Bandung Global History and International Law

Endorsements
This book covers the significance of the Bandung Conference through a

sophisticated set of narratives, counternarratives, and appraisals about the
conference. Notwithstanding the goal of many contributors to show its
long-lasting impact, the volume also includes the tragic story of frustrated
aims, such as the decolonizing of the modern economy, the revealing
absence of Latin American states, or the dark side of nationalist-socialist
projects upon gender politics. Most importantly, the book is a moving
contribution to utopian thinking, a ray of hope for those of us who “want
to be allowed to dream alternative futures.”
– Helena Maria Alviar Garcia, Universidad de los Andes, Bogotá
There is a thread that runs from the “Third World” to the “Global South,”
from anti-imperialist struggles to the World Social Forum, from decoloniza-
tion to the contemporary polycentric world. This genealogical thread is
suffused with the “Spirit of Bandung,” a spirit of resistance to the imperious
West, of negotiated understandings of the law, of critical and autonomous
intellectual thought. As this lucid, engaging and engaged collection shows,
the legacy of Bandung continues to be central not only to the former Third
World, but to the entire globe.
– Arturo Escobar, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill
Until now, there has been no authoritative re-telling of the history of inter-
national law that de-centers the Westphalian myth. Taking Bandung as its
inspiration, this book critically engages the third world’s resistance to the
Global North and examines the silences, blind spots, and the underbelly of
its decolonizing nationalism in re-writing and re-configuring mainstream
accounts of the history of international law as well as its operative logics
and normative commitments.
– James Gathii, Loyola University, Chicago and Trade Policy Centre
in Africa (TRAPCA), Arusha
The intellectual and political history of the world is being rewritten by
historians of law. This terrific collection shows how. Law provides a red
thread: as a repository of dreams, a tool of dominion and resistance, a
doorway to understanding what political economy has been, might have
been, and might yet be. The editors have convened the most innovative
international legal scholars writing today in a multiyear conversation. The
result is a testament to the power of global research collaboration. Each essay
is a delight: methodologically creative, full of intriguing facts and fascinating
reflections on the practice and potential for a truly global history.
– David Kennedy, Harvard University
It is hard to imagine a more important historical project today. Looking
backwards and forwards from 1955, the essays in this volume illuminate the
projects of third world intellectuals, diplomats, and lawyers to transform
politics and priorities in the international system. Never have the institutional
projects that constitute the history of “third-worldism” been told at this depth.
Never has there been an equally global perspective on those projects. The
quality and range of these essays provides an unprecedented opening to
thinking about the possibilities and limits of international law as an instrument
of solidarity and global change. This is not only a hugely important work; it is
also a powerful political intervention in present globalization debates.
– Martti Koskenniemi, University of Helsinki
For some time now, the Bandung Conference is regarded as an event whose
significance has come to pass along with the spirit of anti-imperial resistance
it once symbolized. This book challenges such an assessment not only by
revisiting the contested history of the conference but by analyzing its legacy
for a rethinking of the international legal order, its past and present.
– Saba Mahmood, University of California, Berkeley
This highly anticipated collection is a major contribution to global history and
histories of international law. In asking how we should understand the rela-
tionship of Bandung to the politics of the present, its authors offer a compel-
ling account of the possibilities for solidarity and resistance that have been
inherited along with the contemporary international legal order. They show us
that the debate over the meaning of Bandung began before the conference was
over, and that the struggle to realise its potential continues to play out. The
publication of this book is an important moment in that struggle.
– Anne Orford, University of Melbourne
The era of Bandung is over, and its spirit has dissipated. But that does not
mean that the history that was made there is no longer relevant or that the
spirit cannot be conjured to unimaginable feats in our present day. Bandung,
Global History, and International Law mines that old history for nuggets that
might inform our mapless present.
– Vijay Prashad, Trinity College, Hartford
bandung, global history,
and international law
In 1955 a conference was held in Bandung, Indonesia that was attended by repre-
sentatives of twenty-nine nations. Against the backdrop of crumbling European
colonies, Asian and African leaders forged a new alliance and established anti-
imperial principles for a new world order. The conference captured the popular
imagination across the Global South. Bandung’s significance as a counterpoint to
the dominant world order was both an act of collective imagination and a practical
political project for decolonization that inspired a range of social movements,
diplomatic efforts, institutional experiments, and heterodox visions of the history
and future of the world. This book explores what the spirit of Bandung has meant to
people across the world over the past decades and what it means today. Scholars
from a wide range of fields show how, despite the complicated legacy of the
conference, international law was never the same after Bandung.
luis eslava is Senior Lecturer in International Law and Co-Director of the Centre for
Critical International Law at Kent Law School. He is also a Senior Fellow at Melbourne
Law School, International Professor at Universidad Externado de Colombia, and core
faculty member of the Institute for Global Law and Policy, Harvard Law School. He is
the author of Local Space, Global Life: The Everyday Operation of International Law
and Development (2015) and the co-editor, with Liliana Obregón and René Urueña, of
Imperialismo y Derecho Internacional. He is an active member of the Third World
Approaches to International Law (TWAIL) network. He is originally from Colombia.
michael fakhri teaches in the areas of international economic law, law and
development, and food and agriculture. His research interests include Third World
Approaches to International Law (TWAIL), international legal history, and legal
accounts of imperialism. He has given talks at Harvard Law School, Princeton
University, Brown University, Cornell University, London School of Economics,
University of Cambridge, the American University of Beirut, and the American
University in Cairo. He is the author of Sugar and the Making of International Law.
He is originally from Lebanon.
vasuki nesiah teaches human rights, legal, and social theory at NYU. She is also
core faculty at the Institute for Global Law and Policy at Harvard Law School. She
has published widely on the history and politics of human rights, humanitarianism,
international criminal law, international feminisms, and colonial legal history. A
founding member of Third World Approaches to International Law (TWAIL), she
continues as an active participant in this network. She serves on the international
editorial committees of Feminist Legal Studies and the London Review of Inter-
national Law. She is originally from Sri Lanka.
Bandung, Global History, and
International Law
critical pasts and pending futures
Edited by
LUIS ESLAVA
University of Kent
MICHAEL FAKHRI
University of Oregon
VASUKI NESIAH
New York University
Foreword by JUSTICE GEORGES ABI-SAAB

Epilogue by PROFESSOR PARTHA CHATTERJEE
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Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9781107123991
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© Cambridge University Press 2017
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First published 2017
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A catalogue record for this publication is available from the British Library.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
names: Eslava, Luis, editor. | Fakhri, Michael, editor. | Nesiah, Vasuki editor.
title: Bandung, global history, and international law : critical pasts and pending futures / edited by
Luis Eslava, University of Kent, Michael Fakhri, University of Oregon, Vasuki Nesiah,
New York University; foreword by Georges Abi-Saab ; epilogue by Partha Chatterjee.
description: New York : Cambridge University Press, 2017. | Includes bibliographical
references and index.
identifiers: lccn 2017014855 | isbn 9781107123991 (Hardback)
subjects: lcsh: Nonalignment–History–20th century. | Asian-African Conference
(1st : 1955 : Bandung, Indonesia) | Decolonization–History–20th century. | International law. |
BISAC: LAW / International.
classification: lcc jz1313.3 .b36 2017 | ddc 327.09171/6–dc23 LC record available at
https://lccn.loc.gov/2017014855
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accurate or appropriate.
“what remains from yesterday is still ours – but the color of the sky has
changed”
The Speech of the Red Indian
Mahmoud Darwish
We dedicate this book to our parents and our children. For all three of us the
Bandung project is a claiming of our political ancestry; it is an inheritance that
is intertwined with our personal ancestry, parents who make up the Bandung
generation, and children who will inherit and re-make that legacy.
It is in that spirit that we dedicate this with love to our parents, Esther Arcila
and Carlos Eslava, Joe Fakhri and Ragheda Fakhri, Anita Nesiah and
Devanesan Nesiah, and to our beloved children, Martin Eslava and Tomas
Eslava, Zain Romano, Arjini Kumari Nawal, and Sanjeevi Kumari Nuhumal.
Contents
List of Illustrations page xiii

List of Contributors xv
Foreword xxix
Georges Abi-Saab
Acknowledgments xxxi
introduction 1
The Spirit of Bandung 3
Luis Eslava, Michael Fakhri, and Vasuki Nesiah
part i. bandung histories 33

1 Anti-Imperialism: Then and Now 35
B. S. Chimni
2 Newer Is Truer: Time, Space, and Subjectivity at the Bandung
Conference 49
Rose Sydney Parfitt
3 From Versailles to Bandung: The Interwar Origins of
Anticolonialism 66
Fredrik Petersson
4 Bandung: Reflections on the Sea, the World, and Colonialism 81
Samera Esmeir
5 Nationalism, Imperialism, and Bandung: Nineteenth-Century
Japan as a Prelude 95
Mohammad Shahabuddin
6 Ghostly Visitations: “Questioning Heirs” and the Tragic
Tasks of Narrating Bandung Futures 108
Adil Hasan Khan
ix
x Contents
7 Bandung 1955: The Deceit and the Conceit 126

Ibrahim J. Gassama
8 Not a Place, but a Project: Bandung, TWAIL, and the
Aesthetics of Thirdness 140
Vik Kanwar
part ii. political solidarities and geographical

affiliations 159
9 Challenging the Lifeline of Imperialism: Reassessing Afro-Asian
Solidarity and Related Activism in the Decade 1955–1965 161
Katharine McGregor and Vannessa Hearman
10 Bandung, China, and the Making of World Order in East Asia 177
Chen Yifeng
11 Decolonization as a Cold War Imperative: Bandung and the
Soviets 196
Boris N. Mamlyuk
12 Central Asia as an Object of Orientalist Narratives in the Age
of Bandung 215
Akbar Rasulov
13 Latin America during the Bandung Era: Anti-Imperialist
Movements vs. Anti-Communist States 232
Liliana Obregón
14 Peripheral Parallels? Europe’s Edges and the World of Bandung 247
John Reynolds
15 The Bandung Conference and Latin America: A Decolonial
Dialogue with Oscar Correas 263
Germán Medardo Sandoval Trigo
16 A Triple Struggle: Nonalignment, Yugoslavia, and National,
Social, and Geopolitical Emancipation 276
Zoran Oklopcic
17 “Let Us First of All Have Unity among Us”: Bandung,
International Law, and the Empty Politics of Solidarity 293
Umut Özsu
part iii. nations and their others: bandung at home 309

18 The Colonial Debris of Bandung: Equality and Facilitating
the Rise of the Hindu Right in India 311
Ratna Kapur
Contents xi
19 From Bandung 1955 to Bangladesh 1971: Postcolonial Self-

Determination and Third World Failures in South Asia 322
Cyra Akila Choudhury
20 Reimagining Bandung for Women at Work in Egypt: Law
and the Woman between the Factory and the “Social Factory” 337
Mai Taha
21 Rethinking the Concept of Colonialism in Bandung and
Its African Union Aftermath 355
Luwam Dirar
22 China and Africa: Development, Land, and the Colonial Legacy 367
Sylvia Wairimu Kang’ara
23 Bandung’s Legacy for the Arab Spring 381
Noha Aboueldahab
24 Applying the Memory of Bandung: Lessons from Australia’s
Negative Case Study 397
Rebecca LaForgia
25 Bandung in the Shadow: The Brazilian Experience 411
Fabia Fernandes Carvalho Veçoso
part iv. postcolonial agendas: justice, rights, and

development 429
26 The Humanization of the Third World 431
Hani Sayed
27 Bandung’s Legacy: Solidarity and Contestation in Global
Women’s Rights 450
Aziza Ahmed
28 Reflections on Rhetoric and Rage: Bandung and Environmental
Injustice 465
Karin Mickelson and Usha Natarajan
29 From Statesmen to Technocrats to Financiers: Development
Agents in the Third World 481
Priya S. Gupta
30 Between Bandung and Doha: International Economic Law and
Developing Countries 498
Julio Faundez
31 The Bandung Ethic and International Human Rights Praxis:
Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow 515
Obiora Chinedu Okafor
xii Contents
part v. another international law 533

32 Bandung and the Origins of Third World Sovereignty 535
Antony Anghie
33 Letters from Bandung: Encounters with Another
International Law 552
Sundhya Pahuja
34 Altering International Law: Nasser, Bandung, and the
Suez Crisis 574
Charlotte Peevers
35 Palestine at Bandung: The Longwinded Start of a Reimagined
International Law 595
Nahed Samour
36 “Must Have Been Love”: The Nonaligned Future of A Warm
December 616
Anthony Paul Farley
37 The Bandung Declaration in the Twenty-First Century:
Are We There Yet? 631
Arif Havas Oegroseno
38 Virtue Pedagogy and International Law Teaching 636
Hengameh Saberi
epilogue 655
The Legacy of Bandung 657
Partha Chatterjee
Index 675
Illustrations
Figure 8.1 The Five Principle No-s for a New Pancasila. EVA
International (2014). Courtesy Iswanto Hartono and
Raqs Media Collective. page 144
xiii
Contributors
Abi-Saab, Georges
Georges Abi-Saab is Emeritus Professor of International Law, Graduate Insti-
tute of International Studies, Geneva; Honorary Professor, Cairo University
Faculty of Law; Member of the Institute of International Law; and winner of
the 2013 Hague Prize. Born in Cairo, he studied law, economics, and politics
at the Universities of Cairo, Paris, Michigan, Harvard, Cambridge, and
Geneva. He held numerous visiting professorships including at Harvard,
New York University, and Universities of Tunis, Jordan, and the West Indies.
He served as judge ad hoc twice on the International Court of Justice; judge
on the Appeals Chamber of the International Criminal Tribunals for the
former Yugoslavia and Rwanda; Chairman of the Appellate Body of the World
Trade Organization; as well as on numerous other international tribunals. He
was counsel and advocate for several governments before the ICJ. He has
authored numerous books and articles, as well as two courses at the Hague
Academy of International Law, including most famously his General Course
of Public International Law in 1987.
Aboueldahab, Noha
Noha Aboueldahab is a Visiting Fellow at the Brookings Doha Center. Since
2003, she has worked on international law, human rights and development
issues at various United Nations agencies and NGOs in New York, Lebanon,
and Qatar. She is the author of Transitional Justice and the Prosecution of
Political Leaders in the Arab Region (2017), in which she challenges main-
stream transitional justice practice and scholarship using original material
from interviews she conducted in Egypt, Libya, Tunisia, and Yemen between
2012 and 2017. She is originally from Egypt.
xv
xvi Contributors
Ahmed, Aziza
Aziza Ahmed is Professor of Law at Northeastern University School of Law.
She writes on global health, criminal law, human rights, and feminist legal
theory. She recently published “Medical Evidence and Expertise in Abortion
Jurisprudence” in the American Journal of Law and Medicine and “Traf-
ficked?: AIDS, Criminal Law, and the Politics of Measurement” in the
University of Miami Law Review. Prior to joining the faculty at Northeastern,
Professor Ahmed was a Women’s Law and Public Policy Fellow at the
International Community of Women Living with HIV/AIDS.
Anghie, Antony
Antony Anghie is a Professor at the National University of Singapore Faculty
of Law and Professor of Law at the S. J. Quinney School of Law, University of
Utah. He has written on various public and private international law topics
including the history and theory of international law, international economic
law, globalization, human rights law, and the use of force. He is a member of
the Third World Approaches to International Law (TWAIL) network of
scholars. He is the author of Imperialism, Sovereignty and the Making of
International Law (2005). He serves on the editorial and advisory boards of
various journals and was recently appointed an executive editor of the Asian
Journal of International Law.
Chatterjee, Partha
Partha Chatterjee was educated at Presidency College, Calcutta, and the
University of Rochester. After teaching for more than three decades in
Calcutta, he is currently Professor of Anthropology and South Asian Studies
at Columbia University, New York, and Honorary Professor, Centre for Stud-
ies in Social Sciences, Calcutta. Among his books are Nationalist Thought and
the Colonial World (1986), The Nation and Its Fragments (1993), The Politics
of the Governed (2004), and The Black Hole of Empire (2012).
Chen, Yifeng
Chen Yifeng is an Associate Professor at Peking University Law School, as well
as a docent in international law, University of Helsinki. He is also Assistant
Director of the Peking University Institute of International Law. Prof. Chen’s
fields of interest include legal theory, labor law, international law, and inter-
national organizations.
Chimni, B. S.
B. S. Chimni is Professor of International Law, School of International
Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. He has served as Vice
Chancellor of the West Bengal National University of Juridical Sciences,
Contributors xvii
Kolkata (2004–2006). He has been a visiting professor at Brown University and

