The Five-and-Five Geometry: The CIRIT Conceptual Framework for Greater Eurasia

1. Introduction: The Geometry Problem of Greater Eurasia

The existing integrative formats of Greater Eurasia — the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO), the Eurasian Economic Union (EAEU), the Organisation of Turkic States (OTS), and BRICS in its expanded configuration — share a structural limitation: none of them describes Eurasian space as a whole in its civilisational geometry. The SCO, after the enlargement rounds of 2017–2023, has reached the limits of manageability and, as contemporary expert discussion records, lacks the institutional capacity for structural reform (Pierson, 2000; Cooley and Nexon, 2020). The EAEU remains post-Soviet in geographic scope. The OTS is confined to the Turkic axis. BRICS is global in composition and not Eurasian-specific.

The consequence is a conceptual gap: no available analytical language describes the architecture of Greater Eurasia as a structured geometry of civilisational poles, each with specific properties, organised around a shared inner core. This gap is not merely academic — it generates practical policy deficits. Policy actors cannot negotiate an architecture they cannot name, and they cannot name an architecture whose constitutive elements have not been formally identified and related to one another.

This working paper proposes an alternative analytical framework — the pentagonal geometry CIRIT — describing five civilisational poles of Greater Eurasia on the outer contour and five Central Asian states constituting the inner core. The concept was formulated by the authors in 2023–2024 in the course of preparing a series of publications on Eurasian integration (Rakhimov and Mikhalev, 2023, 2024). The present preprint registers conceptual priority on the terminology and geometry of the framework and precedes its extended publication.

The paper proceeds in six steps: the definitional and etymological core (Section 2); structural properties of the geometry (Section 3); positioning relative to existing formats (Section 4); historical and civilisational depth of each pole (Section 5); implications for Central Asian subjecthood (Section 6); and a methodological note on the term denatofication (Section 7).

2. The Cirit Conceptual Core

2.1. Definition

CIRIT denotes five civilisational poles of Greater Eurasia: China, India, Russia, Iran, Türkiye. Each represents a distinct civilisational tradition of millennial continuity, constitutes an autonomous actor in international relations, and possesses either nuclear status or a nuclear-threshold position. The outer CIRIT contour is symmetrical to the inner core C5 — the five states of Central Asia (Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan).

The five-and-five symmetry is not accidental and cannot be reduced to arithmetic. It describes a minimally sufficient geometry: the outer pentagon is configured so that no single pole dominates the others, while the five-state inner core provides the geographic and logistical connectivity of the entire space. The configuration satisfies four analytical criteria: (1) completeness — all major civilisational traditions of continental Eurasia are represented; (2) parsimony — adding further poles (Pakistan, Japan, Saudi Arabia) dissolves the framework's internal coherence; (3) operationalisability — each pole can be specified on measurable dimensions; (4) historical grounding — each pole-core relationship has centuries of documented interaction.

2.2. Dual Etymology

The choice of the abbreviation CIRIT rests on a dual etymological link that is integral to the concept's meaning, not merely decorative.

Cirit (Turkic) — a mounted equestrian game of riders with javelin-throwing, historically practised across Anatolia and Central Asia. In 2017, cirit was inscribed on the UNESCO Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity (UNESCO, 2017). The semantic core of the game is a team of autonomous riders, each with individual skill and trajectory, acting within a common competitive field defined by shared rules. The imagery is apt: CIRIT poles are not fused into a single bloc but remain individually autonomous while sharing a common structural field. The equestrian metaphor additionally signals mobility, dynamism, and the projection of force — all properties of civilisational poles in the contemporary international system.

Kirīṭa (Sanskrit, किरीट) — a crown or diadem, an attribute of royalty and divine completeness in Hindu and Buddhist tradition. The semantic core is the crowned, geometrically complete form — authority derived from civilisational foundation rather than temporary power. The crown metaphor signals legitimacy-from-depth rather than legitimacy-from-force, which is the epistemological premise of the CIRIT framework: civilisational poles derive their structural weight from millennial continuity rather than from current military or economic rankings alone.

