One of the most overlooked barriers to regional development is not always geography, infrastructure, or even politics. Sometimes, it is the mental map through which a region understands itself.
This is especially visible in the case of Central Asia.
Today, Central Asia is usually defined in a narrow and formal sense: the five post-Soviet republics. This definition is administratively convenient and politically familiar. But it is also historically reduced and functionally incomplete.
If we look at older spatial logics of Eurasia, including historical maps of the broader Iranian, Central Asian, and Indus-connected world, we see a very different picture. We see not an isolated inland block, but a connected civilizational and commercial space stretching across inner Eurasia, linked to the Indus basin, Afghanistan, Iran, and major trade corridors.
Recently, I came across a fascinating map of the region from the period of the Sasanian Empire. What makes it interesting is not only its historical value, but the way it visually reveals a deeper regional logic. If we conceptually add Kazakhstan to this picture, we begin to see something important: a region that appears far more complete, internally connected, and functionally meaningful than the narrow modern definition usually allows.
The "Tübinger Atlas des Vorderen Orients" (TAVO) of the university of Tübinder (1993)This matters because regions do not develop only through borders. They also develop through the way they imagine themselves.
When Central Asia imagines itself only as a closed group of inland states, it narrows its own strategic horizon. It begins to see itself as landlocked, limited, and structurally incomplete. In that form, the region appears dependent on outside corridors rather than capable of becoming a complete functional system.
But if we rethink Central Asia not as a fixed post-Soviet category, but as a broader functional subsystem, the picture changes.
In such a perspective, Pakistan, Iran, Azerbaijan, and Afghanistan can be seen not as external add-ons, but as structurally relevant part. They appear as necessary components of a more complete regional structure:
- Pakistan provides access to the sea and reconnects the region to the Indus space and the Arabian Sea.
- Iran provides west-south connectivity, civilizational continuity, and access to major transit and maritime routes.
- Afghanistan serves as a historic connective corridor between Central Asia, the Iranian world, and the Indus basin, restoring the region’s inner strategic depth and overland continuity.
- Azerbaijan strengthens the western vector of the regional system by linking it more directly to the Caucasus, the Caspian corridor, and wider westward transit routes.
In this form, the traditional Central Asian core remains indispensable, but it no longer appears as an isolated inland block. It becomes the central core of a larger functional region.
This is not about erasing existing political definitions. It is about recognizing that formal regional labels can limit strategic imagination. And when imagination is limited, development may become limited as well.
A region that sees itself too narrowly may unintentionally deny itself:
- access to larger markets,
- a fuller transport logic,
- a stronger demographic base,
- a more coherent historical identity,
- and a more complete development model.
In this sense, the issue is not only how the world divides regions on paper. The deeper issue is how those divisions shape perception and how perception, in turn, shapes economic, political, and civilizational possibilities.
Perhaps Central Asia’s next stage of development begins with a different question:
What if the region is not too small in reality, but only in the way it has been taught to imagine itself?
This is part of a broader reflection I am developing on how we understand the structure of the world: not simply as a collection of states, but as a system of functional subsystems whose real boundaries are defined by connectivity, exchange, and shared developmental logic.