Bandung Conference Research Articles

Building on Bandung: What Does Cooperation Do for Regional Engagement?

This article examines the outcomes of collective forms of engagement in the ASEAN region. By examining how convening power in these south-south engagements has worked since the Bandung Conference, the paper reviews how the mode of consensus building adopted in 1955 has been channelled into regional cooperation. In particular, the paper considers the implications of these forms of cooperation for the consensus building that characterizes ASEAN today. The paper uses the processes evident in the ASEAN Development Outlook to set out the consequences of these findings for how the UN system can set out more effective criteria for global South cooperation. This has direct implications for institutional mechanisms for advancing capacity and expertise in new forms of cooperation between the global North and global South.

Jalal Al-e Ahmad’s Gharbzadegi and the Spirit of Bandung: A Decolonial Reimagination of Development in Mid-Twentieth Century Iran

Sixty years after the original publication of Gharbzadegi (1962) by dissident Iranian writer Jalal Al-e Ahmad, the controversial book remains an important marker in the formation of the mid- and late-twentieth century perceptions of Iranian intellectuals about the relationship between their country’s past, present, and future. Building on the recent scholarship which considers Gharbzadegi as an alternative vision of the future rather than a nostalgic call for a return to the past, this article situates the book’s piercing critique of the Pahlavi state’s modernization and development agenda in a decolonial register. This is done through a reading of Gharbzadegi against the background, on the one hand, of the 1955 Bandung Conference at which representatives from various Asian and African nations gathered to discuss the futures of their countries after colonialism, and on the other hand, of the local experiences of semi-coloniality and dependent development. This reading helps to foreground an alternative conception of modernity in Gharbzadegi, and a decolonial vision in the book of development through delinking from Eurocentric designs. Reading it against the background of the Bandung Conference further helps to situate Gharbzadegi’s engagements with the Islamic tradition in the wider context of a postcolonial turn to religion. The article thus argues that Al-e Ahmad’s turn to Islam reflects a postcolonial sentiment that in developing alternatives to Europe’s colonial modernity the peoples of the Third World ought to reengage with the ways of life and modes of knowledge and norm production which were dismissed and suppressed by the dominating colonial structures and knowledge systems.

Science and Really Existing Socialism in Maoist China

Science and Really Existing Socialism in Maoist China

China engages the Global South: From Bandung to the Belt and Road Initiative

AbstractThis article addresses China’s engagement with the Global South regarding the transnational transfer of knowledge and policy. It argues that China’s active participation in the Bandung Conference constituted historical capital in legitimating its (leadership) role in the Global South and as an alternative modernity. The past decade has witnessed the growing importance of the Global South for China. Apart from a geopolitical motive, China’s expanding economic ties with the developing world serve as an overarching framework facilitating transnational knowledge transfer, with the centrality of development reinforced by an institutionalization drive. The essay concludes that China’s engagement with the Global South in the context of the Belt and Road Initiative has been shaped by the complex logics of domestic political economy and changing global geopolitics, not all of which are within China’s control. A stakeholder‐centric approach, therefore, will be beneficial to all countries concerned.

Rewriting Solidarities in Juxtaposition

This essay proposes nonsynchronous juxtaposition as a narrative device to critically engage with the complex historical legacies of the Bandung Conference 1955 and to reclaim the anticolonial poetic of the Bandung Spirit’s transnational solidarity with a classed and gendered perspective of migrant workers’ contemporary struggles. It argues that juxtaposition forges “Bandung chronopolitics”, a postcolonial politics of time that invokes affective entanglements of historical memories and present anticolonial transnational struggles. To demonstrate the creative and dialogical potential of rewriting solidarities in juxtaposition, this essay performs a close reading that puts side by side two poems titled “Kepada Sahabat Asia Afrika” (To Afro-Asian Friends, 1961) by Sugiarti Siswadi and “Seusai Badai Berpeluk Puisi” (After the Hurricane Embraced a Poem, 2009) by Mega Vristian. This essay summarily positions the poetic of juxtaposition and Bandung chronopolitics as a discursive strategy to avoid unchecked glorification of Bandung legacies and to repurpose the Bandung Spirit as a political imagination that brings historical depth to the works of Third World solidarity from below against the highly coordinated global-imperial capitalism.