The convergence of two etymologies — Turkic and Indic — reflects a structural property of the concept itself: CIRIT connects two civilisational horizons (Central Asian–Turkic and South Asian–Indic) without reducing either to the other. The abbreviation is simultaneously functional (derived from the initials of the five poles in Latin script) and symbolically charged. This dual grounding is methodologically significant: it resists the reductionism of analytical frameworks that impose a single civilisational perspective as the universal standard.

2.3. The CIRIT Order

The sequence of poles in the abbreviation — C-I-R-I-T — is neither alphabetical nor hierarchical. It reflects the geographic logic of traversing the pentagon: from China through India to Russia, from Russia through Iran to Türkiye. This movement traces the structural connectivity of the outer contour, in which each pair of adjacent poles shares a common border or a historical zone of intensive interaction. The sequence also encodes a temporal logic: the China–India pair represents the oldest continuous civilisational traditions in the framework; Russia and Iran share the post-Mongol inheritance; Türkiye connects the sequence back to its Central Asian–Turkic origins.

3. Structural Properties of the Geometry

3.1. The Nuclear Contour

The defining structural property of CIRIT is the completeness of nuclear and threshold status across all five outer poles. Russia, China, and India are officially recognised nuclear-weapon states (SIPRI, 2025). Iran has been assessed by authoritative institutions as a nuclear-threshold state over a period of years, with enrichment levels exceeding 60% — approaching the 90% weapons-grade benchmark — and a breakout timeline estimated in weeks (SIPRI, 2025; NTI, 2025). Türkiye, hosting US tactical nuclear weapons under the NATO Nuclear Sharing arrangement at Incirlik Air Base, possesses de facto access to nuclear assets and retains the latent capacity for an independent programme (OSW, 2026).

No other regional configuration possesses an equivalent property. BRICS-10 includes three nuclear-weapon states (Russia, China, India) but does not incorporate Türkiye and Iran as autonomous threshold actors. The OTS contains no nuclear-weapon states. The EAEU includes only Russia. The SCO includes Russia, China, India, and Pakistan — but Pakistan's nuclear capacity is structurally dependent on Chinese supply chains, a dependency that disqualifies it as an autonomous nuclear pole within the CIRIT framework.

The nuclear-threshold completeness of CIRIT has two analytical implications. First, it raises the structural floor of the framework: negotiations among CIRIT poles operate under conditions of mutual existential deterrence, which generates incentives for political accommodation unavailable to non-nuclear groupings. Second, it creates a unique strategic environment: the five poles collectively possess the capacity to deter any external actor, yet none can unilaterally dominate the others, producing a structural condition of enforced multipolarity within the outer contour.

3.2. Strategic Ambivalence

The second structural property is strategic ambivalence as a class of position shared by all five poles. None of the CIRIT poles is an unconditional ally or adversary of the United States (Cooley and Nexon, 2020). All five simultaneously maintain substantial ties with the Western economic and political architecture and develop autonomous alternative formats.

Türkiye is a NATO member yet an SCO membership aspirant; India participates in the Quad yet holds membership in BRICS and the SCO; Russia is a US strategic adversary yet Türkiye's partner in TurkStream; Iran is subject to US sanctions yet remains a US interlocutor in specific contexts; China is the primary US economic competitor yet the largest US trading partner. This pattern is not a transitional condition but a constitutive property of civilisational poles in the contemporary system: their civilisational depth and autonomous strategic will permit them to maintain complexity in their external relationships that smaller states cannot sustain.

Strategic ambivalence is not a defect but a constitutive property of CIRIT. A geometry of five ambivalent poles generates structural resilience unavailable to configurations built on friend–foe logic. It is precisely because none of the five is fully aligned with any single external power that the framework can function as a genuine architecture of Greater Eurasia rather than as a satellite system of either Washington or Beijing.

3.3. The Operational Core C5 × CIRIT

The inner symmetry of the concept — five Central Asian states in the core — allows the introduction of the operational designation C5 × CIRIT to describe the standard mode of interaction. C5 here is not the sum of countries but a collective subject capable of coordinated action on issues that the outer poles formulate separately and often contradictorily (water, transport, energy, financial infrastructure).

