the 2011-2021 round of consultations took place against the backdrop of the end of the 30-year war and the need to boost foreign investment, Colombo did not feel an urge to reach out to other regions; it was able to secure largess from Beijing to finance its huge infrastructure projects. It also issued large volumes of international sovereign bonds (ISBs). Now, with both China-funded projects and ISBs coming to a standstill, Sri Lanka is trying to resume from where it left off.

But are strategic alliances enough to sustain bilateral ties in the longer term? At the August conclave, Director-General of the Central Asia and Southeast Asia Affairs Division of the Sri Lankan Foreign Ministry Sashikala Premawardhane highlighted several sticking points in the country’s ties with Central Asia. Top among them was trade.

Today, in terms of bilateral trade, Sri Lanka enjoys modest relations with the region. Between 2011 and 2020, exports to all of Central Asia exceeded $20 million in just two years (2012 and 2014) and broke $10 million with a single country just once: in 2014, with Uzbekistan.

On the other hand, in 2015, Sri Lanka imported $21 million worth of goods from Uzbekistan alone.

This underlines a basic feature of the island’s economy: Even after 75 years of independence, Sri Lanka imports a large amount of manufactured goods but has only been able to export commodities such as tea, paper products, and coconut oil. As Shiran Illanperuma, an economic analyst, pointed out, Central Asia’s bilateral relations have been strongest with countries like China, Russia, and India, which have industrialized or are industrializing at a rapid pace. Sri Lanka, on the other hand, “is still using traditional avenues like tea.”

And for both exports and imports, the total value has dropped markedly since 2015-2016.

It is also unclear what Central Asia can bring to Sri Lanka. Ravinatha Aryasinha, executive director of the Lakshman Kadirgamar Institute, noted at the forum that Sri Lanka should have reached out more to the region after the end of the 30-year war in 2009. Aryasinha served as Sri Lanka’s foreign secretary back then, when the country was controversially engaged in a diplomatic battle at the U.N. Human Rights Council over allegations of human rights abuses and war crimes in the last stages of the conflict.

On the other hand, P. K. Balachandran, an Indian foreign policy analyst based in Colombo, contends that Sri Lanka needs to stabilize its relations with neighboring South Asian countries, particularly India, before it can think of Central Asia. 

Rathindra Kuruwita, a Sri Lankan foreign policy commentator and a regular contributor to The Diplomat, largely agrees. “India is engaging more constructively with the [Central Asia] region. Whether Sri Lanka can match Delhi’s clout and influence is a big question and at best highly debatable.”

That raises the question of what avenues the island can try in bolstering relations with the region. Bilateral trade and diplomatic relations are obviously paramount, but these will need to be supplemented by other strategies. Cultural cooperation is one possible method – Sri Lanka and Central Asia enjoy historical and cultural ties going back to the third century BC – but all too often, as pointed out at the August 21 conclave, such ties tend to be parroted out like a mantra. These now need to be updated.

One potential way would be sport. For instance, Central Asia and Sri Lanka share a platform for volleyball, Sri Lanka’s national sport. In February 2022, before protests erupted, the country hosted the Central Asian Volleyball Association. While cultural engagement is hardly a substitute for economic ties, volleyball and other non-elite sports like elle, Sri Lanka’s equivalent of baseball, garner a lot of interest and galvanize the youth. They have proved less expensive, at a grassroots level, than cricket, the nation’s most popular sport. According to Pasindu Nimsara Thennakoon, a school volleyball player from Ratnapura (a village in the country’s Sabaragamuwa Province) now studying for his A Levels, these sports provide easy, cost-effective ways of reaching out to other regions.

Then there is the issue of how Sri Lanka can get closer to the region. The most obvious way would be through Central Asia’s outreach in South Asia in general and India in particular. Multilateral platforms like the SCO represent another way. Yet the SCO is dominated by a troika – China, Russia, India – while Sri Lanka’s ties with India, which entered a new phase after the 2022 crisis, has been rife with many controversies. 

Central Asia is pondering energy connectivity with New Delhi. But given the blowback against such forms of cooperation, as the lawsuit against Adani Group’s wind power plant project in the country shows, the Sri Lankan government may not be too keen on pursuing this line.

The Future: A Question Mark

Direct connectivity seems to be the preferred option. As a result of last year’s consultations, for instance, Air Astana began direct charter flights to Colombo. This came about seven months after Turkey launched direct flights as well. Such developments suggest that the Sri Lankan government and the Foreign Ministry are sincere and keen on extending outward while prioritizing relations with major powers.

Yet is sincerity alone enough in ensuring that these efforts are carried forward?

As always, the verdict is still pending. There is no denying that Sri Lanka faced major issues and sticking points in its foreign policy between 2020 and 2022. That is not to say there were no problems before, but it was during this period that these issues were thrown into sharp relief. More than anything, there was a sense of policy incoherence, an inability to define the country’s foreign policy and a breathtaking ability to anger multiple partners at the same time. Coming out of a crisis, Sri Lanka has only begun to admit to these failures. Central Asia clearly has become a crucial part of the damage-control.

It should be noted, however, that such efforts predate the crisis as well. In 2020, the Sri Lankan government drew up a paper on Africa. Ravinatha Aryasinha, who served as foreign secretary then, observed that this was part of a strategy to diversify Sri Lanka’s external relations. However, Aryasinha was replaced soon afterwards, and moved to a post as ambassador in  Washington D.C., from where he retired in 2021. The government did hold consultations with Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan that year. But these were never fully followed up.

Certainly, whether or not these strategies bear fruit, the 2022 crisis has spurred Sri Lanka to keep its options as open as possible. As it reaches out to new regions and new countries, it will have to prioritize economic recovery. As Sashikala Premawardhane observed at the Central Asia Forum, moreover, the private sector will need to play a major role. She added that a Sri Lankan conglomerate is already operating in the region.

Sri Lanka’s Central Asia gambit may or may not work. Without parading it as a turnaround in the country’s foreign policy, it must be said that it provides a broader insight into what vulnerable states, particularly those seeping in debt, can do to navigate themselves amid a sea of geopolitical complexities. It is clear that Sri Lanka will need to be innovative and responsive. The question, however, is whether the country can continue these engagements, or whether they will peter out – as they have, all too often, in the past.