Nehru’s Bandung moment: India and the convening of the 1955 Asian-African conference

ABSTRACT This article explores Jawaharlal Nehru’s role in convening the 1955 Bandung Conference. Drawing upon previously embargoed Indian and Western government records, it sheds light on a largely overlooked aspect of Nehru’s Cold War diplomacy. By doing so, it shows that Nehru did not attach, at least initially, much importance to Indonesia’s calls for an Asian-African conference. Only in late 1954 did he show more interest in the Indonesian proposal. Three factors pushed Nehru in this direction: his reluctance to embarrass Indonesia, his concerns about American regional policy and his desire to exploit China’s support for peaceful coexistence. Confronted with renewed regional tensions but able to capitalize on Beijing’s new-found reasonableness, Nehru threw India’s diplomatic weight behind Indonesia’s proposal with the view to furthering his vision of “areas of peace.” Nehru’s “Bandung moment,” however, was short-lived. Although the Bandung Conference appeared to have advanced India’s national interests in the short term, its benefits were more questionable in the long run. In the end, India was unable to tie China down to its regional vision and protect itself against Chinese belligerence. Faced with a mounting Chinese challenge, Nehru’s strategy, centered upon nonaligned peaceful coexistence, manifested all its limitations.

The Rendezvous of Victory: Translations of Bandung Humanism

AbstractThis article tracks the engagement of several twentieth-century writers with a line from Aimé Césaire’s Cahier d’un retour au pays natal (Journal of a Homecoming): “et il est place pour tous au rendez-vous de la conquête” (and there is room for all at the appointed place of conquest; translated by C. L. R. James as “there is a place for all at the rendezvous of victory”). This line came to define an ethics and an aesthetics for the cultural movement that ensued in the wake of the Bandung conference, which brought together heads of state from the third world in pursuit of national independence. In the critical commentaries and artistic engagements with Césaire’s work by James, Frantz Fanon, Nadine Gordimer, and Edward Said, a form of internationalism emerged that was sustained by a common investment in this poetic image. These writers weren’t bound by an identity of interest, however, but rather by the displacements to which they subjected Césaire’s poem through their linguistic, generic, affective, and semantic translations. The essay concludes that Bandung humanism supposed a contingent and revisable understanding of the human and promoted an aesthetic of reworking rather than timeless forms.

제3세계 운동의 기원으로서 한국전쟁 - 버마의 우 누의 중립주의를 연결고리로

South Korea’s historical and social science scholarship has recently taken strong interests in the inception and development of the Third World movement. The growth of this research interest is closely tied to the end of the global Cold War order and Korea’s unique place in this historical process. It involves probing reflections on why the two states of the Korean peninsula, especially that in the southern half, were not part of the early Third World movement. This essay argues that although these state actors were outsiders to this formative internationalist movement of the mid-twentieth century in its early days, their experience of the era, notably that of the Korean War, was not. Focusing on the Bandung Conference of 1955 and the role of U Nu, the Burmese leader and strong advocate of neutralist politics, in it, the essay asks how the civil war crisis in Korea became a crucial background for the advent of the Non-aligned Movement and the rise of the Third World more broadly.

Rethinking the History of Chinese Empires from the Sinophone South

ABSTRACT This article juxtaposes the Singapore playwright Kuo Pao Kun's imagining of ancient maritime trade with evocations of similar histories in the discourse of Afro-Asian solidarity that was inspired by the Bandung Conference of 1955. At the first “Afro-Asian Writers' Conference” held at Tashkent, Uzbekistan, in 1958, several members of the Chinese delegation framed the cultural exchange among Third World nations in terms of the Silk Road. These allusions highlight the deep memory of non-western empires and a circulatory history that embedded the nation-state as a dominant political form and intellectual framework for discussions of international exchange. Trying to articulate the discourse of Afro-Asian solidarity of the 1950s and 1960s with some recent concerns regarding sinophone culture in Chinese studies, this article calls attention to the sinophone South, the vastly uneven geography where the “South,” as both concept and location, overlaps with the Chinese script world. My research shows that many sinophone intellectuals and authors embraced the “Third-Worldist, antiimperialist, nationalist” agendas. Their activities constitute the vibrant scenes of the global sixties, but because of their nonnational status, they remain neglected by existing discussions of Third World exchange and global Maoism.

“A Theatre—or, More Aptly, a Laboratory”: India in the 1940s Egyptian Left as an Antecedent of Bandung Internationalism

ABSTRACT Delving into an ephemeral 1940s Cairene magazine and conducting oral history, this essay focalizes an unrecorded Egyptian–Indian moment wedged between the two countries' anti-imperial cooperation in the 1920s and 1930s, and their postindependence solidarity most visible in the 1955 Bandung Conference. The textual material is in the nature of a representation of India, suffused with identification; the oral history yields a virtually unknown Egyptian–Indian solidarity among student networks. Far from claiming to cover any and all engagements with things Indian in 1940s Egypt, the essay argues that the supranationalism of the specific Egyptian dialogue with India tackled here, while squarely anti-imperial, acquires more pronounced socialist internationalist hues due to a much-invigorated stage in the Egyptian left. Recouping that moment enables us to form a more nuanced picture of the later, postindependence internationalism, attuning us to various precursor orientations that fed into it, if in unremarked ways. Dwelling on these instances of 1940s internationalism resists the tendency to subsume the later Third Worldist internationalisms under the shadow of the Cold War, notwithstanding their imbrication within it. And yet this intervention is non-teleological: the conclusion considers the implications—the continuities as much as the discontinuities—of the 1940s moment for the succeeding Afro-Asian Third Worldism.

