On the morning of April 18, 1955, President Sukarno of Indonesia addressed an assembly unlike any the world had seen. Before him in the Merdeka Building in Bandung sat delegates from twenty-nine African and Asian nations representing 1.5 billion people — more than half of the world’s population — most of whom had been under foreign rule within living memory. “This is the first intercontinental conference of coloured peoples in the history of mankind,” Sukarno told them. The overstatement was forgivable. The gathering of independent governments from across Africa and Asia, seven years after Indian independence and just ten years after the end of the Second World War, was genuinely unprecedented. It was also, in a historical perspective that compounds over seventy years, genuinely consequential.
The Bandung Conference did not end the Cold War or immediately free the remaining colonised peoples of Africa and Asia. It did not produce a durable institution or a functioning military alliance. What it produced was more durable than any of these: a political idea, the Bandung Spirit — the notion that the formerly colonised peoples of the world constituted a political community with shared interests that were not identical to those of either Washington or Moscow, and that their sovereignty required asserting that difference.
That idea has never fully died. It was institutionalised in the Non-Aligned Movement, contested in the Cold War’s proxy conflicts, apparently buried in the unipolar moment of the 1990s, and has emerged with new force in the twenty-first century as China, India, and a dozen other powers press for a multipolar world order and resist Western-defined frameworks on Ukraine, sanctions, and great power competition. Understanding what happened in Bandung in April 1955 is essential for understanding the world in 2026.
The World in 1955¶
The world that convened in Bandung had been remade by two great disruptions: the Second World War and decolonisation. Both were still unfolding. The war had destroyed the European empires’ claim to civilisational superiority — it had been Europeans, after all, who had exterminated six million Jews, firebombed Dresden, and starved Bengal — while simultaneously exhausting the metropolitan powers’ capacity to maintain overseas rule by force. Britain, France, the Netherlands, Belgium, and Portugal had all discovered between 1945 and 1955 that holding colonies required resources they no longer possessed.
The Cold War had immediately moved into the resulting vacuum. The United States and Soviet Union both had ideological reasons to profess anti-colonialism — the United States from its own revolutionary tradition; the Soviet Union from Marxist-Leninist anti-imperialism — while both simultaneously sought to recruit newly independent states into their respective blocs. The Americans pressured the Netherlands to grant Indonesian independence in 1949 and publicly opposed the French position in Indochina, but they also funded the French war in Vietnam, maintained bases across Asia on terms that mirrored colonial arrangements, and overthrew the elected government of Iran in 1953 and Guatemala in 1954 when nationalist governments threatened Western economic interests.
The Soviet Union offered military aid and diplomatic support to liberation movements, but Moscow’s control of Eastern European satellites demonstrated that Soviet “anti-imperialism” had specific limits. Khrushchev had denounced Stalin’s crimes in February 1955 — the Bandung Conference convened less than two months later — but the Hungarian Revolution would be crushed just eighteen months hence.
By 1955, Asia had produced its first tier of independent states. India and Pakistan had been independent since 1947. Burma and Ceylon (Sri Lanka) since 1948. Indonesia since 1949. Libya since 1951. Egypt, Iraq, Syria, and Lebanon were formally independent Arab states. China had achieved communist revolution in 1949. In Africa, only Ethiopia, Liberia, and Egypt were independent — the continent’s decolonisation was still a decade away. Africa’s representation at Bandung was primarily North African, reflecting this imbalance.
The UN Security Council’s permanent five were four Western powers (the US, UK, France, and the Republic of China — Taiwan held the China seat until 1971) plus the Soviet Union. The UN Security Council was structurally a committee of the old order. No Afro-Asian state held a permanent seat. The United Nations General Assembly, where developing countries had one-state-one-vote, was the only forum where the emerging world could influence international norms — and it could only recommend, not decide.
The Organisers¶
The Bandung Conference emerged from the Colombo Powers — a group of five Asian prime ministers who had met in Sri Lanka (then Ceylon) in April 1954 to discuss the French defeat at Dien Bien Phu and the Geneva negotiations on Indochina. The five were Ali Sastroamidjojo of Indonesia, Jawaharlal Nehru of India, U Nu of Burma, Mohammed Ali Bogra of Pakistan, and Sir John Kotelawala of Ceylon.
