ABSTRACT
Bartosz Bojarczyk claims that the initial strategy of Iran towards Central Asia was divided into three stages. First, Iranians attempted to export “revolutionary ideas” to promote post-Soviet Islamization of the region. Later, similar to Turkey, Iran tried to emphasize the role of historical and civilizational connections with Central Asians. In 1996, the President Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani “hoped for Gulf investment in Iran and suggested that Iran could become the biggest market for Saudi industrial products as well as a bridge for Saudi goods to Central Asia”. Under the presidency of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Iran was the main investor in Tajikistan in 2010 and the second biggest after China in 2011. Iranian Foreign Direct Investment in the Central Asian state amounted $65.5 million in 2010. On 24 December 2016, President Hassan Rouhani declared that “establishing close ties with neighbours, especially Central Asia and the Caucasus, is among the Islamic Republic’s basic foreign policy principles”.