University of Tokyo. He has also held visiting positions at Harvard Law
School, University of Cambridge, University of Minnesota, and York University.
He is an associate member of Institut de Droit International. His central research
interest is to elaborate in association with a group of like-minded scholars a
critical Third World Approach to International Law (TWAIL). He is the editor-
in-chief of the Indian Journal of International Law. His latest publication is the
second edition of the book International Law and World Order: A Critique of
Contemporary Approaches (Cambridge University Press, 2017).
Choudhury, Cyra Akila
Cyra Akila Choudhury is Professor of Law at Florida International University
College of Law in Miami. She has a JD (cum laude) and LLM from George-
town University Law Center and an MA in Comparative Politics
from Columbia University. She earned her Bachelor’s in Political Science from
The College of Wooster where she won the Frank Miller Prize in Comparative
Politics, was inducted into Phi Beta Kappa, and graduated second in her class.
Prior to joining the FIU faculty, Choudhury worked for The National Acad-
emies advising the federal government on international labor standards as well as
for Freshfields Bruckhaus Deringer. She returned to Georgetown Law Center as
the Future Law Professor Fellow in 2005. Choudhury’s expertise is in inter-
national and comparative law and gender, subjectivity and feminist legal theory,
and the socio-legal effects of national security law and the War on Terror.
Dirar, Luwam
Luwam Dirar is a Research Associate at the Weatherhead Center for Inter-
national Affairs of Harvard University. Luwam is also a JSD Candidate at
Cornell Law School. Luwam’s interests include international law, human
rights, and North-South relations.
Eslava, Luis
Luis Eslava is Senior Lecturer in International Law and Co-Director of the
Centre for Critical International Law at Kent Law School, Senior Fellow at
Melbourne Law School, and International Professor at Universidad Externado
de Colombia. He is also core faculty of the Institute for Global Law and
Policy, Harvard Law School. He works in the areas of international legal
theory and history, anthropology of international law, public law, and law
and development. He is the author of Local Space, Global Life: The Everyday
Operation of International Law and Development (2015) and the coeditor of
Imperialismo y Derecho Internacional (2016), with Liliana Obregón and René
Urueña. Eslava is an active member of the Third World Approaches to
International Law (TWAIL) network. He is originally from Colombia.
xviii Contributors
Esmeir, Samera
Samera Esmeir is an Associate Professor in the Department of Rhetoric at
University of California, Berkeley. She is the author of Juridical Humanity:
A Colonial History (2012) and is currently working on a book that is a
theoretical and historical investigation of the nineteenth-century rise of the
international as a new signifier of the world.
Fakhri, Michael
Michael Fakhri is an Associate Professor at the University of Oregon School of
Law, where he is also the codirector of the Food Resiliency Project. He is also
core faculty of the Institute for Global Law and Policy, Harvard Law School.
Fakhri is the author of Sugar and the Making of International Trade Law
(2014). He is an active member of the Third World Approaches to Inter-
national Law (TWAIL) network. He is originally from Lebanon.
Farley, Anthony
Anthony Paul Farley is the Matthews Distinguished Professor of Jurisprudence
at Albany Law School. He was the Lassiter Distinguished Visiting Professor at
the University of Kentucky College of Law and the Andrew Jefferson Endowed
Chair at Texas Southern University’s Thurgood Marshall School of Law in
2014–2015, the Haywood Burns Chair in Civil Rights at CUNY School of Law
in 2006–2007, and, before Albany, tenured professor at Boston College Law
School. He was elected to the American Law Institute in 2017. His work has
appeared in Hip Hop and the Law (2015), After the Storm: Black Intellectuals
Explore the Meaning of Hurricane Katrina (2007), Cultural Analysis, Cultural
Studies & the Law (2003), Crossroads, Directions and a New Critical Race
Theory (2002), and Black Men on Race, Gender & Sexuality (1999). He has also
published in the Yale Journal of Law & Humanities, the NYU Review of Law &
Social Change, the Southern California Interdisciplinary Law Journal, the
Michigan Journal of Race & Law, Law & Literature, the Berkeley Journal of
African American Law & Policy, and the Columbia Journal of Race & Law.
Farley is a graduate of Harvard Law School and the University of Virginia.
Faundez, Julio
Julio Faundez is Professor of Law (emeritus) at Warwick University. His main
research interests are international economic law and law and development.
He has written extensively on law and democracy, legal and judicial reform,
and has evaluated legal reform projects for the World Bank, the DFID, and
the Inter-American Development Bank. He has advised several national
agencies and international institutions, including the DFID (UK), the ILO,
UNDP, UNCTAD, IADB, and the World Bank. He acted as counsel for the
Republic of Namibia in the Case Concerning Kasikili/Sedudu Island (Inter-
national Court of Justice, 1999) and for the Republic of Chile in the Maritime
Contributors xix
Dispute with Perú (International Court of Justice, 2014). He is editor of the

book series Law, Development and Globalization published by Routledge and
was founding editor of The Hague Journal on the Rule of Law.
Gassama, Ibrahim
Ibrahim J. Gassama is the Frank Nash Professor of Law at the University of
Oregon School of Law. Gassama is a native of Sierra Leone and a graduate of
Harvard Law School. Prior to joining the legal academy, he practiced law in
New York and worked at TransAfrica, the African-American human rights lobby,
to change U.S. foreign policy toward Africa and the Caribbean. He helped
coordinate the Free South Africa Movement in the United States, including
Nelson Mandela’s first visit to the country. He also helped manage the training
and deployment of foreign observers to South Africa’s first democratic elections
in 1994. Professor Gassama has consulted on various human rights and inter-
national economic issues including Caribbean banana export to Europe, polit-
ical disputes and economic stagnation in Haiti, and racial discrimination in the
Cuban justice system. He teaches and writes about international law.
Gupta, Priya
Priya S. Gupta is Professor and Faculty Director of the General LLM Program at
Southwestern Law School, where she teaches Property, Public International Law,
Law & Development, and Race & the Law. Prior to joining Southwestern, she
was Assistant Professor and (founding) Co-Director of the Centre for Women,
Law, & Social Change at the Jindal Global Law School in Delhi NCR, India. Her
research is in property and economic development from critical and postcolonial
perspectives. In particular, her recent scholarship explores how racial disparities
have been written into the laws and spatial structures of the single-family house in
suburban United States and the conceptions of legitimate property, modernity,
and citizenship that inform the governance of urban land in India.
Hearman, Vannessa
Vannessa Hearman is a lecturer in Indonesian Studies at Charles Darwin
University and a historian of Southeast Asia. Her research interests include the
1965–66 anticommunist violence in Indonesia and Indonesian transnational
activism during the Sukarno era (1949–66). Her research has been published
in several books and journals including Indonesia, South East Asia Research,
and Critical Asian Studies.
Kang’ara, Sylvia
Sylvia Wairimu Kang’ara is the founding Dean of Riara Law School, Kenya,
and an Associate Professor of Law. She is an advocate of the High Court of
Kenya. Her current research is on critical histories of international law, legal
issues of transcontinental infrastructure development, and transnational
xx Contributors
lawyering. Before joining the faculty of the University of Washington School

of Law, Seattle, she was an international legal associate at White & Case, LLP,
New York. She has written on African marriage law reform and comparative
property law. She studied at Harvard Law School and the University of Nairobi.
Kanwar, Vik
Vik Kanwar is Associate Director of International Programs at Southwestern
Law School in Los Angeles and formerly Associate Professor of Law at Jindal
Global Law School, near New Delhi. He is the cofounder of the Winter School
on Art/Law, founding Executive Director of the Centre on Public Law and
Jurisprudence (CPLJ), and Faculty Convener of the Critical Theory Work-
shop. In his teaching, writing, and curatorial projects, Professor Kanwar con-
ceptualizes law as an expression of normativity, coercion, culture, and value.
Kapur, Ratna
Ratna Kapur teaches Global Studies and Human Rights with the Faculty of
Law, Symbiosis International University. She is currently a Visiting Professor
of Law at Queen Mary University of London, and also a Senior Faculty with
the Institute of Global Law and Policy, Harvard Law School. Kapur is a
member of the Third World Approaches to International Law (TWAIL)
network and actively works on issues of gender, the protection of the rights of
religious and sexual minorities and migrant worker’s rights from a postcolonial
perspective. Kapur has written and published extensively on postcolonial and
feminist legal theory, human rights, as well as on secularism, religion, and the
Hindu Right. Her book publications include Erotic Justice: Law and the New
Politics of Postcolonialism (2005) and Secularism’s Last Sight? Hindutva and
the (Mis)Rule of Law (2001). She is a co-editor of the forthcoming special issues
on Gender and the Rise of the Global Rights, Signs- Journal of Women and
Culture. Her forthcoming book is Gender, Alterity, and Human Rights: Free-
dom in a Fishbowl (Edward Elgar Press, Spring 2018).
Khan, Adil Hasan
Adil Hasan Khan is a McKenzie Fellow at Melbourne Law School. He
completed his PhD in International Studies, with a specialization in Inter-
national Law and a minor in Anthropology and Sociology of Development,
at the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies
(IHEID) in Geneva. His doctoral dissertation, titled Inheriting Persona:
Narrating the Conduct of Third World International Lawyers, narrates the
conduct of two generations of Third World international lawyers in their
struggles to reimagine, re-found, and alternatively authorize international
law, and identifies the defining struggle of the third world in international
law as being over temporal transmissions or inheritance. He was Residential
Contributors xxi
Institute Fellow at the Institute for Global Law and Policy (IGLP), Harvard
Law School during 2016–2017.
LaForgia, Rebecca
Dr. Rebecca LaForgia earned an LLB (Hons) at Adelaide University, LLM at
Cambridge University, and PhD at Flinders University. LaForgia is a senior
lecturer at Adelaide University School of Law. She is a co-convener of
International Law. LaForgia was also part of an inaugural team at Adelaide
Law School to offer a Massive Online Course on Cyberwar, Surveillance and
Security. LaForgia’s research explores law and narratives. She has completed a
number of submissions and oral testimony on trade agreements and the need
for these agreements to contain ongoing, open, and meaningful information
flow. Her most recent submission was to the Australian Joint Standing Com-
mittee on Treaties on the China Australia Free Trade Agreement.
Mamlyuk, Boris
Boris N. Mamlyuk is Associate Professor of Law at the University of Memphis,
School of Law (USA). His research focuses generally on Russian approaches
to international law and global governance from a historical perspective.
McGregor, Katharine
Associate Professor Katharine McGregor is a historian of Southeast Asia with
special interests in the topics of history, memory, violence, and transnational
political history. She currently is an Australian Research Council Future
Fellow for the Project Confronting Historical Justice in Indonesia: Memory
and Transnational Human Rights Activism, School of Historical and Philo-
sophical Studies, Melbourne University.
Mickelson, Karin
Karin Mickelson is Associate Professor at the Allard School of Law, University
of British Columbia. Her research has focused on the South-North dimension
of international environmental law, and she has been involved in TWAIL
since the late 1990s. Recent publications include “The Stockholm Confer-
ence and the Creation of the South-North-Divide in International Environ-
mental Law and Policy,” published in International Environmental Law and
the Global South (2015), and “International Law as a War against Nature?:
Reflections on the Ambivalence of International Environmental Law” in
International Law and Its Discontents (2015).
Natarajan, Usha
Usha Natarajan is Assistant Professor of International Law and Associate
Director of the Center for Migration and Refugee Studies at the American
University in Cairo. Her research is interdisciplinary, utilizing third-world and
postcolonial approaches to international law for an interrelated understanding
xxii Contributors
of the relationship between law and issues of development, migration, envir-

onment, and conflict, globally and in the Arab region. Prior to academia, she
worked with international organizations including UNDP, UNESCO, and
the World Bank. She has a PhD from the Australian National University, MA
from the United Nations University for Peace, and LLB and BA from Monash
University.
Nesiah, Vasuki
Vasuki Nesiah is Associate Professor of Practice in the Gallatin School at NYU
where she teaches human rights and social and legal theory. She is Academic
Director of the Gallatin Human Rights Initiative. She is also core faculty in
Harvard Law School’s Institute for Global Law and Policy (IGLP) and Senior
Fellow at Melbourne Law School. She has published widely on the history
and politics of human rights, humanitarianism, international criminal law,
international feminisms and colonial legal history. Her recent essays have
been published in the Journal of International Criminal Justice, Philosophy
Today and the Oxford Handbook of International Legal Theory. She serves on
the international editorial boards of various journals, including Feminist Legal
Studies and the London Review of International Law. Nesiah is one of the
founding members of Third World Approaches to International Law
(TWAIL) and continues as an active participant in this network. She is
originally from Sri Lanka.
Obregón, Liliana
Liliana Obregón is Professor and Director of the International Law LL.M at
the University of los Andes in Bogotá, Colombia. She holds a law degree from
the same university, an M.A from SAIS, Johns Hopkins University and an SJD
from Harvard University. She writes on history and theory of international law.
Her current project examines the historiography of the discipline through the
work of several nineteenth century lawyers. Her most recent publications
include Imperialismo y Derecho Internacional (co-edited with Rene Urueña
and Luis Eslava), “Martti Koskenniemi’s Critique of Eurocentrism in Inter-
national Law,” and “The Third World Judges: Neutrality, Bias or Activism at
the PCIJ and the ICJ?.” In 2016–2017 she was the Santo Domingo Visiting
Scholar at the David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies and at
Global History program of the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs at
Harvard University. She has also been a research fellow at the University of
Helsinki, the Max Planck Institute in Frankfurt and Heidelberg, Stanford
University, and the University of Wisconsin. She is an active participant in
the IGLP, TWAIL and Latin American Society of International Law networks
and events.
Contributors xxiii
Oklopcic, Zoran
Zoran Oklopcic teaches at the Department of Law and Legal Studies at
Carleton University. He focuses on the vocabulary of peoplehood in the
context of state formation at the intersection of three disciplines: consti-
tutional theory, normative political theory, and international law. He has
published on the metamorphosis of self-determination in the post–Cold
War context; the concept of territorial rights in the context of theories of
secession; and the inadequacy of the concept of constituent power of the
people in the (semi-)periphery. He was MacCormick Visiting Fellow at
the University of Edinburgh School of Law (2013), Junior Faculty at
Harvard Law School’s Institute for Global Law and Policy in Doha,
Qatar, Visiting Researcher at the Department of Political Sciences Uni-
versitat de Pompeu Fabra, Barcelona, and Global Research Fellow at the
NYU School of Law.
Oegroseno, Arif Havas
Arif Havas Oegroseno is Deputy Minister to the Coordinating Ministry of
Maritime Affairs of the Republic of Indonesia. He was the Indonesian
Ambassador to Belgium, Luxembourg, the European Union, and the World
Custom Union from 2010 to 2015. He also worked with NATO on maritime
security issues. He graduated from Harvard Law School and Faculty of Law
of the University of Diponegoro, Indonesia. He served as head of Indonesian
Delegation to the Submission to the United Nations on the Limit of
Continental Shelf. He was President of the 20th Meeting of the 162 State
Parties of the UN Convention of the Law of the Sea (SPLOS). He pub-
lished a chapter entitled “Archipelagic State: from Concept to Law” in The
IMLI Manual on International Maritime Law: Volume I: The Law of the
Sea (2014).
Okafor, Obiora
Obiora Okafor has experience as is the York Research Chair in International
and Transnational Legal Studies at the Osgoode Hall Law School, York
University, Toronto Canada. He also served as the Chairperson of the United
Nations Human Rights Council Advisory Committee, Geneva, Switzerland;
and as the Gani Fawehinmi Distinguished Chair in Human Rights Law at the
Nigerian Institute of Advanced Legal Studies, Abuja, Nigeria. He is an active
member of the Third World Approaches to International Law (TWAIL)
Network. Okafor earned a PhD, LLM at University of British Columbia,
Vancouver, Canada and an LLM, LLB (Hons) at University of Nigeria,
Enugu Campus, Nigeria. He is originally from Nigeria.
xxiv Contributors
Özsu, Umut
Umut Özsu is an Assistant Professor at the Department of Law and Legal
Studies at Carleton University. His research interests include public inter-
national law, the history and theory of international law, law and develop-
ment, international human rights law, and international refugee law. He is the
author of Formalizing Displacement: International Law and Population Trans-
fers (2015). He is currently at work on a second book, Completing Humanity:
The International Law of Decolonization.
Pahuja, Sundhya
Sundhya Pahuja is Professor of Law and Director of the Institute for Inter-
national Law and the Humanities at the University of Melbourne. Her work
engages with the history, political economy, and theory of international law,
particularly with respect to the relationship between North and South. She
holds visiting chairs at SOAS and Birkbeck at the University of London and is
a Programme Advisor to the Institute for Global Law and Policy at the Harvard
Law School.
Parfitt, Rose Sydney
Rose Sydney Parfitt is a Lecturer in Law at Kent Law School. She is currently
based at Melbourne Law School, where she holds an ARC (Australian
Research Council) Discovery Early Career Research Award. She is interested
in the history and theory of international law, focusing in particular on critical
historiography and art theory, and on the concept of international personality.
Her current project examines the relationship between fascism and inter-
national law. She has taught or teaches at the Institute for Global Law &
Policy (Harvard Law School), the American University in Cairo, SOAS
(University of London), the LSE (University of London), the Erik Castrén
Institute of International Law and Human Rights (Helsinki University), and
Los Andes University, Colombia, among others.
Peevers, Charlotte
Charlotte Peevers is a Lecturer in International Law at the University of
Glasgow and has previously been a postdoctoral research fellow at the Pro-
gram on Science, Technology and Society, Harvard Kennedy School, and
Lecturer in Law at the University of Technology Sydney. She is trained in
history and law and is the author of The Politics of Justifying Force: the Suez
Crisis, the Iraq War, and International Law (2013).
Petersson, Fredrik
Fredrik Petersson is Lecturer in General History, and Associate Professor of
Colonial and Postcolonial Global History at Åbo Akademi University (ÅA).
Contributors xxv
He received his doctoral degree in history at ÅA, and his 2013 dissertation
was entitled “We Are Neither Visionaries Nor Utopian Dreamers”: Willi
Münzenberg, the League Against Imperialism, and the Comintern
1925–1933. His current research focuses on twentieth-century anticolonial-
ism and the transnational experiences of individuals and organizations. He
is a founding member of the Global History Laboratory at ÅA. Former
research projects are: “International Radical Solidarity” and “Radical
Spaces, Global Communities, and Embedded Articulations.” His other
affiliations include the Russian State University for the Humanities
(RGGU, Moscow), Stockholm University, and Swedish Defense College,
Stockholm.
Rasulov, Akbar
Akbar Rasulov is Senior Lecturer in Public International Law at the University
of Glasgow.
Reynolds, John
Dr. John Reynolds is a lecturer in international law at the National University
of Ireland, Maynooth. Reynolds’s primary research interests lie in the fields of
colonial legal history, the political economy of international law, and
the operation of law in states of emergency, conflict, and crisis. Recent
publications include Empire, Emergency and International Law (2017);
“Anti-Colonial Legalities: Paradigms, Tactics & Strategy,” published in the
Palestine Yearbook of International Law; and “Apartheid, International Law,
and the Occupied Palestinian Territory,” published in the European Journal
of International Law.
Saberi, Hengameh
Hengameh Saberi is Associate Professor at Osgoode Hall Law School, with
areas of interest ranging from international law, international legal theory and
history, and jurisprudence to disability law and human rights, epistemology,
political theory, and Islamic political and legal thought. She has previously
pursued these interests at the University of Tehran, McGill University,
Harvard University, Brown University, The University of Tennessee, and
Boston University.
Samour, Nahed
Nahed Samour is a Postdoc Researcher at the Eric Castrén Institute of
International Law and Human Rights, Helsinki University, and at Humboldt
University, Berlin. Since 2015, she was Junior Faculty at Harvard Law School,
Institute for Global Policy and Law. Samour has studied law and Islamic
xxvi Contributors
studies at the universities of Bonn, Birzeit, London (SOAS), Humboldt