Race and racism in the founding of the modern world order

Abstract While race existed as a cultural marker in earlier history, a mutually-reinforcing link between racism, slavery and empire is a distinct product of western Europe and the US-led world order. Yet, mainstream scholarship on International Relations has obscured the question of race or worse, legitimized its exclusion in discussions of world order-building. At the same time, demand for racial equality from anti-colonial forces presented an alternative and inclusive conception of world order. The first part of this article offers a brief discussion of concepts of race, racism and world order. The next part examines how racist ideas and norms created exclusionary frameworks and approaches of world order, such as the European ‘standard of civilization’ principle. The third part looks at the role of racism in the emergence of the American-led world order, including US President Woodrow Wilson's rejection of the ‘racial equality’ principle in the League of Nations Charter, the privileging of ‘sovereign equality’ over ‘racial equality’ in the UN Charter, and the scant attention given to the link between colonialism and denial of human rights in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Yet, anti-colonial leaders and conferences, especially the 1955 Bandung Conference, integrated ‘national sovereignty, racialism and colonialism’, and demanded racial equality as a fundamental human right. The final part cautions against the dangers of complacency and compartmentalizing the study of race and racism, and calls instead for viewing racism as an inter-linked global challenge, hence integral to the emerging research agenda of Global International Relations.

From Bandung to Little Rock: Dalip Singh Saund and the Limits of Racial Liberalism

ABSTRACT This essay briefly examines the state-sponsored journey of Dalip Singh Saund – the first Asian American, Indian American, and Sikh American to be elected to the United States Congress – across Asia in the winter of 1957–1958 alongside the 1955 Afro-Asian Conference in Bandung, Indonesia. As an ambassador of American efforts to put forward a new and conciliatory face on the issue of race in the United States, Saund was deployed not only as symbol of American ideals and universality, but also as part of broader U.S. state efforts to counter worldwide criticism of U.S. racism, to build relations with emerging Asian and African nations, and to contain the possibility of a radical restructuring of the global racial and economic order. Saund used his cultural authority as a formerly excluded immigrant and, as he saw, fully assimilated citizen to celebrate a racially liberal order at home and to reframe histories of racial exclusion into triumphant stories of national inclusion. Saund’s racial liberalism served as a precursor to the conservative and neoconservative responses to race that would emerge in the coming decades, responses that downplayed the persistent and structural nature of U.S. racism and suppressed the kinds of anticolonial and antiracist critiques and demonstrations of Afro-Asian solidarity emerging from sites like Bandung.

Negritude, Universalism, and Socialism

It is important to read afresh today the meaning of the Negritude movement without reducing it, as is often the case, to a counter-essentialism in response to the essentialism of the discourse of coloni-alism; to realize that Senghor, Césaire, and Damas were 􀏔irst and foremost global philosophers, that is, thinkers of the plural and decentred world that the Bandung conference of 1955 had promised. Thus, their different perspectives converge as the task of thinking a humanism for our times based on a non-imperial universal, a univer-sal of encounter and translation founded on equality. And, consequently, a socialism that is, in its different translations, a force of emancipation, but also of humanization and spiritualization of the earth. That task is still ours.

Indonesia’s African Foreign Policy Shift under President Jokowi

Under President Jokowi’s leadership, Indonesia seems to have made Africa a foreign policy priority. Previously bounded by Bandung romanticism and lacking understanding on the contemporary strategic importance of Africa, Indonesia finally launched its own Africa+1 forum in April 2018 in Bali, the Indonesia Africa Forum (IAF), following an economic diplomacy framework and will to do business with Africa. For Jokowi, Bandung should be leveraged to mean business. Indonesia had previously struggled to institutionalize Asia-Africa intercontinental multilateralism through the New Africa-Asia Strategic Partnership (NAASP) launched during the 2005 Asia Africa Summit in Jakarta organized to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the Bandung Conference; while other major Asian powers such as Japan, China, Malaysia, India or South Korea developed their own political, economic and cultural platforms with African countries. Closing a clear research gap, this original study allows a better comprehension of this foreign policy shift and of Indonesia's contemporary foreign policy towards Africa within Global Africa Studies. For more pragmatism and flexibility, this qualitative research, notably based on in-depth interviews with Indonesian and African diplomats, uses an eclectic analysis allowing a holistic approach combining levels of analysis and types of factors; thus increasing explanatory power.