C5 × CIRIT presupposes formats in which the five Central Asian states act as a unified institutional partner for each of the five outer poles. This is a demanding requirement: it assumes a degree of C5 coordination that is structurally difficult to achieve given the competitive dynamics among the five states (particularly around water and energy resources). The paper does not pretend that C5 coordination is currently achieved; it argues that the C5 × CIRIT format provides the institutional incentive structure that makes such coordination strategically rational. Each C5 state, individually, is a dependent variable in its interactions with any single outer pole; collectively, C5 becomes an independent variable capable of shaping the terms of interaction.

4. Conceptual Positioning Relative to Existing Formats

4.1. CIRIT as Analytical Language, Not Institution

The foundational methodological position of this paper is that CIRIT is an analytical language for describing Eurasian space, not an institutional project. The concept does not presuppose the creation of an organisation, secretariat, or formal membership. It proposes a geometric description within which existing institutions (SCO, EAEU, OTS, BRICS) and bilateral formats (Russia–China, Russia–India, Türkiye–Iran, etc.) become projections of a single structure onto different planes.

This positioning resolves the false dichotomy of 'new institution versus old ones'. CIRIT is compatible with any existing framework and requires no actor to choose between it and current memberships. Its analytical function is to reveal the structural properties of the space within which existing institutions operate — properties that those institutions, taken individually, cannot capture. A map is not a government; CIRIT is a map.

4.2. Comparative Table of Pole Composition

Format	Russia	China	India	Iran	Türkiye	C5 inclusion
SCO (full members)	+	+	+	+	– (partner)	4 of 5
EAEU	+	–	–	–	–	2 of 5
OTS	–	–	–	–	+	4 of 5
BRICS-10	+	+	+	+	– (partner)	0 of 5
Quad+	–	–	+	–	–	0 of 5
CIRIT	+	+	+	+	+	5 of 5 (core)

Only CIRIT simultaneously describes the complete outer pentagon and the complete inner C5 core. This structural property explains why the proposed framework does not duplicate any existing format. The SCO comes closest — including four of five poles and four of five C5 states as full members — but excludes Türkiye and treats C5 as peripheral rather than as a structural core. BRICS-10, while global in ambition, explicitly excludes Türkiye from full membership and has no C5 component whatsoever.

4.3. Relation to the Greater Eurasian Partnership

The Greater Eurasian Partnership (GEP) concept, articulated in Russian foreign policy discourse since 2015–2016 (Karaganov, 2016), coincides with CIRIT in spatial scope but differs in the type of description. GEP is an institutional initiative encompassing the SCO, EAEU, and ASEAN; CIRIT is a geometry of civilisational poles, indifferent to institutional forms of participation. GEP and CIRIT do not compete; they describe one reality from different levels — institutional and structural. GEP specifies the network of existing organisations; CIRIT specifies the civilisational architecture within which those organisations operate.

The relationship is analogous to the distinction between a map of roads (GEP: existing institutional connections) and a map of geological formations (CIRIT: civilisational poles and their structural properties). Both are valid and non-competing representations of the same territory at different levels of analysis.

5. Civilisational Depth of the Five Poles

The claim that CIRIT describes 'civilisational poles' requires substantiation beyond enumeration. What makes each of the five a pole rather than merely a large state? Four criteria establish pole status: (1) civilisational continuity (a recorded tradition exceeding one millennium); (2) autonomous strategic will (the demonstrated capacity to formulate and execute foreign policy independent of any other pole); (3) nuclear or nuclear-threshold status; (4) geographic periphery relative to the Central Asian core. Each of the five satisfies all four criteria; no other state in the Eurasian space satisfies all four simultaneously.

5.1. China

China's civilisational continuity is the longest documented in the framework, with unbroken records exceeding 3,500 years (Acharya, 2018). Its autonomous strategic will is demonstrated by its capacity to maintain simultaneously: strategic competition with the United States, the largest bilateral trade relationship with the US, a comprehensive partnership with Russia, a contested border with India, and a Belt and Road Initiative that spans more than 140 countries. No other state manages this degree of structural complexity without subordination to an external hegemon. China's nuclear arsenal (approximately 500 warheads, expanding toward 1,000 by 2030; SIPRI, 2025) and its geographic positioning along Central Asia's eastern flank through Xinjiang complete the pole specification.