University Berlin, Harvard, and Damascus, and was a doctoral fellow at the
International Max Planck Research School for Comparative Legal History,
Frankfurt/Main. Her work focuses on Islamic law, public law, and the history
of international law.
Sandoval Trigo, Germán Medardo
Germán Medardo Sandoval Trigo is a Professor at the Universidad Nacional
Autónoma de México (UNAM) Law School, where he teaches Philosophy of
Law and Legal Sociology. His main research focuses on the decolonization of
law, epistemologies of the South and Third World Approaches to Inter-
national Law. He has taught in the Human Rights Law Masters programme
at Universidad Iberoamericana and he is actively involved in research projects
at the Institute for Global Law and Policy at Harvard Law School and the
Centro de Estudos Sociais in Coimbra, Portugal. He holds a Master of Laws
degree from the UNAM Law School and a PhD from UNAM Legal Research
Institute.
Sayed, Hani
Hani Sayed is Associate Professor and Department Chair at the Department of
Law at the American University in Cairo. He received a Licence en Droit
from the Faculty of Law at Damascus University, a DES in International
Relations from the Graduate Institute of International Studies at the HEI in
Université de Genève, and an SJD from Harvard Law School. He teaches and
writes on a diverse set of topics in international law, including human rights
and humanitarian law, law and development, international economic law,
global governance, and legal theory.
Shahabuddin, Mohammad
Mohammad Shahabuddin is a Senior Lecturer in law at the University of
Birmingham. His research focuses on the postcolonial critique of the concept
of ethnicity and its role in the making of international law. He is the author of
Ethnicity and International Law: Histories, Politics and Practices (2016). Prior
to joining Birmingham, he served at Keele University as a lecturer in law, at
Yokohama National University as a visiting professor of international law, and
at Jahangirnagar University as the founding chair of its Department of Law
and Justice. He holds a PhD in law from the School of Oriental and African
Studies (SOAS), University of London.
Taha, Mai
Mai Taha is an Assistant Professor at the Department of Law at the American
University in Cairo. Previously, she was a postdoctoral fellow at the Institute
Contributors xxvii
for Global Law and Policy, Harvard University (2015–2016). She was also a
Visiting Assistant Professor and Catalyst Fellow at Osgoode Hall Law School,
York University (2014–2015). She received her doctorate in law from the
University of Toronto. Her research broadly explores the historical relation-
ship between international law, empire, and capital. She received her LLM
from the University of Toronto and her MA in International Human Rights
Law from the American University in Cairo. She worked at the International
Criminal Court (ICC) in The Hague, and as a legal adviser for refugees at
Africa and Middle East Refugee Assistance (AMERA) in Cairo.
Veçoso, Fabia Fernandes Carvalho
Fabia Fernandes Carvalho Veçoso is a postdoctoral fellow with the Laureate
Program in International Law at Melbourne Law School. Her project focuses
on the emergence of the principle of non-intervention in Latin America,
exploring the movement of Pan-Americanism and the related continental
debates promoted by international lawyers and politicians between the late
nineteenth century and early twentieth century. Prior to joining Melbourne
Law School, she was Assistant Professor of International Relations at the
Federal University of São Paulo. She completed her PhD at the University
of São Paulo Law School in 2012, debating the case law of the Inter-American
Court of Human Rights on amnesties. Previously she was a Doctoral Visiting
Research Fellow at the Erik Castrén Institute of International Law and
Human Rights at the University of Helsinki. Her research and teaching
interests are focused on the theory and history of international law, regional-
ism and Latin America, and international human rights law. Fabia earned her
LLB and LLM from the University of São Paulo Law School.
Foreword
At the beginning was the Bandung Conference. For those who were there at
the creation – Nehru, Cho-en-Lai, Sukarno, Nasser, among others – it was a
defining moment; a moment of self-awareness and recognition that they were
the witnesses and agents of the advent of a new and potentially potent force on
the world scene.
The Bandung Conference heralded the birth of a coalition of variable
geometry and shifting focus over time. It started as the Afro-Asian Movement
(basically newly independent nations of non-European stock and culture);
leading, in the early 1960s, to “the Non-Aligned Movement” (including a
European state, Yugoslavia, and focusing on an independent posture in the
Cold War); then, in 1964 at the first UNCTAD, to the “Group of 77”
(adjoining the Latin American states who share the same economic predica-
ment and political sensitivity – a group of more than 130 members at present).
These different movements or groups have kept formally their separate
existence. But they are in fact concentric (or intersecting) circles, with the
same hard-core but varying at the margins. They represent, at the intergovern-
mental level, what is currently referred to in the literature as the Third World
or Global South. Their members share by and large the same grievances and
claims: the grievance of colonial past and exploitation, and of actual margin-
alization; and a claim for greater equality and equity, as well as for effective
participation in global decision-making.
Their choice arenas for voicing these grievances and claims have been
those of international organizations, particularly the UN family, where the
rules of parliamentary diplomacy provided them with an ideal forum and
allowed them to draw the advantage of their numbers. The dialectics they
triggered in those arenas and beyond, over the rules of the game (i.e., the rules
of international law that govern international relations) as well as on the
substantive issues that constitute the objects of these relations (economic,
xxix
xxx Foreword
political, cultural, or otherwise), are sometimes referred to as the North-South

confrontation. A confrontation that can be portrayed as a psychodrama that is
still being written, its successive acts and scenes continuously shifting focus
and venue with the eruption of international crises and the emergence of new
sources of tension or concern in the international public consciousness.1
But it all started in Bandung.
Georges Abi-Saab
1
For an exposition of this “psychodrama” about the content and horizons of international law
that followed Bandung, see Georges Abi-Saab, “The Third World Intellectual in Praxis:
Confrontation, Participation, or Operation behind Enemy Lines?” (2016) 37 Third World
Quarterly 1957.
Acknowledgments
A book such as this is a testimony to the kindness and intellectual commit-

ment of many. For this reason, we want to thank, first, all the contributors and
fellow travelers who shared their views about Bandung and its many worlds
and histories here. This project was only possible because it was a collective
adventure forged by solidarity and trust in the value of our shared initiative to
revisit our pasts and imagine alternative futures.
We are grateful for the financial support that we received for this project from
the Institute for Global Law and Policy (IGLP) at Harvard Law School, Kent Law
School, the Gallatin School of Individualized Study at New York University, the
Oregon Humanities Center, and the University of Oregon School of Law.
We are deeply indebted to Esther Sherman and Sarah Rutledge for crucial
editorial and logistical assistance. We are also grateful to John Berger and
everyone at Cambridge University Press for their enduring support.
We owe an immense amount of thanks to Usha Natarajan, John Reynolds,
Amar Bhatia, and Sujith Xavier – the organizers of the Third World
Approaches to International Law (TWAIL) Conference held at the American
University in Cairo in February 2015. They provided the Bandung project
crucially important space to discuss, debate, and develop the chapters. This
was the first time we took the project public, and a meeting with many
generations of TWAILers was an especially salutary space to discuss Bandung.
We are particularly grateful to David Kennedy for providing the Bandung
project a stimulating venue for an author workshop at IGLP’s 2014 Heterodox
Traditions: Global Law and Policy Conference at Harvard Law School. This
meeting gave us a valuable opportunity to workshop a number of chapters
early in the project and develop a collective sense of the path we were taking.
Our thanks to Kristen Verdeaux and her administrative team for all the
logistical support in helping us convene that meeting.
xxxi
xxxii Acknowledgments
We are honored to have Georges Abi-Saab opening the book, and Partha
Chatterjee closing it. Readers will find that this book is inspired by and
indebted to their work.
Finally, we are incredibly grateful for the love and patience of each other’s –
growing, transforming, and flourishing – families. They have generously lent
us to the project for long calls, editorial meetings, and author workshops; they
have been kind hosts, needed distractions, and sounding boards to the editor-
ial collective. The personal has co-mingled with the political (and profes-
sional) in the best ways possible here.
We write in our introduction that alliances can be profoundly transforma-
tive. Working on this project together has been profoundly affirming of the
joys of scholarly comradeship.
The Editors
Introduction
The Spirit of Bandung
luis eslava, michael fakhri, and vasuki nesiah*
understanding bandung
On April 18–24, 1955, delegates from twenty-nine states attended a conference
in Bandung, Indonesia.1 The meaning of the events that took place during
those days was disputed then and now. Bandung has generated, as a result,
myths and countermyths, hopes and disappointments, solidarities and frac-
tious disputes, visions for international law and its subversion. In fact, scholars
and politicians refer to the conference by different names: the Asian-African
Conference, the Bandung Conference, or simply Bandung. Each of these
names signals a different understanding of the Conference and a different
conceptualization of both its origins and horizons.
Bandung was born of the challenges of grappling with the legacies of
European imperialism, their long reach from the past, as well as their trans-
mutation into the structures of the current world order.2 However, it also had,
a forward-looking, almost utopian dimension with an unprecedented number
of peoples across the world actively reimagining, changing, and prefiguring
the rules of the global order. Newly independent countries such as Indonesia
and India had begun to assert their presence in international politics and law.
Postcolonial states that were previously held together within different empires
*
We thank Sundhya Pahuja for her attentive reading of this introduction and Esther Sherman
and Sarah Rutledge for their editorial assistance with the entire volume.
1
From Asia: Afghanistan, Burma (now Myanmar), Cambodia, Ceylon (now Sri Lanka), People’s
Republic of China (PRC), India, Indonesia, Iran, Iraq, Japan, Jordan, Laos, Lebanon, Nepal,
Pakistan, the Philippines, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Thailand, Turkey, North and South Vietnam
(now unified), and Yemen. From Africa: Egypt, Ethiopia, the Gold Coast (now Ghana),
Liberia, Libya, and Sudan. The conference was also attended by several others who were in
solidarity with the anti-imperialist project such as the Black Amerian scholar Richard Wright
and the Kenyan freedom fighter Joseph Murumbi.
2
See Chimni, Chapter 1 in this volume.
3
4 Luis Eslava, Michael Fakhri, and Vasuki Nesiah
were now building new alliances among each other as “sovereigns.”3 While
almost all countries in Asia had attained independence, in 1955 most of Africa
was still colonized by European states. In fact, delegates from the Gold Coast
(now Ghana) attended Bandung while their government was at a critical stage
in their independence negotiations with the British (only achieving full
independence in 1957). Countries on the cusp of independence, such as
Ghana and Kenya, were aware that “self-determination” was going to be
affected by the international landscape as much as by factors internal to their
nations. While Asian states may have instigated Bandung, African states took it
and continued to push for and assert their independence with their Declar-
ation of the First Conference of Independent African States (held in Accra on
April 15–22, 1958). Later, Latin America, in the form of some states and an
expanding network of liberation movements, all of them postcolonial cre-
ations, joined their Asian and African counterparts to push for an even
stronger anti-imperial agenda in the 1966 Tricontinental Conference.4 Pankaj
Mishra describes decolonization as “the central event of the last century for
the majority of the world’s population,” namely “the intellectual and political
awakening of Asia and its emergence from the ruins of both Asian and
European empires.”5 This “awakening,” we could argue, is also applicable
to Africa, the Pacific, Latin America, and beyond. Bandung and its legacies
are a manifestation of that “awakening.”
The Bandung Conference was a coming together of leaders of countries
whose combined population made up approximately two-thirds of the world’s
people. Attendees did not easily map onto a First World versus Second World
political matrix, nor was the Conference a straightforward precursor to the Non-
Aligned Movement.6 Of the five organizers – the Colombo Powers – India,
Burma (now Myanmar), and Indonesia were socialist but neutral, whereas
Ceylon (now Sri Lanka) and Pakistan were anticommunist and pro-West. The
delegates from Iran, Iraq, Libya, Lebanon, Pakistan, Philippines, Turkey, and
South Vietnam were also anticommunist and pro-West. On the other hand,
Egypt, an important player in the Conference and its aftermath, was engaged in
developing a form of Arab socialism during the Nasser years.7 Categories of
“imperial” and “postcolonial” were also complicated, by the fact that delegates
3 4
See Anghie, Chapter 32 in this volume. See, e.g., Obregón, Chapter 13 in this volume.
5
Pankaj Mishra, From the Ruins of Empire: The Revolt against the West and the Remaking of
Asia (Toronto: Doubleday Canada, 2012), p. 8.
6
Lorenz M. Lüthi, “Non-Alignment, 1946–1965: Its Establishment and Struggle against Afro-
Asianism” (2016) 7 Humanity 201. See also Oklopcic, Chapter 16 and Özsu, Chapter 17 in this
volume.
7
See Peevers, Chapter 34 in this volume. See also Fouad Ajami, “On Nasser and His Legacy”
(1974) 11 Journal of Peace Research 41.
from Japan, a formal imperial power, attended the Conference,8 and because
many countries that were seen as the custodians of Bandung developed “colo-
nial” relationships with internal minorities or neighboring regions that they had
annexed.9 Moreover, the Conference itself, the speeches given, and its final
outcomes were all formally framed and articulated in the language of inter-
national law. This was the very same language that had served to unroll empires
across the planet and that, in the post–World War II context, was again engaged
in “constituting” a new “order” in the world10 – an order that came to be soon
denounced as neocolonial by critical and, especially, Southern intellectuals.11
These contradictions, tensions, and diversities shaped the Bandung Confer-
ence, and the ways in which most people in the world confronted that
moment of decolonization and the political reconfigurations and possible
futures that it heralded. The Final Communiqué reflected the complexities
of this landscape and the exercises in alternative world making being con-
ducted, as well as the contested futures of the time.12
The Conference was divided into Political, Economic, and Cultural com-
mittees.13 Accordingly, the Final Communiqué outlined a series of principles
under the following headings: Economic Co-operation, Cultural Co-
operation, Human Rights and Self-determination, Problems of Dependent
Peoples, Other Problems (which identified specific existing colonial cases),
and Promotion of World Peace and Co-operation. It concluded with ten
principles (the Dasa Sila),14 which were meant to conform to the UN Charter.
With the benefit of the passage of time and our knowledge of what emerged
from 1955, we can see the Communiqué speaking to a vision of a new
international order, and planting the seeds for a new international law. In
the Communiqué’s dual voice of formality and openness, we can also see the
struggle to both conform to and resignify the language and categories of the
8
See Shahabuddin, Chapter 5 in this volume.
9
For example see Choudhury, Chapter 19 in this volume regarding Kashmir and India,
McGregor and Hearman, Chapter 9 in this volume about West Irian and Indonesia, and Dirar,
Chapter 21 in this volume regarding Western Sahara and Morocco and Eritrea and Ethiopia.
10
Anne Orford, “Constituting Order” in James Crawford and Martti Koskenniemi (eds.), The
Cambridge Companion to International Law (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012).
11
See, for example, Thomas Benjamin, “Neocolonialism” in Thomas Benjamin (ed.),
Encyclopedia of Western Colonialism since 1450 (New York: Thomson Gale, 2007), p. 831. See
also on a theorization of neo-colonialism, Gyan Prakash, After Colonialism: Imperial Histories
and Postcolonial Displacements (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994).
12
See especially Parfitt, Chapter 2 and Pahuja, Chapter 33 in this volume.
13
Conference Chair and Chairman of the Political Committee was Sastroamijoyo, Prime
Minister of Indonesia. Chairman of the Economic Committee was Roosseno, Minister of
Economy Indonesia. Chairman of the Committee on Culture was Muhammad Yamin,
Minister of Education and Culture of Indonesia.
14
See Oegroseno, Chapter 37 in this volume.
international legal order. This duality and its attendant challenges get revisited
again and again in the extended (and still ongoing) process of decolonization
over the decades following the Bandung Conference. This process includes
institutional initiatives such as the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) and the
United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD);
projects seeking to shape international law such as the New International
Economic Order (NIEO) and the Law of the Sea; and interventions regarding
specific independence struggles such as in Palestine and Namibia.
The Communiqué was built on a premise of cooperation among multiple
civilizations and religions – what we would today call a “trans-civilizational”
perspective.15 From that, the text developed some ideas of postcolonial soli-
darity, based on decentering Europe as the organizing geopolitical and cul-
tural fulcrum of the world. Yet, like all documents that are the result of
negotiation and compromise, and indeed of diverse ontologies, it was, without
doubt, aspirational, ambiguous, and limited. While it did not have any formal
legal status, the Communiqué used and expanded the scope of legal concepts
such as sovereignty, self-determination, and human rights. To an important
degree, it repositioned postcolonial nations as the “newer” and “truer” subjects
of the international legal order, challenging with this the foundations of the
legal and political status quo.16 This new postcolonial model of international
legal personhood was to be invoked by these nations in their negotiations and
discussions with both Western states and the Soviet Union.17
Reading the Communiqué as an aspirational document intended to assem-
ble a “new politics” on the surface of a resilient patterning of moving and
multiform (imperial) forces, it is possible to capture what is commonly known
as the “Spirit of Bandung” – a phrase made popular in part by Roeslan
Abdulgani, Secretary-General of the conference.18 Just the fact that the Con-
ference was convened empowered people in the colonized world to assert
their own place in the world on their own terms and to crystallize in the Final
Communiqué the convoluted drama of being in the world after empire. As
Vijay Prashad notes, “[f]rom Belgrade to Tokyo, from Cairo to Dar es Salaam,
politicians and intellectuals began to speak of the Bandung Spirit.”19 The
Communiqué represents a position of hope against almost insurmountable
15
Yasuaki Onuma, A Transcivilizational Perspective on International Law (Leiden and Boston:
Martinus Nijhoff, 2010).
16 17
See Parfitt, Chapter 2 in this volume. See Peevers, Chapter 34 in this volume.
18
Roeslan Abdulgani, Bandung Spirit: Moving on the Tide of History (Djakarta: Prapantja, 1964),
p. 110.
19
Vijay Prashad, The Darker Nations: A People’s History of the Third World (New York: New
Press, 2007), p. 45.
stakes. The agenda was not only about asserting independence against an
imperial past and present; it was also about facing an uncertain future. The
stakes of peace and cooperation were nothing less than the fear of global
nuclear war and the sedimentation of a reloaded, international structure that
could be used, once again, against the interests of the Global South, as it came
to be known.
It is not surprising that such an ambitious agenda has generated two types
of historiography.20 Some have written Bandung into history as a story of
disappointment, with little long-term impact on international relations and
no concrete agenda that gained traction with the countries of the global
South. They argue that the Conference failed to have a tangible impact –
there were no new international institutions that were established, and no
new collective initiatives that proved sustainable.21 Others, however, have
measured Bandung differently. They look at the follow-up conferences that
took place in the years after Bandung and the multiple solidarity movements
that emerged from these efforts as not insignificant for the decolonization of
international relations. While acknowledging the limited character of Ban-
dung’s formal effects, these other accounts have described the conference as
representing and emboldening an emotional and psychological experience
shared across the postcolonial and non-white world.22 While both types of
narratives continue – traces of which are present in this collection – in
recent years, there has been renewed interest in going beyond international
institutions in tracing Bandung’s legacies for the decolonization of the
international order.23
20
For a detailed account of these bodies of literature, see Michael Fakhri and Kelly Reynolds,
“The Bandung Conference” in Anthony Carty (ed.), Oxford Bibliographies in International
Law Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017.
21
George McTurnan Kahin, The Asian-African Conference, Bandung, Indonesia, April 1955
(Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1956).
22
Odette Guitard, Bandoeng et le Réveil des Anciens Peuples Colonisés (Paris: Presses
Universitaires de France, 1961).
23
For recent historiographies, see Seng Tan and Amitav Acharya (eds.), Bandung Revisited: The
Legacy of the 1955 Asian-African Conference for International Order (Singapore: NUS Press,
2008); Christopher J. Lee (ed.), Making a World after Empire: The Bandung Moment and Its
Political Afterlives (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2010); Sally Percival Wood, “Retrieving the
Bandung Conference . . . moment by moment” (2012) 43 Journal of Southeast Asian Studies
523; Robert Vitalis, “The Midnight Ride of Kwame Nkrumah and Other Fables of Bandung
(Ban-doong)” (2013) 4 Humanity 261; Naoko Shimazu, “Diplomacy as Theatre: Staging the
Bandung Conference of 1955” (2014) 48 Modern Asian Studies 225; Brian Russell Roberts and
Keith Foulcher (eds.), Indonesian Notebook: A Sourcebook on Richard Wright and the
Bandung Conference (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2016); “Special Issue:
Bandung/Third World 60 Years” (2016) 17:1 Journal of Inter-Asia Cultural Studies 1–163.
Some of these accounts are more invested in celebrating Bandung and are
keen to mine its legacies for remaking international relations today; others are
more wary about romanticizing the conference and retrospective mythmak-
ing. However, rather than dismissing certain accounts as simply “romantic,” or
measuring Bandung in terms of success and failure, we believe that one of the
most significant things about Bandung was precisely this unknown and
unknowable potential – no one at the time knew what the repercussions of
Bandung would be. This powerful sense of being on the precipice of the new
and unknown emerges, in one way or another, across these different strands of
literature on Bandung. The final goal of the Conference was to undo imperi-
alism and “racialism” (as it was then called). But at the dizzying heights of this
historical summit, there were different ideas about what were the best tactics
to achieve such a goal, and different visions of what that goal looked like. The
trajectories that came out of the Conference were as disparate as they were
aspirational. The stakes were high and the challenges enormous. In this sense,
the debate over Bandung’s meaning began even before the Conference was
formally convened. However, if there is one thing that animated Bandung
then that also characterizes its meaning now, it is the call to act, to shape
history – a sensibility captured in Aime Cesaire’s famous words in Notebook of
a Return to the Native Land:
Beware of crossing your arms in the sterile attitude of the spectator, because
life is not a spectacle, because a sea of sorrows is not a proscenium, because a
man who screams is not a dancing bear.24
Bandung was a conference against both imperialism and mere spectatorship. It

