Central Asian Countries Suffer Massive Brain Drain, Putting Their Futures at Risk

Paul Goble

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Since gaining independence in 1991, the five Central Asian countries—Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan—have suffered a new brain drain problem. A large share of their best scholars and advanced students are moving not to Russian centers, as had been the case in Soviet times, but to universities and research centers in the West and the countries of the Pacific Rim (Commonwealth of Independent States, March 7, 2023; Bugin.info, April 16). This new flow has been eclipsed in numbers and attention by the movement of the vastly larger numbers of worker migrants from Central Asia to Russia and other countries, on whose remittances home the Central Asian countries currently rely (Checkpoint, June 30, 2022; Bugin.info, April 15). The impact of the outflow of students, scientists, and other scholars, however, is increasingly worrying the region’s governments. These countries are already suffering losses because of the departure of students, scientists, and other scholars, and fear that without such people, their countries’ development will be hobbled. Such fears have only been intensified by World Bank reports and by Russian commentaries suggesting that this brain drain is a Western plot to wean the Central Asian countries away from Moscow (The World Bank, October 31, 2024; RITM Eurasia, April 4; Bugin.info, April 14).

All five countries are committed to addressing this problem. All invest far less in education and research, however, than the average of the world’s countries, most by more than an order of magnitude. Money shortages have limited their ability to hold, let alone attract back, researchers, as Kazakh scholar Gulnash Askhat and others point out (The Diplomat, August 14, 2024; Zakon.kz, April 14). Now, some in Moscow are seeking to take advantage of this situation by calling for the formation of a joint Russian-Central Asian foundation to support this effort, promising both money and restrictions on the length of time Central Asians can spend in Russia (Bugin.info, April 16). Whether Moscow can create such a structure is very much an open question given its past actions and increasingly xenophobic attitudes toward Central Asians (see EDM, May 9, October 22, November 21, 2024). Still, this new proposal by itself will exacerbate geopolitical competition in the region.