Indonesia’s Ali Sastroamidjojo proposed hosting a larger Afro-Asian conference. Nehru was initially sceptical — he feared it would become anti-Western and undermine India’s diplomatic strategy of building bridges to all sides — but eventually supported it. The Colombo Powers extended invitations to twenty-five additional states across Africa and Asia, deliberately excluding the great powers. There would be no Americans, no Soviets, no British, no French at the table. The conference would be run by the formerly colonised, for the formerly colonised.
This exclusion was deliberate and radical. Every other major international conference of the postwar era — the United Nations, the Bretton Woods institutions, the Korean armistice negotiations, the Geneva talks on Indochina — had been dominated by the great powers, with Asian and African states as observers or, at most, secondary participants. Bandung inverted this order.
President Sukarno of Indonesia was the conference’s most enthusiastic patron and its most effective political impresario. Sukarno had led Indonesia’s revolution against Dutch colonialism and was one of the towering figures of postwar anti-colonialism. His personal charisma, his gift for oratory in multiple languages, and his political positioning — nationalist but not communist, Muslim but secular, anti-imperialist but pro-democratic — made him the ideal host. Bandung also served Indonesian domestic interests: positioning Sukarno as a leader of the Afro-Asian world would compensate for Indonesia’s limited conventional power and ongoing internal challenges.
The Attendees¶
The twenty-nine nations that gathered in Bandung on April 18, 1955 were:
Afghanistan, Burma, Cambodia, Ceylon, the People’s Republic of China, Egypt, Ethiopia, Gold Coast (Ghana), India, Indonesia, Iran, Iraq, Japan, Jordan, Laos, Lebanon, Liberia, Libya, Nepal, Pakistan, the Philippines, Saudi Arabia, Sudan, Syria, Thailand, Turkey, the Democratic Republic of Vietnam (North Vietnam), the State of Vietnam (South Vietnam), and Yemen.
The invitation list itself was a political act. The People’s Republic of China was included despite American objections — the US still recognised the Taiwan government as the legitimate Chinese government — and Beijing’s Premier Zhou Enlai would use the conference to dramatic effect. The Democratic Republic of Vietnam (Ho Chi Minh’s government) was included over American protest. Japan was invited despite having been the colonial power over much of the region less than a decade earlier, a decision that required delicate handling and generated resentment in some delegations.
Egypt’s President Gamal Abdel Nasser, who had nationalised the Suez Canal Company just a month before Bandung (the nationalisation came in July 1956, but the Egyptian revolution was in full swing), attended as one of the conference’s stars. Gold Coast’s delegate represented the first sub-Saharan African territory to attend a major international conference as something approximating a sovereign participant; Ghana would declare independence in March 1957, inspired in part by the Bandung moment.
The figures assembled in Bandung were among the most consequential of the twentieth century. Nehru of India, Zhou Enlai of China, Nasser of Egypt, Sukarno of Indonesia, U Nu of Burma — collectively they governed or would govern over a billion people and would shape the political development of the postwar world for decades. For most of them, Bandung was one of their few opportunities to negotiate directly with each other without great-power intermediaries.
The Ten Principles¶
The conference’s formal output was the Final Communiqué, issued on April 24, 1955, which included ten principles for international relations — “The Dasa Sila Bandung,” or Ten Principles of Bandung:
- Respect for fundamental human rights and the purposes and principles of the United Nations Charter
- Respect for the sovereignty and territorial integrity of all nations
- Recognition of the equality of all races and nations, large and small
- Abstention from intervention or interference in the internal affairs of another country
- Respect for the right of every nation to defend itself, singly or collectively
- Abstention from the use of arrangements of collective defence to serve the particular interests of any big powers; abstention by any country from exerting pressures on other countries
- Refraining from acts or threats of aggression or the use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any country
- Settlement of all international disputes by peaceful means
- Promotion of mutual interests and cooperation
- Respect for justice and international obligations
The principles were a deliberate synthesis of the UN Charter’s language with the specific concerns of newly independent states: non-interference in internal affairs (protecting newly won sovereignty from great-power meddling); abstention from great-power collective defence arrangements (a rejection of both NATO and the Soviet blocs); and equality of races and nations (a direct challenge to the colonial hierarchy).