was a performative commitment to changing the conditions of life under
empire and returning the native land to the possibilities of history, with all
of the associated costs this enterprise entails. This was the challenge confront-
ing the Wretched of the Earth. As if in response to Cesaire’s poetic manifesto
against spectatorship, his Martinique comrade, Frantz Fanon, calls for collect-
ive action and a new sense of collective humanity to shape a new history:
Today we are present at the stasis of Europe. Comrades, let us flee from this
motionless movement . . . [to] . . . reconsider the question of mankind. . . .
Come, brothers, we have far too much work to do for us to play the game of
rearguard [action]. . . . The Third World today faces Europe like a colossal
mass whose aim should be to try to resolve the problems to which Europe has
not been able to find the answers. . . . No, we do not want to catch up with
24
Aimé Césaire, Notebook of a Return to the Native Land (1939) (Middletown: Wesleyan
University Press, 2001), pp. 13–14.
anyone. What we want to do is to go forward all the time, night and day, in
the company of Man, in the company of all men. The caravan should not be
stretched out, for in that case each line will hardly see those who precede it;
and men who no longer recognize each other meet less and less together,
and talk to each other less and less. It is a question of the Third World starting
a new history of Man.25
situating the power of bandung

Even though this collection starts from Bandung and examines how it may
help understand the present, much work could also be done in trying to
understand how Bandung is situated within a longer history of anticolonial
solidarity and resistance engaged with international law. For instance, one
could also look to liberal anticolonialists of 1919 or to the formation of the
League Against Imperialism in 1927 as earlier moments when international
law was deployed to challenge and undo imperial rule, and in a sense
opening a road toward Bandung.26 However, what makes the Bandung
Conference particularly profound for international lawyers, in its time as
well as in our own, is that it was the formal beginning of a project
whose aim was to ensure that all peoples of the world benefited from what
was claimed to be the twin building blocks of world order, sovereign
statehood and international law. For most of history – despite good inten-
tions, and sometimes enabled by good intentions – purveyors of past and
modern international law either ignored or legitimized various forms of
imperialism.27 But at Bandung, international law’s relationship with imperi-
alism was formally and significantly challenged, from within.
How is it then that a diplomatic conference on international law on the
island of Java projected a “Spirit of Bandung” that has traveled through the
imagination of countless peoples and so many subsequent international events
and phenomena? To respond to this question it is important to accept that it is
not a shortcoming that some accounts of Bandung have a popular and
idealistic tenor. This was indeed a defining feature of the Conference. While
professional interest in Bandung ebbs and flows, very few international
diplomatic conferences have entered popular culture, spread through diverse
local social movements across the globe, and remained so resonant in the
political imagination across different generations. How is it that Bandung is
25
Franz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth (New York: Grove Press, 1963), pp. 314–315.
26
See Petersson Chapter 3 in this volume.
27
See especially, Antony Anghie, Imperialism, Sovereignty and the Making of International Law
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004).
simultaneously a reference point for Malcolm X,28 international economic

lawyers,29 international environmental lawyers,30 and art movements?31
Maybe a possible start to answering these questions is to pay attention to
Bandung’s creative fusion of formalism and subversion, of “formal” forms
being turned inside out, against a historical backdrop of oppression.
A productive excess comes out naturally here. The future had to be made
anew, in a world in which there were already set frames in place. Some steps
forward, some steps back. Rehearsals and projections mark the Conference
and its history.
Naoko Shimazu has written a richly suggestive account of the Conference
as a diplomatic theater consciously designed as a performance.32 The dele-
gates engaged in a number of public events and in pageantry developing a
rapport with the people of Bandung. The delegates were particular about what
they wore in public, and the conference organizers transformed the city for
the Conference. People in Bandung were indeed both the audience and
actors in their interaction with delegates at public events, through their
conversations with each other, and in public discussions through local news-
papers and magazines. But if the people at Bandung had front-row seats, there
was also a global audience with their eyes trained on the stage. And the
conference organizers and delegates were aware of it: they had in their minds
their audiences across the seas, in their home countries and continents as well
as in Europe and the Americas. According to Roeslan Abdulgani, the
Secretary-General of the Joint Secretariat of the Conference, Sukarno was,
for example, attentive to setting the stage in everyway – not just in terms of law
and policy talk but also the details of the principal conference venue:
The interior of the Concordia Building must be inspiring. Everyone sitting
inside it must be inspired. Don’t be so prosaic. Not so dry. Not like a book of
laws . . . You know what I think – Met juristen kun je nooist een revolusi
beginnen. You can’t make a revolution with jurists! They have no inspiration.
28
Malcolm X, “Message to the Grass Roots. November 10, 1963, Detroit” in George Breitman
(ed.), Malcolm X Speaks: Selected Speeches and Statements (New York: Grove Press, 1965), p. 3.
29
An Chen, “Reflection on the South-South Coalition in the Last Half Century from the
Perspective of International Economic Law-Making – From Bandung, Doha and Cancun to
Hong Kong” (2006) 7 Journal of World Investment & Trade 201. See also Faundez, Chapter 30
in this volume.
30
Sumudu Atapattu and Carmen G. Gonzalez, “North-South Divide in International
Environmental Law: Framing the Issues,” in Shawkat Alam et al. (eds.), International
Environmental Law and the Global South (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2015), p. 1.
31
See Kanwar, Chapter 8 in this volume.
32
Naoko Shimazu, “Diplomacy as Theatre: Staging the Bandung Conference of 1955” (2014) 48
Modern Asian Studies 225.
Whereas the participants need to be enfolded in inspiration! For that reason,

change the interior of this building!33
For us the metaphors of performance, actors, and audience are suggestive of

how to read Bandung and the multiple contexts that have shaped the event, its
reception, and its legacy. As the contributions in this collection suggest, the
best approach to engaging with Bandung is not to read Bandung in isolation,
but to see how it played out, and continues to play out, in diverse forms at
different moments. Contextual, anachronistic, competing, and sometimes
contradictory histories of Bandung allow us to understand better, as a result,
the many different ways that Bandung occupies the history of international
law, imperialism and resistance, and global history in general.
Taken as a complex, composite, collectively authored global history, this
volume affirms a historical voice shaped by radical multiplicity in matters
related to international law, imperialism, and resistance in our long post-
colonial present. Indeed, it would be more accurate to speak of global
histories, often even within the multiple registers of individual chapters.
Relatedly, many of our contributors speak to social movements and margin-
alized communities’ experience of and shaping of international legal
history – what some may term a peoples’ history of international law. To
this end, it pays attention to how international legal history is narrated,
contested, and imagined in multiple fora, from diplomatic memoranda and
General Assembly resolutions to paintings and family letters; in other words,
our histories are culled both from the formal archive of “official” Bandung
and the repertoire of “embodied memory” of Bandung.34 But, as the reader
will notice, this multiplicity does not display here as agnostic or unsituated.
It does not pretend to be complete and does not aspire to be cosmopolitan.
Instead, as an artifact of global history itself, this volume relates to Bandung
as part of a longer, open-ended project to de-constitute and reconstitute
order in the world, especially in the Global South through post-imperial
forms of governance, international legal mechanisms, and permanent
resistance.
Bandung could be understood, in this way, as something more than a single
event or a moment of commencement. Perhaps Bandung is a story; a story in
which the “Spirit of Bandung” was already haunting the world at the moment
in which the Conference took place, and it then took off in different
33
Roeslan Abdulgani, The Bandung Connection: The Asia-Africa Conference in Bandung in 1955
(Singapore: Gunung Agung, 1981), p. 68.
34
Diana Taylor, The Archive and the Reportorie (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003).
directions. If we follow this line of thought, it is possible to realize how

Bandung came to provide the necessary conditions for a momentous
gathering – one with wide global repercussions at the normative, institutional,
and cultural levels. In this sense, our orientation toward the Global South
involves an attention to both the cross-geographical underpinnings and effects
of Bandung in the South as well as in the North, and the multiple registers,
scales, and temporal locations that were haunted and continue to be haunted,
productively or not, by Bandung and its “Spirit.”35 As such, we are less
interested here in chronicling Bandung as an event; we are more interested
in how the “global histories of Bandung” are narrated, how the postcolonial
condition is emplotted, and how the intellectual and political stakes of the
synergies and tensions in those multiple and varied histories shaped, or could
shape, the orientation of the dominant world order.
Bandung’s larger significance as a counterpoint to the dominant order has
been particularly significant for international lawyers because it was both an
act of collective imagination and a practical political project that gave rise to a
range of institutional experiments and social movements. In this sense, Ban-
dung is often identified with birthing the Third World project.36 However, it is
more accurate to understand Bandung as a moment that facilitated and
empowered a number of “third-word-list” projects.37 Sometimes these differ-
ent projects aligned together, and at other times they manifested divergent
projections of third-world futures.
Focusing on Afro-Asian solidarity, this is a dynamic that peaked in 1955 and
subsided in 1965.38 From this perspective, the preliminary institutions and
conferences that led to Bandung were the Arab League (1945), the Asian
Relations Organization (1947), the Delhi Conference on Indonesia (1949),
the Baguio Conference (1950), the Colombo Conference (1954), the Nehru-
Chou En Lai Statement (Panchsheel Treaty) (1954), the SEADO Treaty
(1954), and the Bogor Conference (1954).39 The Afro-Asian Peoples’ Solidarity
Organization (AAPSO) was a social movement created as a direct result of
Bandung (and the people-to-people, nongovernment Conference of Asian
35
On the turn to Global History and its complications, see Samuel Moyn and Andrew Sartori
(eds.), Global Intellectual History (New York: Columbia University Press, 2013).
36
Prashad, The Darker Nations: A People’s History of the Third World.
37
Christopher J. Lee, “Between a Moment and an Era: The Origins and Afterlives of Bandung”
in Christopher J. Lee (ed.), Making a World after Empire: The Bandung Moment and Its
Political Afterlives (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2010), p. 1.
38
See McGregor and Hearman, Chapter 9 in this volume.
39
Sundar Lal Poplai (ed.), Asia and Africa in the Modern World: Basic Information Concerning
Independent Countries (Bombay: Asia Pub. House, 1955), pp. 189–214.
Countries held in 1955 in New Delhi a few days before Bandung). In turn, this
organization created the Afro-Asian Writer’s Conference that held its inaug-
ural meeting in 1958 in Taskent and the Afro-Asian Federation for Women
that held its inaugural conference in 1961 in Cairo. The Asian-African Legal
Consultative Organization (AALCO) (originally known as the Asian Legal
Consultative Committee) was another direct result of Bandung. Both the
AAPSO and AALCO remain active today.
Focusing on Third World politics more broadly, Bandung contributed to
the creation of the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) (1961) and there was some
ideational continuity between the two. But, as already mentioned, only some
Bandung participants supported full nonalignment; moreover, NAM had its
own political tensions and dynamics focused on interstate politics and realign-
ing global power away from the West in an already more virulent and
polarizing Cold War context.40 Similarly, the Tricontinental Conference
(1966) and its institutional birth-child, the Organization of Solidarity with
the People of Asia, Africa, and Latin America (OSPAAAL) is indebted to
Bandung – except this one embraced a more socialist and liberationist tenor,
and left behind the conciliatory aspects immersed in the Asian focus and
values of 1955. As Robert Young has put it,
Third World identity at Bandung . . . was very much mediated by recent and
ongoing wars in Asia. This encouraged the delegates to try to step out of the
dynamics of the Cold War that was producing such conflicts into a free space
of neutrality. In this context, the Soviet Union was regarded as the most
threatening power. By the time of the Tricontinental Conference in Havana
eleven years later, the situation had changed dramatically. At Havana, the
Soviet Union was regarded as the major ally, and the US characterized as the
global imperialist power that had to be resisted at all costs. Non-alignment
had changed to alignment, and the political philosophy of non-violence had
moved to one of violence.41
Accompanying these direct inputs and outcomes of the Conference, there is,
of course, a whole universe of areas touched by Bandung through its response
to imperialism, international law and resistance. At this level, Bandung
becomes both a trace, and a question of tracing. It exists across disparate
spaces, time trajectories, and registers: from institutional and conceptual
formations,42 to past histories,43 to national and regional narratives and
40
See also, Oklopcic, Chapter 16 and Özsu, Chapter 17 in this volume.
41
Robert Young, “Postcolonialism: From Bandung to the Tricontinental” (2005) 5 Historein 11, 14.
42
See, e.g., Khan, Chapter 6 and Faundez, Chapter 30 in this volume.
43
See, e.g., Shahabuddin, Chapter 5 in this volume.
statecraft practices,44 to alternative conceptualization of the world and inter-

national law,45 to social movements and liberation struggles,46 and to old and
new forms of both resistance and oppression.47
bandung in international law

As mentioned earlier, over the last decade scholars interested in decoloniza-
tion and international relations have begun to reassess the historic role of
Bandung. One of the most common approaches in this historic reassessment
is a discussion of the political significance of Bandung in terms of major world
powers, Cold War axes of interests, or Great Men of history. Others situate
Bandung within national or regional politics.48 Some chapters in this collec-
tion follow similar kinds of approaches to varying degrees. But what does it
mean to situate Bandung or place these other accounts within international
legal history?
Interestingly, many of the facts about Bandung have become blurred and
disputed over time. Scholars have pointed to how historical accounts of the
conference have been inaccurate and laden with romantic and political
mythmaking.49 Undoubtedly, it is necessary to establish a correct account of
who attended and what happened during the conference – a task that has in
fact generated a growing body of literature in recent years. But an exclusive
focus on the factual details of the conference does little to contribute to our
44
See, e.g., Carvalho Veçoso, Chapter 25; Chen, Chapter 10; Choudhury, Chapter 19; Gupta,
Chapter 29; Rasulov, Chapter 12; and Peevers, Chapter 34 in this volume.
45
See Chimni, Chapter 1; LaForgia, Chapter 24; Mamlyuk, Chapter 11; Pahuja, Chapter 33;
Parfitt, Chapter 2; Obregón, Chapter 13; Okafor, Chapter 31; and Saberi, Chapter 38 in this
volume.
46
See, e.g., Ahmed, Chapter 27; Farley, Chapter 36; McGregor and Hearman, Chapter 9;
Aboueldahab, Chapter 23; Petersson, Chapter 3; and Samour, Chapter 35 in this volume.
47
See, e.g., Anghie, Chapter 32; Chatterjee, Epilogue; Dirar, Chapter 21; Esmeir, Chapter 4;
Gassama, Chapter 7; Kanwar, Chapter 8; Kapur, Chapter 18; Mickelson and Natarajan,
Chapter 28; Oegroseno, Chapter 37; Reynolds, Chapter 14; Sayed, Chapter 26; and Sandoval,
Chapter 15 in this volume.
48
J.A.C. Mackie, Bandung 1955: Non-Alignment and Afro-Asian Solidarity (Singapore: Editions
Didier Millet, 2005); Prashad, The Darker Nations: A People’s History of the Third World; Itty
Abraham, “Bandung and State Formation in Post-colonial Asia” in See Seng Tan and Amitav
Acharya (eds.), Bandung Revisited: The Legacy of the 1955 Asian-African Conference for
International Order (Singapore: NUS Press, 2008), p. 48; Antonia Finnane and Derek
McDougall(eds.), Bandung 1955: Little Histories (Caulfield East, Victoria: Monash University
Press, 2010); Lee (ed.), Making a World after Empire: The Bandung Moment and Its Political
Afterlives.
49
Vitalis, “The Midnight Ride of Kwame Nkrumah and Other Fables of Bandung (Ban-doong)”.
understanding of what Bandung means in the larger sense. As we started to

