Yugocentrism and the Study of the Non-Aligned Movement

Abstract

There has been a renewed scholarly interest in recent years concerning the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM). This text addresses some of the challenges posed by focusing on NAM through a lens of Yugocentrism that is reliant on socialist Yugoslav sources alone. To reinsert socialist Yugoslavia into a global historiography, one needs to perform a double movement: The first part concerns bringing Yugoslavia back into global social relations; the second part concerns decentring its positionality and ensuring that other sites of analysis and struggle, and the relations between them, are taken into consideration. Seeing NAM as a prefigurative, multi-nodal, networked community rather than a traditional international organization suggests that privileging one node at the expense of others will lead to a distorted and incomplete analysis. This paper addresses the complex relationship between the Bandung Afro-Asian conference of April 1955 and the Belgrade NAM summit of September 1961. NAM and the G-77 are also studied as overlapping groupings in terms of membership and objectives. The paper contributes to the development of a critical decolonial historiography of the Cold War period that addresses the need for multi-sited, para-sited, and meta-historiographies by going beyond Yugocentrism whilst still retaining a nuanced concern with global Yugoslavia across different conjunctures.