The document was in one sense unremarkable — it was a statement of principles, not a treaty, and principles are cheap. But the specific configuration of these principles carried political weight. The sixth principle — abstention from collective defence arrangements serving big-power interests — was directed explicitly at the US-Pakistan military alliance (SEATO and the Baghdad Pact) and at Soviet bloc arrangements. The assertion that there was a third position — neither Washington nor Moscow — was the conference’s political core.
Nehru and Non-Alignment¶
No figure at Bandung embodied the conference’s ambitions more fully than Jawaharlal Nehru. India’s first prime minister was simultaneously the world’s most prominent practitioner of what would come to be called non-alignment and the most intellectually sophisticated advocate of Third World solidarity. He arrived at Bandung already celebrated as the founder of modern India’s foreign policy doctrine — a doctrine he had articulated in the Five Principles of Peaceful Coexistence, known as Panchsheel, which he had signed with China in an agreement over Tibet just a year earlier, in April 1954.
The Panchsheel principles were: mutual respect for each other’s territorial integrity and sovereignty; mutual non-aggression; mutual non-interference in each other’s internal affairs; equality and mutual benefit; and peaceful coexistence. Bandung’s Ten Principles were essentially an expanded collective version of the Panchsheel — Nehru had brought the intellectual architecture from his bilateral agreement with Zhou Enlai and offered it as the foundation for Afro-Asian international relations.
Nehru’s non-alignment was not passive neutrality. He was deeply convinced that newly independent states needed to remain free from both superpower blocs to preserve their sovereign authority over their own political development. He had seen how American and Soviet aid came with political strings. He had watched how bloc membership had constrained the foreign policies of even European states. Non-alignment was, in Nehru’s conception, a positive assertion of strategic autonomy — the right to pursue India’s interests without subordinating them to Washington’s or Moscow’s framework.
At Bandung, Nehru was also navigating real tensions. Pakistan, India’s rival and recently partitioned twin, was at the table and had just joined SEATO — the Southeast Asia Treaty Organization, the American-led collective security arrangement that Nehru considered an extension of Cold War bloc politics into Asia. Sir John Kotelawala of Ceylon provoked controversy by equating Soviet domination of Eastern Europe with Western colonialism — a comparison that some delegates found accurate and Nehru found unhelpfully disruptive. The conference exposed the limits of Afro-Asian solidarity: the attending states had very different political systems, strategic alignments, and interests.
Nehru nonetheless emerged from Bandung as its most credible voice internationally. His prestige — leader of the largest democracy, advocate of a principled foreign policy, intellectual heavyweight — gave the conference’s principles legitimacy with Western audiences who might otherwise have dismissed them as anti-Western posturing.
Zhou Enlai’s Coup¶
The most unexpected diplomatic performance at Bandung was delivered by Zhou Enlai. The Premier of the People’s Republic of China arrived at Bandung under clouds of suspicion. Several delegations — the Philippines, Thailand, Pakistan — were deeply wary of Chinese intentions, given Beijing’s support for communist insurgencies in Southeast Asia, its rhetoric about overseas Chinese communities as a fifth column, and its recent military involvement in Korea. The United States had been actively lobbying Asian governments not to attend or not to invite China. When a plane carrying the Chinese delegation exploded over the South China Sea on April 11 — the result of a bomb, almost certainly placed by Taiwanese intelligence — killing eight Chinese officials who had been travelling separately, the atmosphere was one of genuine danger.
Zhou Enlai arrived and proceeded to demonstrate that he was one of the most gifted diplomatic performers of the twentieth century. Where Chinese propaganda had spoken of communist revolution and anti-imperialism in militant terms, Zhou at Bandung was restrained, collegial, and conciliatory. He explicitly acknowledged religious and political differences and said China was not seeking to export revolution. He announced China’s willingness to negotiate with the United States about Taiwan, a dramatic concession that removed the immediate crisis atmosphere. He approached delegations that had been hostile — the Filipinos, the Thais — with patient, personal diplomacy rather than bloc-style pressure.