suggest above, the historical embellishments and political lore that has been
attached to Bandung are important windows into understanding its signifi-
cance for the global order, and, in particular, for international law as part of
this global order. One reason for this is because international law – as all other
laws – has always been laden with myths. Let us briefly provide the example of
the Treaties of Westphalia to explain this point.50
As the story goes, two treaties were signed at two important European
conferences in the Catholic city of Münster and the Lutheran city of
Osnabrück – both in Westphalia (a province in present-day Germany) – on
October 24, 1648. These treaties marked the closure of the Thirty Years’ War,
which was a bloody conflict between Catholics and Protestants. In the annals of
orthodox international law these treaties mark the emergence of the modern
state as a secular institution independent from the Church. It was the moment
that created a system in which the international order shifted from one “based
on the recognition of authorities above the States to a horizontal system charac-
terized by the coexistence of a multiplicity of territorially defined autonomous
entities and sustained by a new type of law operating between rather than above
the members of the system.”51 According to the discipline’s canonical history, it
is this new configuration that gave rise to the modern international legal order.52
Arguably, however, it is sociologically more accurate to situate international
law’s beginnings in 1868–1873 when it shifted, as Martti Koskenniemi has
argued, from being the musings of “professors and philosophers, [as well as]
diplomats with an inclination to reflect on the procedure of their craft” to
becoming the practice of lawyers.53 Westphalia as an origin (mythical) story
was, in this way, only made popular later on, in the middle of the twentieth
century.54 But pointing this out does not mean that the most significant
feature of “Westphalia” in the international legal canon is its inaccuracy.
50
The same discussion can take place in the realm of private international law in regards to lex
mercatoria; see Emily Kadens, “The Myth of the Customary Law Merchant” (2012) 90 Texas
Law Review 1153; Ralf Michaels, “Legal Medievalism in Lex Mercatoria Scholarship” (2012) 90
Texas Law Review 259.
51
Rainer Grote, “Westphalian System” (2006) Max Planck Encyclopedia of Public International
Law (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), online edition: www.mpepil.com.
52
See how “the myth” of Westphalia also underpins the field of International Relations: Benno
Teschke, The Myth of 1648: Class, Geopolitics and the Making of Modern International
Relations (London: Verso, 2003).
53
Martii Koskenniemi, The Gentle Civilizer of Nations: The Rise and Fall of International Law
1870–1960 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), pp. 17, 41.
54
Leo Gross, “The Peace of Westphalia, 1648–1948” (1948) 42 American Journal of International
Law 20.
Instead, this point reveals that the actual value of Westphalia resides in its
“mythic” role – the work it does, and what that tells us about the ambitions of
the discipline of international law, and the political projects it serves. The
Treaties of Westphalia thus serve as a foundational myth to explain how
modern states and international law, mythical entities of their own, sprang
from the same source, and how both of them are “rational,” “modern,” and
necessarily “universal” projects. Many cultures have myths about siblings who
often become deadly rivals. But unlike other mythical siblings, the state and
international law do not destroy each other but depend on each other – this is
congealed by memory in the myth of Westphalia. And it is precisely because
of Westphalia’s mythical status and its association with concrete institutional
formations that Westphalia still occupies such a foundational place in both
international law handbooks and the actual operation of the world.
But if Westphalia serves as the creation myth of international law, the myth
of Bandung is its counterpoint. Bandung represents a vexed relationship with
Westphalia: a critical grappling with world history as it has unfolded in its
colonial and postcolonial period and in its many contexts. A richer historical
account of Bandung – in fact, multiple histories of Bandung – will help us
better understand, for this reason, the significance of Bandung, its constitutive
debates, and how it is deployed in different legal contexts at all levels. Going
further, we believe that a critical historiography of dominant Bandung histor-
ies will help us better connect the Conference with substantive questions
about the nature, evolution, and, perhaps, the agonic or – even better – tragic
unfolding of the international legal order. The objective of this collection is
precisely this task. It provides different perspectives concerning what Bandung
was, what it has meant, and what it could signify going forward, as a touch-
stone for our political imaginations, connecting the dots between different
postcolonial moments. In different ways, these chapters ask about the forma-
tion and work of the Bandung myth, how it enriches or circumscribes our own
time and our future, and how it can help us enhance our appreciation and use
of international law, particularly as it relates to North-South relations in our
unequal global world. In this sense, the contributions gathered here do not
simply revisit Bandung, and its attendant historical accounts with a critical
eye. Instead, treating Bandung as a window onto international law, these
readings also offer a global history of the legal order that has patterned the
legacies of colonialism and the struggle to give birth to a postcolonial world.
We could argue then, that 1955 at Bandung was when international law
became truly “universal.” It was the moment during which the majority of the
people in the world either lived within a state (which they either claimed as
their own or contested) or were fighting to form an independent state that was
supported by international law. In this sense, it might make more sense to
describe our contemporary international order as Bandungian rather than

Westphalian. If our mythical twins, the state and international law, were
personified, they would likely have darker skin than expected.
This leads to another of Bandung’s unique contributions to our understand-
ing of international law and its world, namely the recognition that racism and
political, legal, and economic structures of racial difference were an inextric-
able part of international law and the genealogy of the nation-state.55 The
Conference attendees deployed international law and state power to condemn
and eradicate colonialism and “racialism,” even though not every delegate at
the conference wanted to frame questions in terms of race and in fact some
were adamantly against racial discourse.56 However, some participants at the
Bandung Conference highlighted white supremacy, and there was discussion
of race among the delegates. Indeed, Wright argues that the convening of the
conference was in itself a statement about race and history:
The despised, the insulted, the hurt, the dispossessed – in short, the under-
dogs of the human race were meeting. Here were class and racial and
religious consciousness on a global scale. Who had thought of organizing
such a meeting? And what had these nations in common? Nothing, it
seemed to me, but what their past relationship to the Western world had
made them feel. This meeting of the rejected was in itself a kind of judgment
upon the Western world!57
Thus Bandung also has a life in the global history of antiracism, a history that
moves from the Bandung conference to the Durban conference to the present
moment.58 A number of antiracism activists in the American Black commu-
nity, for example, have invoked Bandung to situate their own struggle in
transnational solidarities. In these spaces, Bandung continues to animate the
global battle against racism in all of its forms.59
55
Prashad, The Darker Nations: A People’s History of the Third World and Robert Vitalis, White
World Order, Black Power Politics: The Birth of American International Relations (Ithaca:
Cornell University Press, 2015).
56
For instance, Vitalis argues that Nehru saw invocations of race as a “dangerous and retrograde
step.” On the other hand, Vitalis himself notes that Richard Wright recalled Nehru speaking
(although not in his formal remarks at the end of the conference) “movingly” about his
experience of racialized treatment. Vitalis, “The Midnight Ride of Kwame Nkrumah and
Other Fables of Bandung (Ban-doong),” pp. 21 and 16.
57
Richard Wright, The Color Curtain: A Report on the Bandung Conference. Foreword by
Gunnar Myrdal, 1st ed. (Cleveland: World Pub. Co, 1956), p. 12.
58
For instance, note the January 2017 event at University of Chicago: Racing the International,
from Bandung to Durban. For more information, see http://csrpc.uchicago
.edu/programs/public_programs/racing_the_international/bandung_to_durban/.
59
See Farley, Chapter 36 in this volume.
Bandung brought together, in this way, different nationalist projects and

class interests in order to create a widespread condemnation of “the indignity
of imperialism’s cultural chauvinism.”60 The resulting Bandung Communi-
qué and Principles addressed this strong consensus against imperialism by
framing their points in terms of equality, sovereignty, human rights, and
justice. While the delegates at Bandung could not agree on a definition of
imperialism, to some degree they framed it in cultural terms and linked
questions of culture to the political economy of imperialism. Almost two
decades later, Edwards Said would investigate culture in imperial terms.61
The two were inextricably linked and constituted a struggle over geography
and “forms of control which do not depend so much on the holding of
territory by settlers, but rather on the transformation of territories in the
metropolitan imagination as somehow necessary to the cultural existence of
the metropole.”62 Bandung was a powerful moment in this history that Said
gestures to: a history that in Bandung turns into counter hegemonic struggle to
transgress metropolitan imaginaries.
Foregrounding that global history, we can consider Bandung as being about
cultural resurgence as much, as it was about (re)claiming sovereign nation-
hood. This was about anti-imperialism as an expression of alternative post-
colonial modernities. In this vein, Bandung generated a series of conferences
that embodied Asian-African (“AA” as it was referred to) solidarity and that
were anti-imperial in cultural terms. These were inaugural meetings such as
the AA Students Conference (Bandung, 1956), Conference of AA Journalists
(Tokyo, 1956), AA People’s Solidarity Conference (Cairo, 1958), AA Confer-
ence on Women (Colombo, 1958), and the Afro-Asian Writers’ Conference
(Tashkent, 1958).
The Bandung Political Committee proceedings were, however, the real
priority for the heads of state present. Despite the number of socialist leaders at
the conference (some of whom saw politics, culture, and economics as part of
a single whole), the Political Committee was separated from the smaller
Economic Committee (and Cultural Committee). This keen attention to
the political dimension of a new world order came to be expressed more
forcefully in subsequent years at the UN General Assembly, now increasingly
darkening in its color composition. General Assembly resolutions conflicted
60
Prashad, The Darker Nations: A People’s History of the Third World, p. 45.
61
Edward Said, Orientalism (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1978); Culture and
Imperialism (1993).
62
Edward Said, “Response” (1994) 40 Social Text 20, p. 21. See also Rasulov, Chapter 12 in this
volume.
with the priorities of the Security Council on issues that ranged from apart-
heid South Africa to the Israeli occupation of Palestine. Thus from Bandung
to the structure of the United Nations, the fault lines of the postcolonial
moment had a long afterlife that remained vibrant and contentious through
the course of the Cold War period.
In contrast to the Bandung Political Committee, the Economic Commit-
tee’s agenda was developed by experts, and the discourse was technocratic.63
A commonly held assumption that would define future Third World agendas
was that national independence and sovereignty were the preconditions to
social and economic progress.64 Thus independence fueled a range of new
initiatives for reconfiguring the economic structure of the global landscape;
these initiatives are among the most significant Bandungian contributions to
international law, both in terms of the ingenuity of the specific proposals, and
the inspiration to denormalize the inherited economic order.
The Bandung Communiqué was primarily, however, a product of the
Political Committee and therefore does not fully capture the antagonism that
former colonies felt against the relatively new Bretton Woods institutions and
the relatively new postwar economic order. Bandung’s alternative economic
vision can be situated, as a result, in a timeline of global development politics
that began around 1945. The dominant model of development emerging at
that point, and which has definitely solidified now, came to not only separate
politics and economics; it also began to insulate the economy from the
political through a discourse of independence, expertise and technocracy.65
For these reasons it is particularly unfortunate that scholars and commentators
on Bandung have often ignored the economic aspects of Conference.66
During the Economic Committee discussions, delegates were extremely
critical of the International Bank for Reconstruction and the International
63
Godfrey H. Jansen, Afro-Asia and Non-Alignment (London: Faber, 1966), pp. 308–09.
64
See, e.g., Roeslan Abdulgani, Bandung Spirit; Moving on the Tide of History (Djakarta: Badan
Penerbit Prapantja, 1964), p. 17. See also Sundhya Pahuja, Decolonising International Law:
Development, Economic Growth and the Politics of Universality (New York: Cambridge
University Press, 2011)
65
See Gupta, Chapter 29 in this volume.
66
Some notable exceptions include Benjamin Howard Higgins, Economic Implications of the
Asian-African Conference and Its Aftermath (Cambridge, MA: Massachusetts Institute of
Technology, Center for International Studies, 1955); Helen E. S. Nesadurai, “Bandung and
the Political Economy of North-South Relations, Sowing the Seeds for Re-visioning
International Society” in See Seng Tan and Amitav Acharya (eds.), Bandung Revisited: The
Legacy of the 1955 Asian-African Conference for International Order (Singapore: NUS Press,
2008), p. 68; Bret Benjamin, “Bookend to Bandung: The New International Economic Order
and the Antinomies of the Bandung Era” (2015) 6 Humanity 33.
Monetary Fund for unfairly treating or ignoring “underdeveloped countries”

(as they were called).67 But they decided, and here problematically, that the
“proper place for such critical comments was at the annual Conference of the
Bank and Fund itself, and not at the Asian-African Conference where other
members of the Bretton Woods organizations were not represented.”68
Indeed, the underdeveloped countries had already also coalesced in the
formation of the International Trade Organization (ITO), where they put
forward alternative international trade and development policies, such as an
international legal structure intended to stabilize commodity prices, reflected
in the ITO Charter in 1948.69 After the ITO collapsed upon birth, the call for
stable commodities was reiterated in the Final Communiqué. Through the
UNCTAD and individual commodity agreements, Third World countries
would continue, up until around 1982, to devise multiple and competing
international legal plans for the stabilization of commodities. All of these
efforts were marked, however, by mixed results and the increasing separation
of economics from political considerations.70
Bandung’s most profound effect, at the level of economics, was thus to
define the Third World agenda in terms of decolonization and “national
development.” The later was understood, problematically again, as the way
to generate economic progress on the basis of the newly acquired political
independence.71 Within this narrative, Bandung is no longer only about Asia
and Africa. Along this register, Bandung laid the groundwork for a larger Third
World politics that included some countries in Europe and all of Latin
America. What brought Third World countries together were a colonial
history and their struggle for independence. Countries in Latin America had
their own, earlier postcolonial history, and jurists could describe Latin Amer-
ica’s unique position in international law, and how international law changed
because of Latin American countries’ independence.72 Liliana Obregón
describes this as a Creole legal consciousness – a consciousness that used
international law to find a place in the world for postcolonial states and to
67
Benjamin Howard Higgins, Economic Implications of the Asian-African Conference and Its
Aftermath (Cambridge, MA: Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Center for International
Studies, 1955), p. 7.
68
Ibid., pp. 7–8.
69
Michael Fakhri, Sugar and the Making of International Trade Law (Cambridge: Cambridge
70
Ibid., pp. 139–208.
71
Balakrishnan Rajagopal, International Law from Below: Development, Social Movements and
Third World Resistance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), p. 74.
72
Alejandro Alvarez, “Latin America and International Law” (1909) 3 American Journal of
International Law 269.
justify, in turn, the continued disciplining of local realities – a project increas-

ingly undertaken by local elites in lieu of the colonial masters of a previous
era.73 According to Obregón, jurists and politicians “strategically adapted both
the meaning and the use of the external law to local circumstances, giving it
an identity of place and a sense of regional uniqueness, while at the same time
their flexibility was essential to maintaining the colonial enterprise and the
centrality of a European legal heritage.”74
So despite all the ideological diversity at Bandung, including disagreement
on what constituted colonialism and imperialism, almost all Bandung dele-
gates were united by a discourse of developmentalism.75 As a collective agenda
in the global public sphere this generated projects such as the above men-
tioned UNCTAD, and as a national agenda by individual states, policies of
industrialization to address what many referred to at the time as economic
“backwardness.”76 Within this paradigm, once political independence was
attained, the road ahead was economic transformation and modernization;
projects undertaken with the assumption of post-independence cultural
homogeneity and a progress narrative of modernization.
This commitment to developmentalism in Bandung bridged domestic
and international politics, and is a thread that runs through from inter-
national to domestic law, from then until now.77 Soon after Bandung,
international jurists examined for these reasons the role of “newly inde-
pendent countries” of Asia and Africa in the world and how they would
change international law.78 At Bandung, newly independent states
73
Liliana Obregón, “Noted for Dissent: The International Life of Alejandro Álvarez” (2006) 19
Leiden Journal of Intenrational Law 983.
74
Ibid., 987. See also on the appropriation of international law by postcolonial international lawyers,
Arnulf Becker Lorca, Mestizo International Law (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2014).
75
See Gupta, Chapter 29; Özsu, Chapter 17; and Sayed, Chapter 26 in this volume.
76
See, e.g., Charles Habib Malik, The Problem of Coexistence (The Mars Lectures) (Evanston,
IL: Northwestern University Press, 1955), p. 25. See also Pahuja, Decolonising International
Law: Development, Economic Growth and the Politics of Universality.
77
See especially on the intertwining operation of international law and development in the
South, Anghie, Imperialism, Sovereignty and the Making of International Law; Luis Eslava,
Local Space, Global Life: The Everyday Operation of International Law and Development;
Fakhri, Sugar and the Making of International Trade Law; Pahuja, Decolonising International
Law: Development, Economic Growth and the Politics of Universality; Balakrishnan Rajagopal,
International Law from Below: Development, Social Movements and Third World Resistance
78
For a selection of this literature, see Georges Abi-Saab, Selected Bibliography on the Newly
Independent States and International Law (Geneva: Carnegie Endowment for International
Peace, European Centre, 1963); The Third World and International Law: Selected Bibliography
(1955–1982) (Geneva: UN Library, 1983); Michael Fakhri and Kelly Reynolds, “The Bandung
Conference.”
explicitly adopted and linked the language of development to “the problem

of balancing interests and creating a truly universal international law.”79
This generated, as we have seen, visionary alternative proposals, for
example, the Resolution on Permanent Sovereignty over Natural Resources
(1962), the Declaration on the Establishment of a New International
Economic Order (1974), the Charter of Economic Rights and Duties of
States (1975), and the Declaration on the Right to Development (1986).
These proposals remained, however, largely enclosed within the nation
state-developmentalist paradigm and deeply vulnerable to a resilient old
economic order. Newly independent states, as well as the already postco-
lonial republics of Latin America, very quickly became characterized in
international law as “developing states” and, therefore, in need of develop-
mental interventions. These interventions eventually came to show these
“developing countries” the weakness of political (formal) independence in
a world already crafted through the tools of imperial disciplines and
economic interests – economic interests increasingly conceptualized, once
again, as independent and technical. Debt accumulation, environmental
degradation, elite capture, structural adjustments, and economic exploit-
ation became, in this way, also part of the (tragic) legacies of Bandung era
statehood.
a post-bandung agenda
We want to leave readers with a sense of how we compiled this volume and
how it may be read. With the sixtieth anniversary of the Bandung Confer-
ence in mind, we approached a number of colleagues with the request to
think critically about how Bandung has informed their engagement with
law, to write anything they wished about this idea, and to employ any style
they felt best fitted their own window into the Conference. We tried to
include people from as many different places of the world and perspectives
as we could, and did our best to be strict with our (unreasonable) word
limit. We had no idea what to expect in return or what ideas would emerge.
We did know that due to limits of time and resources we would inevitably
not be able to cover some key aspects of Bandung. As the project unfolded,
our sense of how much more there was to say on Bandung became more
pronounced; we encountered other scholars who we would have loved to
79
Anghie, Imperialism, Sovereignty and the Making of International Law, p. 204.
include in this conversation, and our own conversations about Bandung –

