Kazakhstan will convene the Astana International Forum (AIF) later this month, on May 29–30, emphasizing its profile as an active mediator in the evolving architecture of global diplomacy. The AIF began in 2008 as the Astana Economic Forum, originally conceived as a technocratic venue focused on macroeconomic development, fiscal strategy, and public-sector reform. In its early iterations, it drew regional economists, central bankers, and international development agencies together to discuss Kazakhstan’s integration into global financial institutions.
While modest in its geopolitical profile, the Forum reflected Astana’s broader ambitions to participate in the global rules-based order without overt alignment. In 2023, the AIF was reconstituted with its new, broader mandate in response to international demands for such forums, given the evident erosion of consensus in multilateral governance structures.
President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev has invoked Kazakhstan’s unique geopolitical position to advocate for the AIF as a new platform of balanced engagement, to serve as a “bridge between East and West,” reflecting Astana’s accumulated experience in dialogue facilitation and its ambition to ameliorate the deepening fragmentation of the international system.
The rebranding of the Forum was more than cosmetic. It marked a deliberate effort by Kazakhstan to reach out beyond its customary Eurasian frame of reference. The Forum aspires to be a diplomatic innovation, seeking to complement existing institutions like the UN or OSCE without replacing them: a more flexible platform that would be more responsive to emergent global dynamics.
This aspiration is of a piece with Kazakhstan’s growing participation in multilateral forums, serving different geopolitical functions, such as the Conference on Interaction and Confidence Building Measures in Asia (CICA) and its engagements within the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) and Organization of Turkic States (OTS). The AIF is envisioned as a complementary structure that transcends bloc affiliations, facilitating fluid dialogue among ideologically diverse actors.
The 2024 edition of the Forum was intended to be larger-scale than the 2023 version, but it was abruptly canceled after catastrophic flooding struck several regions, an event President Tokayev described as the most devastating natural disaster in the country in eight decades. The state redirected its attention and resources toward recovery, and the Forum was deferred. The 2025 iteration, now reactivated, has adopted the banner message, “Connecting Minds, Shaping the Future.”
This reflects an underlying logic in Kazakhstan’s foreign policy that privileges “multi-vectorialism” as a structure for autonomy. Within that structure, the AIF is seeking to create space for engagement among actors that often find themselves excluded from the inner circles of traditional diplomacy: the so-called “Global South,” mid-sized Western powers, and immediate regional stakeholders.
The agenda of the 2025 AIF consolidates four previous thematic streams into three: Foreign Policy and International Security, Energy and Climate Change, and Economy and Finance. This thematic restructuring signals an intention to deepen the Forum’s analytical focus while retaining general breadth across domains characterizing Kazakhstan’s long-term strategic interests.
These interests are conditioned by the continuing development of Kazakhstan’s economy. Domestic economic growth is projected to reach 4.5 to 5.0% in 2025, driven by sectoral diversification efforts and continued investment in transport and energy. The country’s international commercial profile also continued to evolve in 2024, with total trade volume increasing by 9.1% and the foreign trade balance improving accordingly.
China has emerged as Kazakhstan’s principal economic partner and largest source of foreign direct investment, with bilateral trade figures exceeding all past levels. Such economic shifts will underpin discussions at the AIF on supply-chain resilience, the reconfiguration of regional trade blocs, and the strategic implications of growing asymmetries in economic dependence.
As trade dynamics are inseparable from logistics, Kazakhstan’s participation in the Trans-Caspian International Transport Route (TITR, Middle Corridor) has intensified. This participation now encompasses soft infrastructure, such as digitalization of customs protocols and cross-border regulatory streamlining, as well as the hard infrastructure of rail upgrades, port expansions, and logistics hubs. These efforts aim to decrease transit times between China and Europe by bypassing Russia and to reduce systemic exposure to external geopolitical shocks.
Infrastructure investments have targeted throughput expansion and customs harmonization. Astana is increasingly positioned as a geoeconomic hinge, as Beijing emphasizes overland connectivity through Central Asia. The AIF’s Energy and Finance tracks are expected to emphasize this development, offering bilateral and multilateral actors opportunities to explore infrastructure finance, digital corridors, and alternative Eurasian integration in formats unconstrained by either Russian-led or Western-led institutions.
The Astana International Forum 2025 thus emerges as a controlled experiment in state-curated soft power projection. It will not be dominated by fixed alliances or crisis-response mandates. Rather, it offers Kazakhstan a sovereign venue to test ideas, build coalitions, and advance a policy profile that is neither reactive nor peripheral. The AIF integrates issue-areas of economic diversification, energy transformation, and regional diplomacy all into a single platform.
Astana is seeking to formulate a new grammar of regional agency. Whether the AIF becomes a durable institution or remains a performative gesture will depend not only on Kazakhstan’s voice but on whether the international system evolves in such a manner as to provide the space for it to echo.
If successful, the AIF may serve as a prototype for small and mid-sized powers seeking to assert constructive agency in global governance. Its effectiveness will ultimately hinge on whether institutional memory is built and whether its dialogues translate into policy traction across diplomatic cycles.