His most significant gesture was strategic restraint on the question of overseas Chinese. Several Southeast Asian states had large ethnic Chinese communities whose loyalty had been a source of anxiety for newly independent governments. China’s constitution had previously claimed that overseas Chinese remained Chinese citizens regardless of local naturalisation. At Bandung, Zhou explicitly endorsed the principle that overseas Chinese should respect and be loyal to the laws of the countries in which they lived, and that they should not maintain dual nationality if local law prohibited it. This was a genuine concession — it renounced the leverage that claiming sovereignty over five million overseas Chinese would have given Beijing — and it was received with relief across Southeast Asia.
The transformation in perceptions of the PRC at Bandung was remarkable. Delegations that had arrived hostile departed with greater openness. Indonesia and China signed a treaty on dual nationality in the wake of the conference. Egypt moved toward diplomatic recognition of Beijing. The Bandung Conference broke China’s near-total diplomatic isolation from the non-communist world and established Zhou Enlai as a statesman of the first rank.
American officials who monitored the conference were alarmed at its impact on their regional alliance management. Secretary of State John Foster Dulles had denounced non-alignment as “immoral.” His assessment of Bandung as a setback for American interests was accurate.
The Fault Lines¶
Bandung’s ten principles papered over fault lines that would soon fracture Afro-Asian solidarity. The most fundamental was the divide between genuinely non-aligned states and those aligned with one superpower or the other.
Pakistan, Turkey, Thailand, Iraq, and the Philippines were all members of US-sponsored collective security arrangements — SEATO, the Baghdad Pact, ANZUS. Their presence at Bandung was anomalous: they were formally committed to American alliance structures while professing the conference’s principle of abstention from great-power bloc politics. Their presence reflected the calculation that the symbolism of Afro-Asian solidarity was worth attending without compromising their security arrangements, and that the conference could be influenced from within.
The question of Soviet colonialism was the most explosive. Kotelawala’s comparison of Soviet control over Eastern Europe to Western imperialism provoked a fierce response from the Soviet-friendly delegates. China’s Zhou Enlai avoided taking a clear position. Nehru, who had a warmer relationship with Moscow than with Washington, deflected. The final communiqué mentioned “colonialism in all its manifestations” — a phrase capable of including Soviet domination of Eastern Europe or not, depending on the reader.
The conference also exposed the competing nationalisms that would subsequently tear at the Non-Aligned Movement. The Arab delegations from Egypt, Syria, Iraq, Jordan, Lebanon, and Saudi Arabia were united on Palestine — Bandung was one of the first international conferences to formally endorse Palestinian rights — but divided on nearly everything else, reflecting the competing dynastic, ideological, and sectarian fractures that have characterised the Arab world ever since.
The India-China relationship, presented as Panchsheel brotherhood at Bandung, would deteriorate into a border war by 1962. The Sino-Indian War of that year revealed that the two largest non-aligned powers had incompatible territorial claims and were potential rivals for the leadership of the developing world — a competition that the Bandung moment had temporarily submerged but not resolved.
From Bandung to NAM¶
The Non-Aligned Movement as a formal institution did not emerge immediately from Bandung. The 1955 conference generated solidarity and articulated principles but did not create an organisation. The institutionalisation came through a series of follow-on meetings that refined the concept and broadened the membership.
The Belgrade Conference of September 1961 produced the Non-Aligned Movement proper, with twenty-five founding members. Yugoslavia’s President Tito was the primary organiser — his position as a communist outside the Soviet bloc gave him a bridge between the ideological factions. Nehru and Nasser attended as the movement’s most prominent faces. Cuba’s Che Guevara brought a revolutionary energy that Nehru found excessive and Nasser found useful. The Belgrade conference codified non-alignment as a political identity rather than merely a diplomatic posture.