5.2. India

India's civilisational continuity spans approximately 4,000 years, with the Indus Valley Civilisation as its earliest documented expression. Its contemporary autonomous strategic will is embodied in the 'Strategic Autonomy' doctrine — the principled rejection of subordination to any bloc or alliance — which has governed Indian foreign policy since independence (Hurrell, 1995). India is the only CIRIT pole that participates simultaneously in the Quad (with the US, Japan, Australia), BRICS (with Russia and China), the SCO (with Russia, China, Pakistan), and maintains a historically complex border relationship with two other CIRIT poles (China and Pakistan-adjacent areas). Its nuclear arsenal (~170 warheads; SIPRI, 2025) and its geographic position as the gateway between Central Asia and the Indian Ocean complete the specification.

5.3. Russia

Russia's civilisational continuity, from Kievan Rus through the Muscovite state to the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union, spans approximately 1,100 years. Its autonomous strategic will is currently most directly expressed in its capacity to sustain a full-scale military confrontation with the collective Western bloc while maintaining functioning relationships with India, China, Turkey, and the Central Asian states simultaneously. Russia's nuclear arsenal (~5,500 warheads; SIPRI, 2025) constitutes the largest in the framework and the primary deterrent against external intervention in Eurasian space. Russia's geographic position along the northern arc of Central Asia — with direct borders with Kazakhstan — makes it the C5's primary institutional framework provider through the CSTO and EAEU (Vinokurov and Libman, 2012).

5.4. Iran

Iran's civilisational continuity, from the Achaemenid Empire through the Sassanid, Safavid, and modern states, spans approximately 2,500 years. Its autonomous strategic will is most powerfully expressed in its sustained capacity to resist comprehensive Western sanctions while maintaining its nuclear programme, regional influence (from Lebanon through Iraq to Yemen), and bilateral relationships with both Russia and China. Iran's nuclear-threshold status — with 60%+ enrichment and a breakout timeline estimated in weeks — places it in a structurally unique position as the only CIRIT pole whose threshold is active rather than latent (NTI, 2025). Iran's geographic position, controlling the eastern approaches to the Persian Gulf and sharing borders with both the Caspian basin and C5 (Turkmenistan), makes it the framework's southern gateway.

5.5. Türkiye

Türkiye's civilisational continuity, from the Göktürk Khaganate through the Seljuk and Ottoman states to the Turkish Republic, spans approximately 1,500 years. Its autonomous strategic will is currently expressed in its most structurally complex form of any CIRIT pole: simultaneously a NATO member, an SCO dialogue partner, an OTS founding member, a regional military power conducting autonomous operations in Syria, Libya, Somalia, and the Caucasus, and the world's largest exporter of armed drones. Türkiye's nuclear position — hosting approximately 50 U.S. B61 tactical warheads at Incirlik while developing indigenous aerospace and defense capabilities — constitutes the latent threshold that completes the CIRIT nuclear contour (OSW, 2026). The structural contradiction of Türkiye's dual membership (NATO's integrated command and SCO aspirant) is the central analytical problem that the CIRIT framework is designed to address. The concept of denatofication (Section 7) specifies the mechanism by which this contradiction can be resolved.

6. Central Asia (C5) as the Subjective Core: Implications for Regional Agency

6.1. Why C5, Not a Sixth Pole

The five Central Asian states — Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan — constitute the inner core of the CIRIT geometry rather than a sixth or seventh pole. This positioning requires justification, since it might appear to demote C5 to a passive object of the outer poles' competition. The argument is precisely the opposite: the core position gives C5 structural centrality that peripheral positions cannot supply.

The five poles constitute the outer contour; the core of subjectivity resides in C5. The argument for core status rests on three properties. Geographic centrality: C5 holds simultaneous land borders or cultural-linguistic ties to all five outer poles — Russia (Soviet institutional legacy), China (Silk Road and BRI), India (the Mogul inheritance and Sanskrit-Sogdian connections), Iran (the Persian civilisational matrix in Tajikistan and Uzbekistan), and Türkiye (Turkic linguistic and cultural kinship in Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan). No other region in the Eurasian space touches all five poles simultaneously.

