Uzbekistan does not make the front pages very often. It is landlocked, post-Soviet, rapidly urbanising, and home to 38 million people who are largely invisible in Western media unless the subject is gas pipelines or the occasional human rights report. But something worth paying attention to happened in Tashkent last week. President Shavkat Mirziyoyev signed the law formally joining Uzbekistan to the New Development Bank, the multilateral lender founded by the BRICS nations in 2015 as an alternative to the Washington-led financial order.