By the third Non-Aligned Summit in Lusaka in 1970, the movement had grown to fifty-four members. At Algiers in 1973, it had grown to seventy-five. The oil crisis of that year — OPEC’s embargo, engineered by Arab members of the Non-Aligned Movement — demonstrated that the Third World could exercise collective economic leverage in ways that the Bandung principles had foreshadowed. The New International Economic Order, demanded at the 1974 UN Special Session on Raw Materials and Development, was the economic expression of Bandung’s political project: a reorganisation of global trade and finance on terms less disadvantageous to developing countries.
The Non-Aligned Movement never fully lived up to Bandung’s idealism. Many members took sides — openly or covertly — in the Cold War. Cuba and Vietnam were aligned with the Soviet Union; Pakistan and Egypt at various points aligned with the United States. The movement’s near-universal condemnation of Israeli settlements coexisted with an inability to prevent them. The principle of non-interference in internal affairs protected repressive governments from legitimate international scrutiny. By the 1980s, the Non-Aligned Movement had become a forum for performative anti-imperialism with declining practical influence.
But this judgement misses the movement’s structural achievement. The Non-Aligned Movement gave developing countries a permanent international forum, collective bargaining capacity in the United Nations General Assembly, and a shared political vocabulary — sovereignty, self-determination, non-interference, the right to development — that shaped the evolution of international law and norms throughout the Cold War and beyond.
The Bandung Spirit Today¶
The Bandung Conference’s most direct contemporary echo is the politics of multipolarity and Global South solidarity that has defined the international system since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022. When the UN General Assembly voted on resolutions condemning the invasion, the pattern of abstentions and non-votes mapped almost precisely onto the membership of the Non-Aligned Movement: India, China, South Africa, Brazil, Pakistan, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Bangladesh, Indonesia, and Vietnam all declined to vote for condemnation. Their stated reasoning — that the conflict was a matter for negotiation, that their countries faced other priorities, that they would not take sides in great-power disputes — were recognisably Bandung arguments.
China’s diplomatic positioning since 2000 draws explicitly on Bandung’s legacy. The Five Principles of Peaceful Coexistence — effectively the Panchsheel — appear in every major Chinese foreign policy document and treaty. China’s opposition to NATO expansion echoes the sixth Bandung principle against collective security arrangements serving great-power interests. Its insistence on non-interference in the internal affairs of partner countries — explicitly not conditioning loans on governance or human rights standards — is the Bandung principle of non-interference applied to 21st-century geoeconomics. When Chinese officials speak of “building a community of shared future for mankind” or of “South-South cooperation,” they are operating in the intellectual tradition that began at Bandung.
But china is not simply inheriting the Bandung tradition — it is competing with India for its leadership. The India-China rivalry for influence over the Global South is the contemporary version of the Nehru-Zhou dynamic at Bandung. Both countries present themselves as the legitimate voice of the developing world; both claim the mantle of anti-colonialism; both aspire to reshape the UN Security Council and international institutions to give the Global South greater weight.
India’s position is more complex. As the world’s largest democracy and a country with genuine strategic autonomy, India has maintained the Nehruvian tradition of non-alignment — rebranded under Prime Minister Modi as “strategic autonomy” — while also deepening security ties with the United States through the Quad. India’s abstentions on Ukraine resemble Nehru’s careful navigation at Bandung, balancing relations with Moscow and Washington while asserting sovereign independence from both. India’s candidacy for a permanent UN Security Council seat — supported by the United States, UK, France, Germany, and Japan — is, among other things, an attempt to address the structural exclusion of the developing world from global governance that Bandung identified in 1955.
The BRICS grouping — Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa, and the states admitted in the 2023 expansion (Saudi Arabia, UAE, Iran, Egypt, Ethiopia, and Argentina, though Argentina subsequently withdrew) — is in many respects the institutional successor to the Non-Aligned Movement. The BRICS members are not non-aligned in any strict sense — Russia is a party to the Ukraine conflict; China is a near-peer competitor with the United States; India has deep security ties to Washington. But the political project is recognisably Bandung: to build an institutional framework that gives the major non-Western states collective leverage in global governance and reduces their dependence on Western-defined rules and institutions.
