Silk Way Star and the Power of Creative Geopolitics

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Kazakhstan’s Jibek Joly channel has wrapped up its Silk Way Star music contest, where 12 singers from 12 countries competed over 12 rounds, and the winner has now been announced. Beyond its cultural and entertainment dimensions, Silk Way Star has emerged as one of the most intriguing cultural experiments in Eurasia, blending artistic performance with the deeper strategic currents of regional politics. What appears at first glance to be a music competition is, in fact, a sophisticated platform that connects nations, audiences, and identities across a historically fragmented space. As representatives from Central Asia, the South Caucasus, East Asia, and other neighbouring regions navigate shifting geopolitical landscapes, cultural initiatives increasingly shape how societies perceive one another. Silk Way Star demonstrates how creative industries can project soft power, attract international attention, and cultivate a shared sense of belonging that politics alone cannot achieve. With the winner now announced, the project offers a valuable lens to observe how culture travels, how narratives are constructed, and how regional imaginaries take shape through art rather than diplomacy. Is Silk Way Star quietly forging a new Eurasian cultural identity and reshaping regional geopolitics through soft power?

Silk Way Star: What is it, and why does it matter?

The Silk Way Star competition started this year as a high-profile musical project hosted in Astana, Kazakhstan, that brought together artists from 12 countries across Eurasia: Azerbaijan, Georgia, Armenia, Kazakhstan, China, Kyrgyzstan, Malaysia, Mongolia, South Korea, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan.

The contest was launched through a joint agreement between Kazakhstan’s Presidential TV & Radio Complex and China Media Group, underscoring cultural cooperation between the two countries. The winner was selected through a mixed system: 50 percent determined by a professional jury and 50 percent by online voting. The final was broadcast live on the Jibek Joly channel and simultaneously in Azerbaijan, Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan, and Mongolia. The People’s Artist of Kazakhstan, Dimash Qudaibergen, announced the winner of the first edition live on air, Mongolian singer Michelle Joseph.

At its core, Silk Way Star functions with a dual purpose. First, it provides a platform for showcasing musical talent and national culture. Each contestant draws on their country’s musical heritage, performs in multiple languages, and engages in elaborate stage production.

Second, more subtly, the project fosters regional integration through creative industries. By combining performers from multiple countries, broadcasting across borders, and engaging millions of viewers, the competition creates a shared cultural space that transcends national boundaries.

As President Tokayev stated, it is “a unique initiative aimed at promoting spiritual interaction between Asian countries and strengthening the bonds of friendship between our peoples.” The value that Silk Way Star offers is multifold. From a cultural perspective, it demonstrates how creative industries can become the drivers of soft power. Governments and media organisations recognise that entertainment formats can generate admiration, shape narratives, and build attachment to a regional identity.

Beyond audience reach, the project also fosters what might be called regional cultural infrastructure: collaborative content production, shared media platforms, multilingual broadcasting, and cross-national participation. This infrastructure strengthens connectivity among societies that have historically been divided by linguistic, cultural, or political barriers. In doing so, the project contributes to the construction of a shared Eurasian cultural identity—or at least signals the possibility of one. As musical styles, costumes, staging, and national motifs intersect on one stage, audiences see both difference and unity.

For the nations involved, the benefits are strategic. Kazakhstan elevates its profile as a cultural hub mediating between Central Asia, China, the Caucasus, and beyond. China deepens its cultural reach into the Eurasian space. Middle power states display their cultural assets on a large stage, gaining recognition and exposure. All of this occurs under the less contentious umbrella of cultural cooperation rather than political negotiation.

However, the project’s value also lies in its soft-power leverage: by shaping the field of cultural production and regional media dynamics, states and media conglomerates participate in agenda-setting, narrative creation, and symbolic leadership. With the winner now known—Mongolia’s Michelle Joseph—the platform gains legitimacy and signals to young artists across the region that this stage matters.