6.2. Resource Endowment and Strategic Neutrality

Resource endowment gives C5 structural leverage disproportionate to its military or economic weight. Kazakhstan holds the world's largest uranium reserves — the foundational material for nuclear deterrence — while simultaneously being the primary transit state for Russian energy exports to China (Rakhimov and Mikhalev, 2023). Turkmenistan holds the fourth-largest natural gas reserves globally. Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan command the headwaters of the Syr Darya and Amu Darya, the primary irrigation sources for the downstream states of Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, and Kazakhstan. Combined, C5 holds a concentration of strategic resources — uranium, gas, water, rare earths — that makes its collective agency strategically significant regardless of military capacity.

Strategic neutrality is the third property establishing C5's core function. Unlike the outer poles — each embedded in competitive great-power logics — C5 practices multi-vectorism as an official doctrine. Kazakhstan's 'multi-vector foreign policy,' Uzbekistan's 'active neutrality,' Kyrgyzstan's balanced relations with Russia, China, and Turkey all reflect a structural condition: small states at the intersection of competing great powers survive by maintaining balanced relationships with all. This neutrality is precisely what makes C5 an acceptable convening space for inter-pole dialogue. The center holds because it is not itself a contender.

6.3. From Object to Subject: The Surrogate Subjecthood Thesis

The conventional treatment of Central Asia in international relations scholarship positions the region as the object of others' strategies — a 'great game' board rather than a player. CIRIT inverts this positioning. In the C5 × CIRIT framework, C5 is not the object of competition but the subject around which competition is structured. This inversion has practical implications.

When the five outer poles engage with C5 bilaterally, C5 states are weak counterparts negotiating individually against each of the five. When C5 engages as a collective — through the C5 × CIRIT format — it becomes a structural partner whose collective agreement is necessary for any outer pole's regional programme to proceed. The shift from bilateral to multilateral engagement does not require C5 states to surrender sovereignty; it requires them to coordinate their positions on specific issues (water governance, transport corridor pricing, energy transit fees) where collective action advantages are clear and coordination costs are low (Rakhimov and Mikhalev, 2024).

7. Methodological Note: Denatofication and the Completion of the Outer Contour

7.1. The Structural Contradiction

The CIRIT framework, as specified in Section 2, Section 3, Section 4 and Section 5, faces a structural incompleteness in its current empirical form. Türkiye — the fifth and final pole — is simultaneously embedded in NATO's integrated military command and positioned as an SCO dialogue partner. This duality is not merely a policy inconsistency; it is a geometric impossibility for coherent CIRIT architecture. A pole whose military command reports to Brussels and whose nuclear assets are controlled by Washington cannot function as an autonomous node in the C5 × CIRIT structure without introducing operational contradictions at every level of inter-pole coordination.

7.2. The Denatofication Concept

One of the authors of the present paper (Rakhimov, 2025), in his address to the SCO Expert Forum on 24 July 2025 in Zhengzhou, proposed the term denatofication (de-NATO-isation) of Türkiye to describe the structural process of gradually withdrawing Ankara from the NATO integrated military command as a condition for its full participation in the Eurasian geometry. The term designates not a one-off act but a sustained process — analogous to France's 43-year withdrawal from NATO's integrated command (1966–2009) — in which Türkiye's strategic ambivalence is converted into operational compatibility with the outer CIRIT contour.

This preprint registers the conceptual priority of the authors on the term denatofication as applied to the process of Türkiye's institutional reorientation. The term is offered as an analytical instrument, not a policy prescription. The empirical content of this process — including the material defense-industrial trajectory that constitutes its observable dimension — is developed in a separate extended publication. The CIRIT framework is analytically complete in the sense that Türkiye's structural position is fully specified; it is operationally incomplete in the sense that Türkiye's dual membership creates a contradiction that denatofication is designed to resolve.