The Bandung principles resonate differently in different contexts. “Non-interference in internal affairs” was an emancipatory principle when applied by newly independent states defending their political systems from great-power meddling. It becomes a shield for authoritarian governments when applied to China’s Xinjiang policies, Russia’s domestic repression, or Saudi Arabia’s treatment of dissidents. The decolonisation framework that animated Bandung does not map cleanly onto a world in which former colonial powers include China — which exercises de facto suzerainty over Tibet and Xinjiang, applies economic coercion to trading partners, and deploys its own weaponised interdependence — and in which some of the most vigorous defenders of sovereignty are authoritarian governments seeking impunity from international scrutiny.
Why It Still Matters¶
The Bandung Conference matters in 2026 because the questions it raised have not been answered. Can the Global South — a diverse collection of states with conflicting interests, different political systems, and competition among themselves for regional leadership — act as a coherent political bloc? Can the principle of sovereignty and non-interference be reconciled with international human rights norms and the protection of populations from their own governments? Can a multipolar order provide stability, or does it produce the fragmentation and conflict that characterised the multipolar world of 1914?
The contemporary Non-Aligned Movement, now with 120 members — nearly two-thirds of all UN member states — is a more heterogeneous body than anything Sukarno envisioned in 1955. It includes petro-states and small island nations, military dictatorships and vibrant democracies, countries integrated into Western supply chains and countries under Western sanctions. The abstention pattern on Ukraine suggests that the political identity of non-alignment has more durability than the 1990s unipolar moment suggested — that states which remember colonial subjection are genuinely reluctant to subordinate their foreign policies to Western frameworks, even when they broadly share Western values.
The most consequential Bandung legacy may be the shift in Global South expectations about what international order should look like. The developing world spent the Cold War largely as an object of great-power competition — proxy war zones, aid recipients, markets for arms sales. The Bandung project — still incomplete, still contested — was the assertion that these countries should be subjects of international politics, shaping the rules rather than merely living under them. The demand for permanent UN Security Council seats for Africa, Latin America, and South Asia; the demand for reformed IMF and World Bank voting weights; the BRICS New Development Bank; China’s Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank — all are expressions of this demand.
Whether the demand produces a more equitable international order or merely a reconfigured hierarchy in which new great powers — China and India above all — claim the privileges that the old great powers extracted from their colonial holdings is the defining question of 21st-century great power competition. Sukarno thought the answer would be determined by Afro-Asian solidarity. Zhou Enlai thought it would be determined by Chinese leadership. Nehru thought it would be determined by principled non-alignment. None of them fully got what they wanted. The argument they started — about sovereignty, decolonisation, and the terms on which the postcolonial world would be integrated into international society — is still being made.
In a building in Bandung in April 1955, twenty-nine nations declared, for the first time collectively, that they were not objects of history but its authors. The declaration was premature and imperfectly realised. It has not been revoked.
Sources & Further Reading¶
- Wright, Richard. The Color Curtain: A Report on the Bandung Conference. World Publishing Company, 1956. A contemporary first-hand account by the African-American novelist, invaluable for its textured observation of the conference’s atmosphere and dynamics.
- Prashad, Vijay. The Darker Nations: A People’s History of the Third World. The New Press, 2007. The most influential recent account of the Third World political project from Bandung to the present, written from a sympathetic but critical perspective.
- Connelly, Matthew. A Diplomatic Revolution: Algeria’s Fight for Independence and the Origins of the Post-Cold War Era. Oxford University Press, 2002. Examines how the anti-colonial project intersected with Cold War diplomacy in ways that illuminate Bandung’s context and consequences.
- Mackie, Jamie. Bandung 1955: Non-Alignment and Afro-Asian Solidarity. Editions Didier Millet, 2005. The most detailed historical treatment of the conference itself, including its organisation and internal negotiations.
- Eslava, Luis, Michael Fakhri, and Vasuki Nesiah, eds. Bandung, Global History, and International Law. Cambridge University Press, 2017. A comprehensive scholarly reassessment of Bandung’s legacy for international law and political economy.