Beyond Europe: Exploring the European Union’s engagement with Central Asia after 2022

This thesis examines the European Union's growing engagement with Central Asia, with particular attention to developments following the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine. The war has acted as a catalyst, prompting the EU to reassess its foreign policy towards the region. The intensification of diplomatic engagement has produced multiple high-level multilateral meetings and culminated in the inaugural 2025 EU-Central Asia Summit in Samarkand, Uzbekistan. The thesis situates itself within European foreign policy studies, specifically within the recent literature on the EU as a geopolitical actor, and adopts a qualitative research design that uses Bretherton and Vogler's (2006) EU actorness framework as its analytical lens. The framework's three dimensions, namely opportunity, presence and capability, structure three hypotheses concerning the post-2022 shift in EU engagement with Central Asia. The thesis analyzes EU primary documents, joint communiqués, official speeches, and Eurostat trade data, and identifies and explains change and continuity in EU policy priorities, in the EU's framing of Central Asia, and in the instruments the European Union deploys in the region. Pre-2022 policy instruments are examined as a baseline against which post-2022 developments are assessed. The thesis concludes that the post-2022 shift represents a geopolitically induced strategic recalibration, more substantial than the continuity literature allows, but more fragile and unevenly distributed than the change literature fully acknowledges. The findings show that Central Asia has shifted from a peripheral development partner to a strategically relevant region within the EU's external action, although the durability of this shift remains conditioned on factors largely outside the EU's control.