7.3. Implications for the Five-and-Five Architecture

If denatofication describes the mechanism by which the outer CIRIT contour achieves operational completeness, the five-and-five architecture specifies its institutional destination. The formula GEP 2.0 = SCO+ (Türkiye − NATO) is not metaphor but the compressed statement of an institutional programme: the SCO's existing security foundation, supplemented by a denatoficated Türkiye functioning as the fifth autonomous pole, organised around a Central Asian subjective core whose collective agency is enabled by the C5 × CIRIT format.

This architecture does not require any actor to abandon current memberships. Russia retains the CSTO and EAEU. China retains BRI bilateral frameworks. India retains its Quad participation. Iran retains its bilateral relationships. Türkiye retains its NATO political membership, Article 5 commitments, and North Atlantic Council participation. What changes is the operational layer: Türkiye withdraws from the integrated military command, removes the institutional veto that foreign nuclear weapons at Incirlik represent, and participates in SCO operational mechanisms as a full member rather than a dialogue partner. The architecture as a whole becomes operationally coherent without requiring any pole to make an existential choice between East and West.

8. Conclusion and Directions for Further Research

8.1. Summary of Contributions

This preprint registers the conceptual priority of the authors on four interrelated contributions:

(a) The terminology CIRIT for denoting the pentagonal geometry of civilisational poles of Greater Eurasia, with the dual etymological link of the concept (Turkic cirit + Sanskrit kirīṭa) as an integral element of its meaning, not a decorative addition.

(b) The structural properties of the geometry: the complete nuclear-threshold contour, strategic ambivalence as a constitutive property of all five poles, and the operational core C5 × CIRIT as the mechanism for converting Central Asia from an object of competition into a subject of collective agency.

(c) The comparative positioning of CIRIT against existing formats (SCO, EAEU, OTS, BRICS-10, Quad+), establishing that only CIRIT simultaneously describes the complete outer pentagon and the complete inner C5 core.

(d) The term denatofication (de-NATO-isation) as applied to the process of Türkiye's institutional reorientation — the mechanism by which the structural incompleteness of the CIRIT outer contour can be resolved without requiring any pole to sever existing political relationships.

8.2. Limitations

This preprint is explicitly a conceptual statement, not an empirical analysis. It registers priority on terminology and geometry; it does not conduct the extended empirical and comparative analysis that the framework requires for full scholarly validation. Several limitations follow from this scope.

First, the civilisational-pole designation involves boundary judgments (the exclusion of Pakistan, Japan, Saudi Arabia) that are defended in the text but require more extensive comparative analysis for full justification. Second, the C5 × CIRIT operational format is specified at a high level of abstraction; the concrete institutional mechanisms by which C5 coordination might be achieved — the decision rules, the enforcement mechanisms, the distribution of costs and benefits — are not developed here. Third, the denatofication concept is introduced here as a conceptual registration; its empirical content (the material defense-industrial dimension, the historical precedents, the falsifiable predictions) is developed in a separate extended publication.

8.3. Directions for Further Research

Six directions for further research follow from the framework.

First, institutional elaboration of C5 × CIRIT formats: the concrete design of a development bank, coordination council, or investment platform that could operationalise the C5 × CIRIT interaction mode.

Second, empirical operationalisation of the nuclear contour: quantitative assessment of nuclear threshold positions, breakout timelines, and their implications for CIRIT's deterrence dynamics.

Third, comparative analysis with alternative geometries: how does CIRIT compare to RIC (Russia-India-China), BRICS+, Quad+, and other proposed configurations on the dimensions of completeness, parsimony, and operationalisability?

Fourth, historical sociology of the dual etymology: the cirit–kirīṭa convergence as a specific instance of Central Asian civilisational mediation between Turkic and Indic traditions.

Fifth, dynamic modelling of denatofication: under what conditions does the material defense-industrial trajectory documented in the companion publication translate into institutional denatofication?

Sixth, Central Asian agency formation: what are the structural conditions under which C5 states can achieve the collective coordination that the C5 × CIRIT format requires?

The analytical vantage of this article — written from Bishkek, at the geometric center of the framework — is itself a methodological asset. The centre observes the outer contour from all sides simultaneously. Whether that observation can be converted into collective agency is the question the framework poses to the region.