Silk Way Star is more than a show; it is a purposeful integration of creative culture and regional strategy. Its value lies in building cultural bridges, enabling regional media infrastructure, and facilitating narrative influence that complements traditional diplomacy. It remains to be seen how durable and deep the constructed regional identity will be, but the project’s structure and scale suggest a meaningful step in the evolution of creative industries as geopolitical tools.

How Creative Industries Create a Common Identity: The Case of Silk Way Star

Creative industries play a unique role in shaping collective identities because they operate simultaneously on emotional, symbolic, and communicative levels. Unlike formal diplomacy or state-driven geopolitical narratives, cultural production spreads through aesthetic appeal and shared experience. This is particularly visible in the context of Silk Way Star: the stage becomes a transnational arena where identities are showcased, negotiated, and reimagined.

First, creative industries form a common identity by generating shared cultural consumption. When millions of viewers across Central Asia, the South Caucasus, China, and East Asia watch the same performers, react to the same songs, and participate in the same voting process, they become a part of a collective cultural experience.

This shared participation reduces symbolic distance between nations that often see themselves as culturally distinct. Viewers begin to recognise melodies, languages, costumes, and artistic styles from neighbouring countries, shifting perceptions from “foreign” to “familiar.”

Second, projects like Silk Way Star produce a common identity through narrative integration. The show tells stories about contestants not only as representatives of their countries but as individuals whose journeys resonate regionally. These narratives create what cultural theorists call identification spaces, where audiences emotionally attach to artists from different backgrounds. Such cross-border emotional connection lays the foundation for a broader Eurasian cultural consciousness.

Third, creative industries provide symbolic vocabulary for imagining a region. In Silk Way Star, the mixture of traditional instruments, contemporary pop aesthetics, multilingual performances, and cross-cultural collaborations builds a symbolic repertoire that audiences start associating with a shared Eurasian cultural sphere. This symbolic fusion is how a “region” becomes culturally legible—not through borders, but through recognisable artistic patterns.

Fourth, creative industries strengthen common identity by enabling participatory soft power. Online voting, social media discussions, fan communities, and digital interactions give audiences an active role in shaping outcomes. Such participatory mechanisms foster a sense of belonging to the project and, indirectly, to the broader cultural region it represents. Soft power becomes co-produced by audiences, not merely projected by states.

Creative industries contribute to identity-building by establishing institutional continuity. If Silk Way Star continues over multiple seasons, it may evolve into a stable cultural institution, much like Eurovision in Europe that symbolically anchors regional integration.

Long-term continuity allows symbols, rituals, and expectations to accumulate, turning a single event into a cultural tradition. In this sense, Silk Way Star demonstrates how creative industries help construct a shared identity, not through political declarations but through emotional resonance, collaborative storytelling, and repeated cultural encounters. It transforms Eurasia from a geographic expression into an emerging cultural imagination֫—one performance at a time.

The case of Silk Way Star shows that cultural cooperation can shape regional dynamics as profoundly as political or economic initiatives. By uniting twelve countries on one stage, the project shows how creative industries serve as powerful engines of soft power, building emotional connections and shared cultural references that transcend borders. The competition’s success lies not only in discovering new musical talent but in creating a symbolic arena where Eurasia can envision itself as a cultural community. Through shared performances, collective viewing, and cross-border voting, the project fosters recognition, familiarity, and a sense of belonging that traditional diplomacy rarely achieves.

Silk Way Star also highlights the emergence of a new form of geopolitical engagement—creative geopolitics, where influence is generated through storytelling, aesthetics, and cultural participation. Its regional visibility and media infrastructure contribute to long-term cultural integration, offering a peaceful and appealing alternative to competitive geopolitical narratives.

Whether this shared cultural identity will solidify remains an open question, but Silk Way Star marks a meaningful step toward a more interconnected Eurasian cultural sphere. It shows that identity can be co-created through art and that creative industries play an increasingly strategic role in shaping how regions understand themselves and each other.

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