Foreign and Security Policy Diversification in Eurasia: Issue Splitting, Co-alignment, and Relational Power

The foreign policies of the Central Asian republics are widely qualified as “multivector.” Yet this concept remains vague in terms of both its underlying causal mechanism and the goals this policy can serve. Departing from received wisdom, this article recasts the notion both conceptually, in terms of co-alignment, and theoretically, by integrating it into a neoclassical realist framework that emphasizes how the geopolitical characteristics of the Eurasian region interact with the nature of the domestic political regimes to explain multivector foreign policy as a form of statecraft beyond the popular catchphrase.