Breaking diplomatic isolation: the origin of the People’s Republic of China’s assistance to Africa

ABSTRACT Following the Bandung Conference held in 1955, China and Africa strengthened their contacts, and the provision of assistance to Africa gradually became an important part of China’s diplomacy. In light of its uncompromising support for African national liberation movements, China’s assistance programs to Africa targeted promoting African countries’ independence and self-reliance, including a variety of forms of assistance to support African countries in various fields such as agricultural cultivation, primary industrial development, and medical and health care. After China’s Reform and Opening Up in 1978, its assistance to Africa adjusted accordingly in terms of its guiding ideology and implementation methods. Assistance to Africa encouraged China-Africa cooperation to become deeper, China’s policy itself was given higher expectations, and its history deserves study.

العدوان الثلاثی على مصر واثره على العلاقات الاردنیة-السعودیة

The triple aggression against Egypt came for many reasons, including the revolution of Egypt in 1952, as well as the policy of Egypt and Abdel Nasser towards the Non-Aligned Movement and its participation in the Bandung conference in 1955, the high dam project is one of the most important reasons that led the major countries Britain and France (Israel) to carry out aggression. Britain was a strong supporter of the high dam project, but that support later faded and was replaced by Soviet support, which provoked the three major powers and prompted them to embark on aggression against Egypt. Britain began its attack on Egypt and then France and later (Israel), the Arab countries did not stand in the face of aggression, as Jordan and Saudi Arabia began to open centers to volunteer in order to send military forces to repel the aggression from Egypt, as well as allow Saudi Arabia forces to pass through Jordanian territory, which strengthened relations between the two countries. Jordan and Saudi Arabia have united their positions during and after the aggression, as the two countries severed diplomatic relations with enemy countries as well as raised donations from the people to support Egypt.

News and Commentaries: China Pakistan Economic Corridor: A Study of Geostrategic Implications for India

The China-Pakistan “all weather friendship” dates back to 1955 Bandung Conference which was rejuvenated by 1962 China’s defeat to India. Based on the Kautliyan maxim of “my enemy’s enemy is my friend, the China Pakistan alignment served the interests of both partners as it is prompted on their convergence vis a vis India. Thus, even after the end of Cold War their alignment survived and in fact got transformed to a formal alliance. This gets exemplified by the much talked about China Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC) where China’s investment reached $62 billion in April 2017. The China-Pakistan bonhomie in South Asia has tremendous geostrategic implications for India in the region. Thus the present study is an attempt to accentuate upon the current trajectory of China Pakistan Alignment i.e. CPEC and its geostrategic implications for India being the South Asian heavy weight.

The Most Social of Maladies: Re-Thinking the History of Psychiatry From the Edges of Empire

This paper argues that the colonial experience was never just “out there” but was a constitutive feature of the global development of psychiatry and, indeed, of social medicine itself. I show how regional knowledge about psychiatry, produced in scientific exchanges across colonial Southeast Asia over four decades and culminating with the 1937 Bandung Conference, became part of new international approaches to health care in rural areas, and later, in developing nations. In particular, I discuss how the embrace of the agricultural colony as a solution to the problem of asylum overcrowding occurred at the same moment that colonial public health experts and officials were moving away from expensive, technocratic fixes to address indigenous health needs. Yet in the search for alternatives to institutionalized care, including forms of family and community support, colonial psychiatrists were increasingly drawn into unpredictable and unwieldy networks of care and economy. Drawing on research from Vietnam, this paper decenters the asylum so as to recast the history of colonial and postcolonial psychiatry as integral to the history of social medicine and global health. The paper then returns to Bandung in 1955, the site of another famous meeting in the history of Third World solidarity, to consider how the embrace of the “Bandung spirit” may provide new avenues for decolonizing the history of colonial and postcolonial psychiatry.

Egyptian communist voices of peace (1947–1958)

ABSTRACT This article sets out to closely scrutinise the main phases of the campaign for peace (1947–58) undertaken by left-wing Egyptian groups. Based on exclusive first-hand Egyptian communist primary sources – archival and others, it shows that although the communists were the only Egyptian political groups to support the November 1947 UN partition resolution on Palestine, President Gamal Abdel Nasser later, during the Bandung Conference (1955), followed suit yet no concrete official actions were taken by neither the Egyptian nor the Israeli political elites before the 1956 Suez War. Following that war, the prospects for an Egyptian–Israeli peace settlement were shut off for nearly two decades.

Seeing the Futures Past, and Futures yet to Come

By comparing the dominant media and academic readings of the visual archive of Yugoslav non-aligned internationalism with the interpretations of the corresponding visual archive of the Bandung Conference, I reflect on the impossibility of recognizing the futurity, solidarity, and alternative modernity in the photographs depicting Yugoslav international encounters in the context of the Non-Aligned Movement. I outline a number of reasons for this impossibility, some of which are related to the nature of photography itself, while the others are shaped by the specific temporality of post-Yugoslav post-socialism and the limits that this temporality imposes on political subjects, their imagination, and aspirations.