among editors, contributors, and others – deepened our understanding of
the themes and issues we had not fully appreciated or even known about
when we started this project. That said, our sense of the value of this project,
with all its limitations, was also further affirmed as time passed and this book
slowly started to take shape.
The end result of our collective efforts is this volume. The book captures
a rich, multiform window into contemporary understandings about
Bandung’s meaning and legacy. As a whole, it can be seen as a historio-
graphical artifact of global international legal writing by a large and wide-
spread collective of scholars, all of them influenced by the global effects of
Bandung. It is then a window not only into 1955 but also into the current
moment and all its myths and countermyths, hopes and disappointments,
solidarities and fractious disputes, visions for international law and its
subversion.
In putting this collection together, we learned that in writing about Ban-
dung we engaged immediately in an exercise of imagining Bandung, and that
such imaginaries affect our accounts of international law. Thinking about and
through Bandung, we argue over how the world is and how it should be
governed. Bandung is, in this sense, one way to debate different understand-
ings of global time and space, or different ways to attain a decolonized future
or to live with an always never fully postimperial tomorrow. Thus, if you read
this collection as a whole, we hope you find the differences and arguments as
productive as the shared conclusions. Moreover, we hope you find common-
alities in unexpected places.
Derek Walcott, a St. Lucian poet, evoked the waves of colonialism,
slavery, and exploitative trading relations that washed onto Caribbean shores
in The Sea Is History.80 It is this oceanic legacy, of multiple layerings, that
President Sukarno invoked in his focus on the sea “as the main artery of
imperialism” in his opening address at the Bandung Conference.81 Walcott
writes in his poem:
but the ocean kept turning blank pages
looking for History.
Yet Walcott holds onto the struggle to extricate history from that ocean with
independence from colonialism:
80
Derek Walcott, “The Sea Is History” in Eduard Baugh (ed.), Selected Poems (New York:
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2007), p. 137.
81
See Esmeir, Chapter 4 in this volume.
Then came the white sisters clapping

to the waves’ progress,
and that was Emancipation—
jubilation, O jubilation—
vanishing swiftly
as the sea’s lace dries in the sun
Yet that too was a false dawn:

but that was not History,
that was only faith,
and then each rock broke into its own nation;
He ends:
and then in the dark ears of ferns
and in the salt chuckle of rocks

with their sea pools, there was the sound
like a rumour without any echo
of History, really beginning.
As a historical question, if Bandung represented a politics of decolonization,

nationhood, and development – with all of the contradictions involved in
these processes – more work needs to be done to understand the current
moment as yet another one where “history” is “really beginning.” To some
degree, Bandung was the early culmination of twentieth-century anticolonial
movements.82 But it also created new anticolonial possibilities. This sense of
possibility, of beginning to imagine and create the world anew, is another of
Bandung’s enduring legacies.
To commemorate Bandung, African and Asian leaders renewed their
commitment to each other on the fiftieth and sixtieth anniversaries of the
Conference.83 The most important event of Bandung’s sixtieth anniversary,
82
See, e.g., Petersson, Chapter 3 and Mamlyuk, Chapter 11 in this volume.
83
Bandung’s fiftieth anniversary was marked by the April 22–24, 2005 Asian-African Summit held
in Indonesia. African and Asian leaders renewed their commitment to each other in terms of
strategic relationship. This is reflected in the three-document Declaration on the New
Asian-African Strategic Partnership (NAASP), Joint Ministerial Statement on the New Asian
African Strategic Partnership Plan of Action, and Joint Asian African Leaders’ Statement on
Tsunami, Earthquake and other Natural Disasters. See “Archives,” Bandung Spirit Network,
www.bandungspirit.org/spip.php?article14. On April 22–24, 2015, in Bandung, national
delegates and civil society leaders attended the Commemoration of the Sixtieth Anniversary of
the 1955 Asian-African Conference. Delegates at the 2015 conference adopted three
documents: the Bandung Message, Reinvigorating the NAASP, and the Declaration on
however, was not the formal political conference, but the renewed imagina-
tive output exemplified by the large number of editorials, blog entries, and
scholarship that emerged in light of the commemoration.84 Political leaders in
their contemporary commemoration of Bandung have eschewed the language
of anti-imperialist alliances leaving the focus only on “South-South” cooper-
ation. The authors in this collection, as with many writers, instead use
Bandung as way to reinterpret and reexamine what imperial pasts and presents
mean for the future.
Thus we resist seeing Bandung as necessarily a narrative of disappoint-
ment. It is teleological and ahistorical to reduce Bandung to a finite project
such as national independence, nonalignment, or NIEO. Rather it is, to
invoke Walcott again, the legacy that “the ocean kept turning blank pages/
looking for History.” It is this sea of endless possibility and a horizon that is
still ahead that frame the post-Bandung agenda. The diverse perspectives in
this collection share the assumption that articulating Bandung’s meaning or
promise is an argument that one makes, not a premise one places in the
background. Bandung’s meaning depends on the writer’s approach, context,
or position. What we have learned in crafting this volume is thus that
Bandung inspired a great many people in vastly different contexts to
imagine different Third World projects, or resist Third World projects.
And this continues today. One should ask, therefore, as many do in this
collection, how people relied on Bandung or how people were inspired by
Bandung to create a different world. Or to see how ideas promulgated by
Bandung traveled, and continue to travel, to unanticipated places and
remerge at different points in time.
A significant number of chapters in this collection interpret Bandung’s
legacy in a particular way, and use this interpretation to gauge contemporary
issues, trace continuity, and notice change. Some focus on an aspect of
Bandung’s legacy and influence in areas such as human rights and develop-
ment85 or in areas not covered by Bandung such as gender politics, inter-
national economic law, or international environmental law.86 Others suggest
that one must consider Bandung in order to understand law and politics today
of particular states and regions, such as China, India, Latin America, and the
Palestine. See “The New Asian-African Strategic Partnership,” Ministry of Foreign Affairs
Republic of Indonesia, www.kemlu.go.id/en/kebijakan/kerjasama-regional/Pages/NAASP.aspx.
84
Many of the workshops, conferences, and publications generated in light of the sixtieth
anniversary are cataloged in the Bandung Spirit Network, www.bandungspirit.org/.
85
See Aboueldahab, Chapter 23; Okafor, Chapter 31; and Sayed, Chapter 26 in this volume.
86
See Ahmed, Chapter 27; Faundez, Chapter 30; Mickelson and Natarajan, Chapter 28; and
Taha, Chapter 20 in this volume.
Arab world,87 and of course Asia and Africa.88 By treating Bandung as a center
point in the world, places like Europe become peripheral and Australia,
Japan, and Brazil, with their ambiguous relationship with imperialism (for
very different reasons), appear to be on the semi-periphery.89 Palestine
decidedly remains an issue that was explicitly raised at Bandung and remains
unresolved today, though Bandung’s relationship to the cause of Palestinian
statehood is a matter of debate.90 Certain ideas, such as race, were raised at
Bandung that remain relevant today, but do not resonate as loudly in today’s
international legal scholarship as they definitely should.91
As the reader may already intuit, given our description of the different ways
in which Bandung relates to international law, one of the main issues that
arise in this collection is the critical tension created by the fact that sovereignty
was such a foundational idea at the Conference. Newly independent coun-
tries adopted Western notions of sovereignty but developed them in ways that
asserted their autonomy and sought to resist imperialism. The idea was that by
pooling their sovereign power through a politics of anti-imperial solidarity,
these new states would change the world order. But this concept of sovereignty
often meant that state authorities could govern their territories as they saw fit,
making Bandung’s commitment to external equality the fulcrum for internal
political distortions and excesses.92 And not only did Bandung principles of
equality and justice not apply internally, but it reinforced the idea of post-
colonial states as “national majorities joined by ethnic or cultural minor-
ities.”93 In ways that echoed Western nation-states, here too ethnic, racial
and religious majorities were often treated as the prime beneficiaries of
sovereignty. In this way, a multitude of “[c]ommunities marked by difference
from these national majorities were . . . recast as aliens and outsiders,
87
See Aboueldahab, Chapter 23; Chen, Chapter 10; Kang’ara, Chapter 22; Kapur, Chapter 18;
and Sandoval, Chapter 15 in this volume.
88
See Oegroseno, Chapter 37 and Rasulov, Chapter 12 in this volume.
89
See, LaForgia, Chapter 24; Shahabuddin, Chapter 5; and Veçoso, Chapter 25 in this volume.
90
See Samour, Chapter 35 in this volume.
91
See Farley, Chapter 36 in this volume. See also, “Panel: International Dimensions of Critical Race
Theory” (1997) 91 Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the American Society of International Law
408; “Symposium on Critical Race Theory and International Law: Convergence and Divergence”
(2000) 45 Villanova Law Review 827; Vasuki Nesiah, “Placing International Law: White Spaces on
a Map” (2003) 16 Leiden Journal of International Law 1; Robert Knox, “Civilizing Interventions?
Race, War and International Law” (2013) 26 Cambridge Review of International Affairs 111; Adrian
A. Smith, “Migration, Development and Security Within Racialized Global Capitalism: Refusing
the Balance Game” (2016) 37 Third World Quarterly 219.
92
See Anghie, Chapter 32 and Gassama, Chapter 7 in this volume.
93
Itty Abraham, How India Became Territorial: Foreign Policy, Diaspora, Geopolitics (Stanford:
Stanford University Press, 2014), p. 69. Quoted in Anghie, Chapter 32 in this volume.
notwithstanding their long residence in these countries.”94 Today this infam-

ous legacy continues to be present in many parts of the world.95 Connected
with this, the other ambiguous legacy of Bandung can be seen today in the
vast numbers of people fleeing their homelands through the Mediterranean
Sea, reversing the direction of European colonial travel, only to face bounded
nation-states, each trying to keep themselves together. The sea has become, as
we write this, a mass graveyard structured by international law. Yet, as Samera
Esmeir notes in her contribution to this volume, people’s journeys, “notwith-
standing its deadly outcome, is a testament to the possibilities that the sea
continues to present as a site of crossing, struggles, solidarity, and some
hope.”96
Authors in this volume have situated themselves differently in relation to
the alliances, divergences, and tensions crisscrossing Bandung – both Ban-
dung as event, and Bangung as myth. Bandung’s influence on nationalist
projects is reexamined through archival records or part of a history of ideas.97
Others write in a more reflective register and consider Bandung to be an
exercise in redescribing the world; they suggest that Bandung becomes polit-
ically salient when it is understood in a way that opens up multiple under-
standings of the past, present, and future.98 Some see a present where
Bandung’s promise of freedom and equality among nations and peoples
remains unfulfilled, in effect calling for a continued push in that direction.99
At the same time, a number of authors provide a precise account of
Bandung’s darker legacies. One argument is that the idea of solidarity at
Bandung, when examined against NAM and NIEO, in effect elided differ-
ences that were irreconcilable.100 The case studies on South Asia and Africa
foreground how concepts of nationhood developed at Bandung allowed, and
continue to allow, violence to be unleashed against populations whose rulers
are not perceived as members of their nationalist/ethnic group or worth of
attention.101 Focusing on the specific role of Bandung’s charismatic nationalist
statesmen, two authors bring also a poignant understanding of Bandung’s
legacy: they tell us that while these leaders should be credited with generating
Bandung’s inspirational anticolonial power, they should also be understood as
historical actors who are responsible for the significant inequality and violence
94 95
Ibid. See especially Dirar, Chapter 21 and Kapur, Chapter 18 in this volume.
96
See Esmeir, Chapter 4 in this volume.
97
See Obregón, Chapter 13; Peevers, Chapter 34; and Oklopcic, Chapter 16 in this volume.
98
See Parfitt, Chapter 2 and Pahuja, Chapter 33 in this volume.
99 100
See Chatterjee, Epilogue in this volume. See Özsu, Chapter 17 in this volume.
101
See Choudhury, Chapter 19; Dirar, Chapter 21; Gassama, Chapter 7; and Kapur, Chapter 18 in
this volume.
within many postcolonial states because of their adherence to certain shared

