On October 29–30, 2026, Ankara hosted the 13th summit of the Organization of Turkic States. What began following the disintegration of the Soviet Union—and crystalized in 2009 via the Nakhchivan Agreement—has transformed into an institutionalized platform. Comprising five member states and three observer states, the Organization of Turkic States presents itself as a standard multilateral group founded on a common language family, inviting comparisons to the Arab League, the Commonwealth of Nations, or the Organisation Internationale de la Francophonie. Yet behind the diplomatic veneer lies an ideological project with destabilizing ramifications.
Fabricating a shared ancestral identity across vastly different modern nation-states is a contemporary political project rather than a spontaneous cultural awakening.
Unlike its international counterparts, the Organization of Turkic States operates under an ideological paradigm. The summit’s photo ops and official documents reveal a paradox at its core: While claiming to unite a single ethno-linguistic family, the conference floor required nearly five simultaneous language translation channels for its participants. The delegates’ reliance on translation underscored a reality—each state speaks a distinct national language often incomprehensible to the others. Just as modern nationalism was forged in 19th-century Europe, fabricating a shared ancestral identity across vastly different modern nation-states is a contemporary political project rather than a spontaneous cultural awakening.
The Ankara summit’s core slogan—“Unity in language, thought and work”—reveals this agenda. These words explicitly resurrect the slogan of Ismail Gasprinsky, one of the ideological fathers of Pan-Turkism.
Linguistic nationalism was the central pillar of Türkiye’s emergence as a modern nation-state after the collapse of the Ottoman Empire. This state-led engineering project relied on radical measures. The Romanization of the Turkish alphabet effectively severed the nation from its centuries-old literary heritage recorded in Arabic and Persian scripts, a transition deeply linked to top-down modernizing reforms. By enforcing a strict monolingual model, Turkey systematically suppressed non-Turkish speakers, most notably the Kurdish population, which constitutes over 20 percent of the country.
This legacy of linguistic erasure is now being replicated across Central Asian states and the Caucasus. Amidst the backdrop of the Ankara summit, Uzbek authorities targeted local content creators—such as popular Persian-speaking figures—forcing them to cease broadcasting in Persian. Tashkent’s adoption of Turkish-style linguistic homogenization directly targets a long-standing demographic reality. Like much of Central Asia and the Caucasus, modern state borders are the artificial creation of the Soviet colonial empire, which partitioned the region into incongruous territorial units reminiscent of the British-French Sykes-Picot arrangement—a coercive process of national-territorial demarcation that forcibly reshaped local ethnic geography.
These Soviet-designed borders imposed monopolistic state identities over populations with centuries of intertwined history. The historic cities of Samarkand and Bukhara served for centuries as thriving Persian cultural hubs and leading centers of classical Islamic knowledge. Yet under colonial demarcation, these centers were folded into the newly minted entity, Uzbekistan. Historical Soviet census data confirm that Samarkand and Bukhara were predominantly inhabited by Tajiks—the region’s native Persian-speaking population. Modern Uzbek statistics presented by state committees, however, deliberately downplay the Tajik community to a mere 4 to 6 percent of the total population, while prominent Persian-speaking cultural figures have been jailed on manufactured charges of “promoting separatism” simply for speaking their native language.
The Organization of Turkic States acts as an institutional vehicle for this revived linguistic nationalism, threatening to erase the region’s rich heritage. In the 20th century, Turkish modernists sought to construct an identity tailored for Western European acceptance, viewing the rejection of their Islamic past as a prerequisite for entering that club. When Turkey’s bid for European Union membership stalled, Ankara executed a strategic pivot back to its “Eastern” roots. Contemporary Turkish leadership actively embraces a neo-Ottoman, Islamic-Turkic identity. However, this agenda has identified a familiar cultural rival targeted for purification: the Persianate world. The Organization of Turkic States serves as the instrument to impose a standardized Turkic identity across Central Asia and the Caucasus, complementing Ankara’s Sunni-centric maneuvers in regional politics.
The Organization of Turkic States serves as the instrument to impose a standardized Turkic identity across Central Asia and the Caucasus.
If international organizations rooted in shared heritage aimed primarily to advance regional stability, their existence would be unproblematic. Yet the Organization of Turkic States consistently fails this crucial test when geopolitics intervenes. The Turkic communities of Afghanistan—comprising Uzbeks and Turkmen—are one of the largest ethnic groups in the country. Since the Taliban’s return to power, these communities have suffered under brutal policies, including systemic human rights violations, the banning of the Uzbek language, and forced population displacements across northern Afghanistan. Yet, in Ankara, the summit prioritized discussions on commercial “railway connectivity” over the plight of persecuted Turkic populations under Taliban oppression. When Turkic solidarity collides with strategic transit routes, profit wins—a reality familiar to anyone bargaining in Istanbul’s Grand Bazaar.
The failed nationalist experiments of the past century—built on exclusion, forced assimilation, and top-down engineering—must not be reincarnated under the guise of lofty pan-Turkic slogans or countered by simplistic sectarian constructs like the Shiite Crescent. Central Asia and the Caucasus should embrace a departure from these coercive identity models and rediscover their historic, cosmopolitan, and collaborative DNA. Nowruz—the ancient vernal equinox celebration shared across Persian, Turkic, Caucasian, and Kurdish cultures—stands as an enduring testament to the region’s shared, non-exclusive heritage. To secure genuine stability, the region must abandon narrow state-enforced identity projects and demand an inclusive Nowruzistan framework that respects its true multi-ethnic and multilingual reality.