worldviews.102
This type of focus on Bandung’s past implies that if we soberly look at the
violence and inequality in the world today, we may see that it is partly the
result of the fact that the leaders at Bandung achieved much of it what they set
out to do. For instance, while none of the Four Asian Tigers – Hong Kong,
Singapore, South Korea, and Taiwan – were present at the Conference, their
political and economic policies have often been told as a story of planned
economic independence that fits well within Bandungian sensibilities. Yet
arguably, transnational solidarity plays only a minor role in the success of the
Asian Tiger story. We may be witnessing a different version of nationalist
alliance in the story of BRICS. China, India, post-apartheid South Africa, post-
Soviet Russia, and Brazil have relied together, especially since 2009 when they
began to meet annually, on claims of sovereignty and economic development
to push themselves ahead in the modernist narrative and upgrade from
developing into emerging economies. But yet again, many smaller countries
were left behind – perhaps even rendered more vulnerable by the success of
the BRICS countries. Is this in the tradition of Bandungian solidarity that we
want to claim?
The challenges of a broader appeal for solidarity may be a call to return to
the Bandungian insistence on the significance of colonial history. This is
surely a significant part of the story of the tragedy of genocide, war, and
environmental crisis in contexts such as Rwanda103 and Palestine, and beyond,
and our inability to respond to these events in a non-state-centric manner.104
In the midst of this crisis, developmental discourses have come to fill the gap
of proper political responses; coupled with humanitarianism these often carry
an ontological structure predicated on victimhood, a poor disabling move that
takes us to commiseration and not to liberation.105 Another example lurking in
the background of one of the chapters is, for these reasons, Syria. As we drew
this volume together, we have been witnessing the regressive unraveling of
imperial borders created by the 1916 Sykes-Picot Agreement. What does a
Bandungian solidarity call for in this moment? Again, we are grappling with
the limitations of reducing solidarity to commiseration or formulaic versions of
sovereignty. As Prashad notes, “distress produces its own contradictions.”106
102
See Gassama, Chapter 7 and Gupta, Chapter 29 in this volume.
103
Mahmood Mamdani, When Victims Become Killers: Colonialism, Nativism, and the Genocide
in Rwanda (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001).
104 105
See Samour, Chapter 35 in this volume. See Sayed, Chapter 26 in this volume.
106
Prashad, The Darker Nations: A People’s History of the Third World, p. 279.
These are all important issues, and further research into them will compli-
cate and enrich our post-Bandung agenda without descending into a narrative
of failure on the one hand or nostalgia on the other. The treatment of
civil unrest and internal repression in the post-colony as failures in the Bandung
vision dehistoricizes the complexity of local social struggles. The failure narra-
tive is often accompanied with an ascension into ethereal cosmopolitanisms – a
move that history has shown as often quickly descending into international
technical managerialisms and imperial projects of all sorts. The nostalgia
narrative presents an equally problematic take on history in looking to the
nation-state as the only locus of social change – a move that history has shown
as often quickly descending into repression of dissenters and internal minor-
ities. On the one hand, the failure narrative denies the long reach of colonial-
ism and the continued role of neocolonialism; unrest in, or resistance to, the
postcolonial nation-state is not the same as the failure of the Bandungian
inheritance, in its nation-state form as well as others. Bandungian nationalism
of the postcolonial moment could be understood as the tactical means people
chose at the time to achieve their goals in an inherited “Westphalian” world
order.107 On the other hand, the nostalgia narrative denies that tactics is a matter
of strategy and the nation-state should not be fetishized as a transhistorical
category. These fault lines, this unrest, stands at the historical intersection of
complex dynamics internal to the postcolonial nation as well as the complex
dynamics of the neocolonial global landscape. Kamala Viswesarna notes in her
discussion of India and Kashmir, in this sense, that refusing history often
conflates “post-colonial critique with nation-state melancholia.” She says this
“not only produces an elision of the question of occupation but also has a
tendency to subsume socio-political opposition in post-colonial states to mere
symptoms of its ‘failure.’”108 Here, leaving aside both the failure narrative and
the nostalgia narrative, we can think of the “occupation” as both Indian
occupation of Kashmir and British colonization of the subcontinent. It is
perhaps overdetermined that “unrest” and opposition will emerge at this potent
historical junction.
In 1955, Richard Wright’s conversation with Benjamin Higgins fore-
grounded the temporal terms for Bandung in a way that continues to resonate
today. Wright was an author who provided a famous firsthand account of
Bandung and linked it to the antiracism struggle in the United States, and
Higgins was a development economist who studied the economic aspects of
Bandung. They discussed Higgins’s proposals after Bandung, and in their
107
Robert Knox, “Strategy and Tactics” (2010) 21 Finnish Yearbook of International Law 193.
108
Kamala Visweswaran, “Occupier/occupied” (2012) 19 Identities 440, 444.
conversation both thought that it might be too late to even start solving Asian
countries’ problems. Wright was overwhelmed by the degree of change
necessary to improve living conditions and the amount of resources necessary
to implement change. But then he concluded, “The problem here is not
whether these Asian masses can or will make progress; the problem is one,
above all, of means, techniques, and time.”109
Today, we are living in one of those particular times and with the results of
some of the particular techniques present in Bandung. In that sense, Bandung
is our present. But is this the world we want? Today, in contradistinction to the
Bandung moment, the progressive Third World project (certainly as exempli-
fied in many of the contributions included in this volume) has unmoored
itself from the state. It is also suspicious of developmental discourses, progress
narratives, and illusory promises of emancipation. However it remains anti-
imperial.110 At Bandung, delegates argued over the geographical dimensions of
imperialism, some emphasizing European colonialism, others worried more
about the Soviet Union or the United States. This perspective, of course, left
out postwar imperial ambitions among Asian and African states.111 But just as
imperialism can be understood in a multitude of ways, anti-imperialism
should comprise a plurality of methods and perspectives. In this precise way,
it is important to pay attention not only to the anti-imperial social movements
that produced Bandung but also to their current local and transnational
iterations.112
Today we could say, as a result, that anti-imperialism is an undertaking that
engages with the workings of the state but with a deep mistrust if not hostility
against it.113 For the last three decades many have been engaged, along these
lines, in what can be called a post-Bandung agenda. It is an agenda that
provides a critical engagement with notions of sovereignty, human rights, and
the international economic order. And it does not treat the state as a predeter-
mined or privileged category. Rather, it is one that constantly revisits “how
and where exactly we do engage, and should engage, with international
109
Wright, The Color Curtain, p. 216 (emphasis in the original).
110
See also Usha Natarajan, John Reynolds, Amar Bhatia, and Sujith Xavier (eds.) “Special Issue:
TWAIL – On Praxis and the Intellectual” (2016) 37:11 Third World Quarterly 1943–2138 (with
contributions by Georges Abi-Saab, Nesrine Badawi, Reem Bahdi, Richard Falk, Ali
Hammoudi, Vanja Hamzić, Mudar Kassis, Adil Hasan Khan, Zoran Oklopcic, John Reynolds,
Adrian M. Smith, and M. Sornarajah).
111
See Dirar, Chapter 21 in this volume.
112
See Chimni, Chapter 1 and McGregor and Hearman, Chapter 9 in this volume.
113
See Chatterjee, Epilogue in this volume.
law.”114 With such an agenda, we can better appreciate, for example, the
progressive and revolutionary implications of uprisings, revolutions, and social
mobilizations in different Asian, Arab, African, Latin American, and Euro-
pean countries in recent years.115
As such, spatial concepts and their relation to political formations are
currently a matter of investigation and argument within international legal
scholarship. One approach has been to contextualize the state within different
transnational scales, whether it is through new international institutions for-
mations or regional imaginaries. Others have opted instead to put the state
deeper in the background (or even better dispersed throughout our human
and material world), calling, in this way, for an international law of the
everyday.116 This has been a reaction against an international law that is
formed as a response to crises – crises from which it extracts value, in order
to present itself as an extraordinary safety zone, while still sustaining these
crises in different ways.117 The aim of this exercise has been to reflect on, and
move away from, the received myths of international law, and instead to pay
attention to shared vernacular ways of seeing the world, communicating
values, and performing or transmitting culture. Even as Bandung’s generation
of politicians, writers, and intellectuals pass away, taking living memory of the
Conference with them, Bandung remains alive in today’s intimate spaces of
friendship, mentorship, and family.118 This is not a space for grand romance,
but it is a space of resistance and solidarity found in the places where we live
and work – from Rhodes Must Fall in one space to Occupy in another; Black
Lives Matter in one space and the Arab Spring in another. For instance,
within the domain of Third World Approaches to International Law
(TWAIL) – the multigenerational network of scholarship and solidarity that
has nurtured us and many contributors to this volume – Bandung continues,
not as a heroic conquest of the international legal order, but more as a popular
spirit of “enlightened anarchy” that Gandhi aspired to for independent India.
114
Luis Eslava and Sundhya Pahuja, “Beyond the (Post)Colonial: TWAIL and the Everyday Life
of International Law” (2012) 45 Journal of Law and Politics in Africa, Asia and Latin 195.
115
See, e.g., Aboueldahab, Chapter 23 in this volume.
116
Luis Eslava, Local Space, Global Life.
117
See, e.g., Anne Orford, “Embodying Internationalism: The Making of International Lawyers”
(1998) 19 Australian Year Book of International Law 1; Hilary Charlesworth, “International Law:
A Discipline of Crisis” (2002) 65 Modern Law Review 377, 385–386; Fleur Johns, Richard Joyce,
and Sundhya Pahuja (eds.), Events: The Force of International Law (London: Routledge, 2011).
118
See Mickelson and Natarajan, Chapter 28; Pahuja, Chapter 33; and Sandoval Chapter 15 in
this volume.
But this call for an international law that pays attention to the everyday
forces us to question whose day matters. The question of “who” is not self-
evident and cannot be answered in the abstract, especially if we think from the
perspective of the claims – enacted, forgotten, or imagined – in Bandung. In
this sense, even though we all live in the realm of the everyday, international
law and its myths still give people a platform to dream of alternative futures
and enable one to speak to the world. In this way the post-Bandung agenda
remains committed, as the contributions collected here demonstrate, to find-
ing new spaces of unity and collective action that defy and transfigure con-
cepts of nations and states, and international law as such. To paraphrase from
the recent Black-Palestinian Solidarity movement: solidarity against imperial-
ism and state-sanctioned violence is neither a guarantee nor a requirement – it
is a choice.119 Solidarity gains and loses momentum and direction like the
winds in the sails of a ship. When there is a shared sense of solidarity, it feels as
though there is collective movement toward a clear goal. At other times,
however, solidarity feels more like a political agenda that is at the mercy of
forces of nature pushing in unknown directions. Alliances are difficult to
create and tenuous at best, but, as we have discovered, the effort to create
them is profoundly transformative.120
Bandung inserted the concepts of equality and justice into international law
in a way that cannot be undone. Bandung’s significance for international
lawyers arises from the fact that it is both an idea and a project, a collective
imagination of a new world and a practical effort to make that idea a reality. It
is for every generation to argue and debate over what equality and justice
mean for international law, and in doing so to resist normalization and to
wrench open the possibility of an alternative, fairer, and more just world order,
“like a rumor without any echo/of History, really beginning.”
119
See www.blackpalestiniansolidarity.com/#sthash.ZUnfqH4K.DoHqmzCS.dpuf.
120
Vasuki Nesiah, “Uncomfortable Alliances: Women, Peace and Security in Sri Lanka” in Ania
Loomba and Ritty Lukose (eds.), South Asian Feminisms (Durham: Duke Univeristy Press,
2012), p. 139.
part i.
Bandung Histories
1
Anti-Imperialism
Then and Now
b. s. chimni
introduction
The historic Bandung Conference represented an alliance against imperial-
ism. It had its antecedents in the League against Imperialism (1927), which
advanced a critique of the mandate system of the League of Nations.1 But
while anti-imperialism was a principal theme of Bandung, not all of the
twenty-nine attending nations were former colonies. Indeed, Japan, with its
imperial legacy, participated in the Conference. The Cold War divide pre-
vented the adoption of an operative definition of the term imperialism in the
Final Communiqué.2 In fact, as Dipesh Chakrabarty points out, “the organ-
izers went to some trouble to make sure that the anti-imperialism undergird-
ing the Conference was open to political ideologies on both sides of the cold
war divide.”3 Amid the contestation of the meaning of imperialism, the idea of
a Third World was born. While there was recognition that “the unity for the
people of the Third World came from a political position against colonialism
and imperialism,”4 the spirit of Westphalia had already begun to work its
magic among newly independent states.5
1
Vijay Prashad, The Darker Nations: A People’s History of the Third World (New York: The New
Press, 2007), p. 21.
2
Dipesh Chakrabarty, “The Legacies of Bandung: Decolonization and the Politics of Culture,”
Afterlives (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2010), p. 50.
3 4
Id. at 52. Prashad, The Darker Nations, p. 34.
5
In one view, a consequence of divisiveness and politics of national interest was that it later “not
only undermined the ability of Third World nationalists to contest the US empire, but
reaffirmed the legitimacy of US imperial ambitions.” Gerard Greenfield, “Bandung Redux:
Imperialism and Anti-Globalization Nationalisms in Southeast Asia” (2005) Socialist Register
166 at 167.
35
36 B. S. Chimni
imperialism today
However, Bandung retains its salience, especially at a time when scholars (and
states) contest the very idea of imperialism. There has emerged an opinion
even on the left that the era of globalization brings to an end the phenomenon
of imperialism. What we have instead is a “postcolonial and postimperialist”
empire.6 For example, according to Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri,
imperialism territorializes the flows of capital, whereas “[t]he full realization
of the world market is necessarily the end of imperialism.”7 Empire has taken
its place with “a decentred and deterritorialising apparatus of rule that progres-
sively incorporates the entire global realm within its open, expanding fron-
tiers.”8 Therefore, concepts such as center and periphery are now all but
useless. In this view, “it is no longer possible to demarcate large geographical
zones as center and periphery, North and South.”9 According to Hardt and
Negri, today there are “no differences of nature” between the United States
and Brazil or Britain and India, “only differences of degree.”10 While they
offer some valuable insights into the workings of the global capitalist system, it
is certainly premature to declare the end of imperialism, which has merely
entered a new phase. The phase of neocolonialism has been succeeded by
that of global imperialism, that is, imperialism in the era of globalization. The
most significant feature of imperialism today is that universalizing capitalism
penetrates and integrates national economies more deeply, imposing serious
constraints on the possibility of a Third World state pursuing an independent
path of development. A borderless global economic space is being created in
which Third World nations are assigned the role of implementing uniform
global standards agreed on through multilateral processes and supplemented
by bilateral agreements. The role of these nations in the era of neoliberal
globalization is primarily to facilitate the expansion of global capitalism
through promoting free trade, lifting constraints on movement of capital,
and ensuring infrastructure development. Another distinguishing feature of
global imperialism is the phenomenon of “accumulation by dispossession.” It
means, among other things, the appropriation of land and other natural
resources of third world countries is a basis for the expansion of global
capital.11 If these nations are not actively protesting the features of new
6
Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000),
p. 9.
7 8 9 10
Id. at 333. Id. at xii. Id. at 335. Ibid.
11
David Harvey, “The ‘New’ Imperialism: Accumulation by Dispossession” (2004) 40 Socialist
Register 63, at 73–87.
Anti-Imperialism: Then and Now 37
imperialism, it is because of the growing influence of transnational fractions of

its capitalist class on foreign economic policies. In the era of global imperial-
ism the North-South divide has come to be accompanied by a global class
divide.
In The Wretched of the Earth, Frantz Fanon warned of “the rise of a new
comprador bourgeoisie” in postcolonial countries.12 This prognosis was con-
summated in the first decades of the postcolonial era.13 In the era of neoliberal
globalization, collaboration between the capitalist classes in the first and third
worlds has assumed a new form. A transnational capitalist class (TCC) has
emerged, constituted by a coalition of transnational fractions of the national
capitalist classes, that stands to gain from the accelerated globalization process.
The transnational fractions “are not the obedient junior partners of the
previous imperialist era; rather, they are emerging as independent players
and rebalancing global power”14 with the active support of the global middle
classes who have come to share its social imagination.15 There is certainly a
degree of “complexity in transnational class formation.”16 The emergence of a
transnational historic bloc “does not eliminate rivalries based in the objective
necessity of capitalist states to influence capital flows to their own territorial
advantage; it only mutes and manages them.”17 In short, “as a class-for-itself,
the transnational capitalist class is in the making, but not (yet) made.”18
A manifestation of this fact is “the detachment of Southern bourgeoisies,
including state-capitalist fractions, from the elite of network of the North.”19
This explains the coming together of the BICS countries (Brazil, India,
China, and South Africa).20 In other words, the logics of capital and territory
do not as yet coincide, as there are contradictory pulls and pressures on the
postcolonial developmental state in the face of different national and regional
histories and trajectories of economic and political development, including a
history of resistance to imperialism.
However, the divide between the advanced capitalist countries and the
emerging powers is being reduced in multiple ways, of which at least two
12
Christopher J. Lee, “Introduction” in Lee (ed.) Making a World, at 19. For details, see Frantz
Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth (New York: Penguin Books, 2001), p. 132.
13
Lee, “Introduction,” p. 19.
14
Jerry Harris, “Statist Globalization in China, Russia and the Gulf States” (2009) 73 Science and
Society 6, at 7.
15
Leslie Sklair, The Transnational Capitalist Class (London: Blackwell Publishers, 2000).
16
William K. Carroll, The Making of a Transnational Capitalist Class: Corporate Power in the
21st Century (London: Zed Books, 2010). p. 231.
17 18 19
Id. at 232. Id. at 233. Ibid.
20
Ibid. I deliberately do not refer to BRICS, as Russia has its own compulsions for becoming a
part of this coalition and the BICS nations their reasons for accommodating it.
38 B. S. Chimni
may be mentioned. First, international institutions (such as the IMF, World

Bank, and WTO) are playing a significant role in mediating between
advanced capitalist states and leading Third World states to promote the
general interests of TCC. Indeed, there is emerging a global state constituted
by a network of international institutions.21 Second, there is the emergence of
new political coalitions that lessen the divide. India, a founder of the Non-
Aligned Movement (NAM), is in the process of entering into a strategic
partnership with the United States. China no longer talks the language of
Third Worldism. Its economic relationship with the United States is based on
“a level of economic interdependence surpassing that of Japan.”22 The result is
that despite the “irresistible shift of power to the East,” the political alignment
is not that of opposition to capitalism or advanced capitalist countries. But
there is certainly an element of competition with the latter as rising Third
World states seek political power commensurate with their growing economic
profile. It explains the creation of the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank
(AIIB).23 The organization is less about divergence of economic interests than
about claiming political power. The fact that a large number of developed
countries have joined AIIB reflects the convergence of interests between the
TCC of the Global South and the Global North.24 On the other hand, the
opposition of the United States (and Japan) is based on the unwillingness to
share political power with the emerging powers, raising the possibility of
breathing fresh life into Third World coalitions such as NAM.
In sum, the nature of imperialism has changed since Bandung. The
meaning of Third World today can, in a significant sense, be more accurately
expressed in the vocabulary of class (conceptualized as intersecting with
gender and race divides). Broadly speaking, in the emerging global social
formation constituted by interpenetrating national economies, the First World
is constituted by the TCC, which includes the top echelons of the managerial
and professional class, the rich landowners, and the political elite; the Second
World by the global middle class encompassing the bureaucracy, armed forces
personnel, junior professionals, the intelligentsia, and the organic intellec-
tuals; and the Third World by the exploited, marginalized, and oppressed
classes that include workers, the indigenous or tribal peoples, poor and
oppressed women, landless workers, small peasants, petty traders, unemployed
21
See B. S. Chimni, “Capitalism, Imperialism and International Law in the Twenty First
Century” (2012) 14 Oregon Review of International Law 17.
22
Perry Anderson, “On the Conjuncture” (2007) 48 New Left Review 5, at 6.
23
For details, see https://www.aiib.org.
24
See generally C. P. Chandrasekhar, “Infrastructure Financing as Power Politics,” at
http://triplecrisis.com/infrastructure-financing-as-power-politics/.
youth, religious and ethnic minorities, uncared-for elderly persons, refugees,

and illegal migrants. The meaning and strategy of anti-imperialism has to be
considered in the light of this new meaning of Third World. However, it would
be imprudent to forget that as yet the class divide exists amid a sovereign state
system in which the western capitalist states, led by the United States, con-
tinue to play a leading role in shaping neoliberal globalization backed by their
military prowess that is used against recalcitrant Third World nations.
anti-imperialism today
An effective anti-imperialist strategy must reflect the complex and contradict-
ory trends that inform the new imperial formation. Those who mistakenly
speak of a post-imperialist empire tend to pose simplistic choices. When
reviewing the World Social Forum (WSF) meeting in Porto Alegre in 2002,
Michael Hardt summed up the options in relation to the promotion of the
global democracy and global justice project:
There are . . . two primary positions in the response to today’s dominant
forces of globalization: either one can work to reinforce the sovereignty of
nation-states as a defensive barrier against the control of foreign and global
capital, or one can strive towards a nonnational alternative to the present
form of globalization that is equally global. The first poses neoliberalism as
the primary analytical category, viewing the enemy as unrestricted global
capitalist activity with weak state controls; the second is more clearly posed
against capital itself, whether state-regulated or not. The first might rightly be
called an antiglobalization position, in so far as national sovereignties, even if
linked by international solidarity, serve to limit and regulate the forces of
capitalist globalization. National liberation thus remains for this position the
ultimate goal, as it was for the old anticolonial and anti-imperialist struggles.
The second, in contrast, opposes any national solutions and seeks instead a
democratic globalization.25
In view of his and Negri’s farewell to imperialism, Hardt is critical of the fact
that “the representatives of the traditional parties and centralized organizations
at . . . [WSF] are too much like the old national leaders gathered at
Bandung . . . affirming national sovereignty around a conference table, but
they can never grasp the democratic power of the movements.”26 His prognosis
is “eventually they too will be swept up in the multitude, which is capable
25
Michael Hardt, “Today’s Bandung” (2002) 14 New Left Review 112, at 114. 26
Id. at 118.
40 B. S. Chimni
of transforming all fixed and centralized elements into so many more nodes
in its indefinitely expansive network.”27
Hardt clearly sees the goals of reinforcing “national sovereignty” or seeking
“national solutions” and promoting “democratic globalization” as mutually
exclusive positions, neglecting the possibility that the two objectives can,
appropriately framed, represent a pincer move against new imperialism. The
need of the hour is a contextualized strategy of anti-imperialism that is flexible
and multidimensional, responding in diverse ways on multiple fronts through
the “explosive combination of different agents.”28 Inasmuch as imperialism
translates into a loss of critical policy space, the strengthening of national
sovereignty is imperative but in conjunction with social movements, both
national and global, that compel the Third World developmental state to
enhance the welfare of ordinary citizens. This position is not against global-
ization, but in favor of just globalization.
At Bandung the restoration of national sovereignty took precedence, as the
decolonization process was yet to be completed. It was assumed that the
newly independent state would serve its people. The internal social fractures
and contradictions that marked the birth of the postcolonial developmental
state have since come to the fore and sharpened under conditions of
neoliberal globalization. These had not received the attention of most antic-
olonial movements, as their primary goal was to unify the people against
imperialism. The concerns of subaltern classes have today become active
subjects of social movements, often led by left parties, as in the case of Latin
America. Therefore, while the strengthening of national sovereignty can
mean bolstering authoritarian, predatory, and corrupt states that heap oppres-
sion on their peoples, in the absence of adequate policy space, even a
willing state cannot pursue measures that promote the well-being of its
citizens. But moves in favor of strengthening national sovereignty must for
that very reason proceed apace with sustained social movements to safeguard
democratic and welfare institutions. There may be long periods of time in
which internal democratic movements are suppressed, but as the Arab
Spring showed, these can come to life in most difficult conditions. On the
other hand, Hardt does not appreciate that both nonparty and left-led social
movements seek national solutions and strengthen national sovereignty as a
bulwark against global imperialism even as they struggle for internal and
global democracy. He does not acknowledge that in the absence of a thick
global political culture, territorial citizenship cannot be set aside and
27
Ibid.
28
Slavoz Zizek, “How to Begin from the Beginning” (2009) 57 New Left Review 43, at 55.
reconstituted at the global level.29 To speak of a global revolution against

capital is to disarm subaltern peoples and nations against the forces of
imperialism.
In short, the principal locus of resistance to imperialism remains the nation-
state, and this is recognized even by nontraditional formations of resistance in
the Third World that also participate in WSF. These formations seek national
solutions precisely as a way of promoting democratic globalization against
capital.30 The initiatives of global civil society that challenge global capital,
even acquiring primacy in some contexts, are seen to complement national
struggles. The problem with Hardt is that he hypothesizes “an unprecedented
agency that may be everywhere, and potentially omnipotent, yet remains
without a local habitation and a name.”31 While it potentially exists every-
where, it effectively exists nowhere. Hardt also does not indicate the insti-
tutions of the new society that will constitute and give life to the nonnational
alternative. Nor does he recognize the fact that an empty nonnational imagin-
ation has created space for use of force by imperialist states against Third
World nations legitimized by concepts such as “responsibility to protect.”
Therefore, in the struggle against global imperialism, the choice is not
between pursuing the objective of strengthening national sovereignty and
promoting global democracy. In order to strengthen the rights of subaltern
peoples against the national and global structures of oppression, social move-
ments must pursue both these objectives simultaneously.32 This effort has to
be supported in the world of international law, as it does not merely reflect but
also constitutes imperial structures and practices. It is critical to have an anti-
imperialist jurisprudence that simultaneously pursues both these goals.
dealing with agrarian crises and land grab

The thesis on pursuing a pincer strategy against imperialism can be easily
sustained with reference to the international investment or international
property rights regimes that have led to the erosion of national policy space.
But because the agrarian crisis and the land question in the Third World
29
David Chandler, “Critiquing Liberal Cosmopolitanism? The Limits of the Biopolitical
Approach” (2009) 3 International Political Sociology 53, at 64.
30
An example of such a formation is the National Alliance of People’s Movements (NAPM) in
India. For details of constituent organizations, see www.napm-india.org/.
31
Tom Nairn, “Make for the Boondocks” (2005) 27 London Review of Books, available at
www.lrb.co.uk/v27/n09/tom-nairn/make-for-the-boondocks (accessed May 27, 2015).
32
For an analogous argument, see Vijay Prashad, The Poorer Nations: A Possible History of the
Global South (Delhi: Leftword Books, 2013), Chapter 4.
42 B. S. Chimni
receive almost no attention in the world of international law, these may be

used to illustrate the need for a multipronged and flexible anti-imperialist
strategy. The objective is to critique the pseudo-choice posited between
national solutions and strengthening national sovereignty on the one hand
and making nonnational moves against capital on the other with the aim of
advancing democratic globalization. In the case of the agrarian crisis, a
significant aim of both non-party-led social movements and left parties in
the Third World is undertaking land reforms. It principally demands a
national solution as an integral part of a strategy to improve the living condi-
tions of people living in rural areas. However, the agrarian crises also call for
addressing, among other things, the phenomenon of land grabbing and land
acquisition by foreign investors in many Third World countries. In this
instance, the nonnational global democratization strategy against capital led
by transnational social movements can play an important role.
Agrarian crisis has long afflicted the poor world. It cannot be corrected
without carrying out land reforms.33 But the language of land reforms has
been lost in much of the Third World. For example, land reforms were
promised in India in the course of the freedom struggle, but the agenda was
all but abandoned in the 1960s.34 As a result, land continues to be concen-
trated in the hands of a small percentage of people. More than 40 percent of
households in rural India do not own land. The pattern of land ownership is
even more problematic in other regions of the world, especially in Latin
America. In the case of Brazil, “two-thirds of the country’s arable land is in
the hands of a small group of proprietors who account for barely 3 percent of
all landowners.”35 In Argentina, “43 percent of the productive land today is
owned by fewer than 4,000 landowners.”36 These figures are said to be “typical
for Latin America as a whole, a region that, according to the World Bank,
exhibits the most unequal distribution of land and wealth in the world.”37 The
picture has worsened over the past two decades as “the degree of concen-
tration in land ownership and the disparity in access to the means of produc-
tion in rural areas has increased in a context of two decades of neoliberal
‘structural’ policy reform.”38
33
Marc Edelman et al., “Introduction: Critical Perspectives on Food Sovereignty” (2014) 41 The
Journal of Peasant Studies 91, at 92.
34
D. Bandyopadhyay, “Does Land Still Matter?” (March 8, 2008) Economic and Political Weekly
37, at 37.
35
James Petras and Henry Veltmeyer, “The ‘Development State’ in Latin America: Whose
Development, Whose State?” (2007) 34 Journal of Peasant Studies 371, at 381.
36 37 38
Ibid. Ibid. Ibid.
As a result of this and other factors such as the lack of adequate public
investment in agriculture, the agrarian crisis has deepened. But it has been
made invisible at the global level through speaking of “the death of the
agrarian question,” for it is thought that the globalization process “will indus-
trialize backward agrarian formations . . . without reference to agriculture.”39
Such a view, reflecting the imagination of the TCC, greatly exaggerates the
importance of foreign sources in financing industrialization of the Third
World and neglects the significance of the home market, which can be
expanded through land reforms.40 The agrarian question has also been mar-
ginalized by pronouncing the “death of the peasantry,” a reference to the
sharp reduction of its size in the First World and in many parts of the Third
World.41 However, such a pronouncement does not take into account the
simple fact that more than half the population in countries like China and
India continues to be involved in agriculture42 But the talk of the “death of the
agrarian question” or “death of peasantry” facilitates the framing of resistance
in nonnational terms and the privileging of democratic globalization alterna-
tive, as struggles over land are preeminently national. Joao Pedro Stedile, the
leader of MST in Brazil, put it succinctly: “The struggle at the national level is
the key one.”43 To be sure, Stedile affirmed the need for a World Assembly of
Peoples Movements to support national movements.44 However, this was not
in his case a reference to WSF, with which he was disillusioned, albeit for the
different reason that powerful European NGOs and social movements that
participated were “dominated by anarchist visions that reject any form or
organization or articulation.”45 As Stedile aptly asked, “How can you possibly
39 40
Id. at 207. Id. at 208.
41
Even as astute a historian as Eric Hobsbawm has lent credibility to this understanding: “The
most dramatic and far-reaching social change of the second half of [the twentieth] century, and
one which cuts us off for ever from the past, is the death of the peasantry.” Eric Hobsbawm,
Interesting Times: A Twentieth-Century Life (New York: The New Press, 2002), p. 289.
42
Terence Byres, “Structural Changes, the Agrarian Question, and the Possible Impact of
Globalization” in Jayati Ghosh and C. P. Chandrasekhar (eds.), Work and Well-Being in the
Age of Finance (New Delhi: Tulika, 2003), p. 202.
43
Joao Pedro Stedile, “The Class Struggles in Brazil: The Perspective of the MST: Joao Pedro
Stedile Interviewed by Atilio Boron,” Socialist Register 2008 (New Delhi: Leftword Books,
2007), p. 211. The MST uses “public activism” involving “an organized, politicized, visible,
autonomous, periodic, and nonviolent form of social conflict.” Miguel Carter, “The Landless
Rural Worker’s Movement and Democracy in Brazil” (2010) Latin American Research Review
186, at 202. See also Prashad, The Poorer Nations, pp. 246, 253–256.
44
Stedile, “The Class Struggles” at 213.
45
See ibid. MST “possesses a large membership and the ability to mobilize masses of people. In
2006, the MST had an estimated membership of 1.1 million people, supported by twenty
thousand activists engaged in coordinating movement activities on various issues and levels.”
Carter, “The Landless” at 198.
44 B. S. Chimni
defeat neoliberalism without organization?”46 Furthermore, only the state can

undertake large-scale land reforms. When Stedile spoke of world assembly of
peoples’ movements, he had in mind transnational social movements, such as
La Via Campesina (LVC), that bring together national movements in the
struggle against neoliberal globalization. The LVC, as its website notes,
“brings together millions of peasants, small and medium-size farmers, landless
people, women farmers, indigenous people, migrants and agricultural workers
from around the world” and “strongly opposes corporate driven agriculture
and transnational companies that are destroying people and nature.”47 The
LVC “comprises about 164 local and national organizations in 73 countries
from Africa, Asia, Europe and the Americas, altogether representing nearly
200 million farmers.”48 It has gained strength through supporting “non-violent
but radical direct actions, opposing the real powers in the world as an
alternative, democratic, and mass-based peasant power base.”49 In other
words, the LVC is a transnational movement that promotes global democra-
tization primarily through supporting national movements for agrarian
justice.50
However, there may be instances where the nonnational global democra-
tization movement can play a significant role by pointing to the need for a
flexible anti-imperialist strategy. Take for example the current phenomenon of
land grab in Third World countries. In recent years, domestic and foreign
investors have bought or leased out large tracts of farmland, including from
emerging economies, in Africa (although Asia and Latin America are also
significant venues). Foreign investors have either resorted to outright purchase
or secured long-term leases of government-owned land. The evidence on land
grabbing varies.51 Oxfam has referred “to reported deals for 227 million ha
worldwide over the period 2001–2010. Of these, deals for about 67 million ha
46
Stedile, “The Class Struggles” at 213.
47
La Via Campesina, available at http://viacampesina.org/en/index.php/organisation-mainmenu-
44.
48
See ibid. “La Vıa Campesina is considered by many to be the most important transnational
social movement in the world.” Marıa Elena Martınez-Torres and Peter M. Rosset, “La Vıa
Campesina: The Birth and Evolution of a Transnational Social Movement” (2010) 37 The
Journal of Peasant Studies 149, at 150.
49
Martinez-Torres and Rosset, “La Via Campesina” at 171.
50
Prashad, The Poorer Nations, pp. 254–256.
51
See Lorenzo Cotula, “The International Political Economy of the Global Land Rush:
A Critical Appraisal of Trend, Scale, Geography and Drivers” in Ben White, Saturnino M.
Borras Jr., Ruth Hal, Ian Scoones, and Wendy Wolford (eds.) The New Enclosures: Critical
Perspectives on Corporate Land Deals (London: Routledge, 2013), pp. 32–38. Olivier De
Schutter, “The Green Rush: The Global Race for Farmland and the Rights of Land Users”
(2001) 52 Harvard International Law Journal 503, at 504.
have been cross-checked through triangulation.”52 The World Bank has

“documented land acquisitions for 56.6 million ha worldwide . . . over a
period of one year between 2008 and 2009.”53 Much of the data may be
outdated (available essentially until the end of 2009) and, because of lack of
transparency, may not include all land acquisitions. But according to Lornzo
Cotula, it may be safely concluded that “the phenomenon is massive and
growing.”54 The two trends of absence of land reforms and land grab are not in
tension, for as Smita Narula points out, the neoliberal approach to land “relies
on the market to distribute land to the most efficient producer.”55
The contemporary phenomenon of land grabbing and more generally land
acquisition for foreign investors reveals a complex class configuration that
encompasses the national and transnational fractions of the global capitalist
class, represented by a range of actors that include corporations and the state.56
Both national elites and foreign investors acquire land,57 although foreign
investment has an increasingly strong presence. A fair amount of foreign
investment in land is intraregional, like Chinese investors’ acquisition of land
in Lao PDR and in Cambodia.58 Likewise, South Africa is a significant
player59 in Africa. In the case of cross-regional foreign investment, “evidence
points to Europe and North America as key regions of origin, in addition to
the more publicized role of Gulf states (Saudi Arabia, UAE, Qatar), East Asian
countries (China, South Korea), and India.”60 The consequences of land
grabbing are grave. These include displacement and diminished livelihoods,61
inadequate compensation, limited employment opportunities at low wages,62
lack of access to water resources,63 undermining of land reform gains, and
eventual weakening of the “food sovereignty” of nations.64 In the case of land
grabbing, the global democratization movement has greater salience as inter-
national investment regimes and international financial institutions that facili-
tate land grabbing need to be resisted in order to stop the erosion of national
52 53 54
See ibid. See id. at 33. See id. at 37.
55
Smita Narula, “The Global Land Rush: Markets, Rights, and the Politics of Food” (2013) 49
Stanford Journal of International Law; NYU School of Law, Public Law Research Paper No.
13–42. Available at http://ssrn.com/abstract=2294521 at 38.
56
“Alliances between state officials, local political elites and domestic and foreign investors
enable them to seize their opportunities for the appropriation of resources” in Ben White et al.,
“The New Enclosures: Critical Perspectives on Corporate Land Deals,” in The New
Enclosures, p. 9.
57
Cotula, “The International” at 38. 58
See id. at 39. 59
Ibid. 60
Ibid.
61
Narula, “The Global Land” at 15–16 (footnotes in original deleted). 62
Ibid. 63
Ibid.
64
See Edelman et al. “Introduction: Critical Perspectives on Food Sovereignty”; Narula, “The
Global Land” at 16.
46 B. S. Chimni
sovereignty.65 While the primary struggles still have to be conducted at the

national level, global civil society can play a critical role in drawing attention
to the negative effect of land grabbing. Its campaign has already had an
impact, evidenced by the adoption by the World Bank of Principles for
Responsible Agro-Investment (PRAI) jointly recommended by FAO, IFAD,
and UNCTAD.66
The acquisition of land by the state for foreign investors has also become a
burning issue in many Third World countries, especially when the land
acquired is that of indigenous or tribal peoples (the terminology used in
India). It is interesting to note in this context the report on discussions in
Group B of Bandung Conference, which states:
The Group finally discussed the problem of indigenous and backward
populations . . . Some backward tribes had already been assimilated into the
local communities, others were in the process of assimilation, and some still
remained untouched by civilization. A scientific study of these people was
advocated with a view to finding out how and why the aboriginal tribes had
remained primitive in the midst of civilization. International cooperation
seemed to be called for in handling the problem of backward and tribal
people.67
This understanding, echoing a civilizing mission tone, has informed the

actions of many postcolonial developmental states.68 It explains why in the
case of India, as Paul Brass has noted, “the majority of the cases of peasant
unrest since Independence . . . have either been nearly exclusively tribal-based
or have ‘involved a large component of tribal people.’”69 The tribal peoples
“have suffered loss of land, loss of access to forest resources, and increasing
indebtedness leading to debt bondage.”70 The narrative has not changed over
the three decades since Brass wrote those words as rich mineral resources are
65
Ben White et al., The New Enclosures, p. 12.
66
See “Principles for Responsible Agricultural Investment that Respects Rights, Livelihoods and
Resources: A discussion note prepared by FAO, IFAD, UNCTAD and the World Bank Group
to contribute to an ongoing global dialogue” January 25, 2010. For a brief comment, see
Phoebe Stephens, “The Principles of Responsible Agricultural Investment” (2013) 10
Globalizations 187.
67
Quoted in Itty Ibrahim, “From Bandung to NAM: Non-alignment and Indian Foreign Policy,
1947–1965” (2008) 46 Commonwealth and Comparative Politics 195, at 201. The original
reference is Asian Relations Conference (1948) Special Collection, folder V4. (New Delhi:
Indian Council of World Affairs), at 98.
68
Ibrahim, “From Bandung to NAM” at 201.
69
Paul R. Brass, The Politics of India since Independence, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1990), p. 329.
70
Ibid.
found under tribal lands. The unfortunate state of affairs has been commented
on by the Honorable Supreme Court of India in Nandini Sundar and Others
vs. State of Chattisgarh (2011).71 In the instance of acquisition of land, espe-
cially of indigenous peoples, national and transnational movements for
“global democratization” against capital can again play a significant role.
conclusion
There were divisions at Bandung regarding the understanding of imperialism.
But today there is no consensus even on the reality of imperialism. Under the
influence of transnational fractions of the national capitalist classes, which
gain from the ongoing neoliberal globalization process, leading Third World
powers like BICS no longer speak of imperialism. There are also celebrated
left thinkers like Hardt and Negri who have announced a farewell to imperi-
alism. Yet to any perceptive observer imperialism remains a palpable reality.
The advanced capitalist states led by the United States are promoting an
unjust neoliberal globalization process accompanied by the use of force
against weak nations. Therefore, a key task before those who celebrate the
Bandung Spirit is to “bring imperialism back in.” However, it has to be
recognized that the nature of imperialism has undergone transformation as
it is now actively supported by the TCC of the Third World. An anti-
imperialist strategy must be shaped keeping this new situation in mind. But
the false choice between pursuing national solutions and strengthening
national sovereignty on the one hand and advancing nonnational democratic
globalization against capital on the other needs to be rejected. Both these
strategies have a role to play in the struggle against imperialism.
As global capitalism penetrates and overwhelms Third World economies in
the era of neoliberal globalization, there is a need to strengthen national
sovereignty and retrieve critical policy space to enunciate measures in favor
of the subaltern classes. There is also no serious alternative to national
solutions to problems such as the agrarian crises that grips large parts of the
Third World, but neglected by Western scholars with talk of the “death of the
agrarian question” or the “death of the peasantry.” It is therefore no accident
that even nonparty and nontraditional formations of social resistance in the
poor world seek national solutions and strengthen national sovereignty. At the
same time, in order to prevent the struggles to strengthen national sovereignty
from bolstering authoritarian or predatory governments, these social forces
71
The judgment is available at http://supremecourtofindia.nic.in/outtoday/wc25007.pdf.
48 B. S. Chimni
have launched concurrent movements for democratic and just national insti-
tutions. The nontraditional forces of resistance that promote democratic
globalization against capital can complement these efforts. In contrast to this
complex strategy, a movement against global capital that does not seek
national solutions or takes a theoretical position against strengthening national
sovereignty reinforces forces of imperialism. The essential point is that the
struggle against new imperialism requires a certain deftness that combines
peoples’ struggles with a focus on national solutions and strengthening
national sovereignty with nonnational movements against global capital.
In the struggle against new imperialism, international lawyers have an
important role to play with the objective of promoting democratization of
internal and international relations, laws, and institutions. Speaking to the
problem at hand, they can contribute to finding answers to the agrarian crises
including concerns such as land grabbing and land acquisition. The possibil-
ities include proposing a people-centric interpretation of the principle of
permanent sovereignty over natural resources that is linked with international
human rights law with the aim of facilitating land reforms and making
international investment law more responsive to the needs of the poor and
the weak.72 Such an effort must be accompanied by developing the inter-
national law relating to accountability and responsibility of relevant inter-
national institutions. The urgency of producing an anti-imperialist
jurisprudence cannot be overemphasized. But if such jurisprudence is to play
a significant role in advancing the cause of subaltern groups and nations, it
must reflect and further the anti-imperial dialectic between the national and
the global.
72
For attempts in this direction, see Lila Barrera Hernandez, “Sovereignty over Natural
Resources under Examination: The Inter-American System for Human Rights and Natural
Resources Allocation” (2006) 12 Annual Survey of International & Comparative Law 43;
Ricardo Pereira and Orla Gough, “Permanent Sovereignty over Natural Resources in the 21st
Century: Natural Resource Governance and the Right to Self-Determination of Indigenous
Peoples under International Law” (2013) 14 Melbourne Journal of International Law 1; Lillian
Aponte Miranda, “The Role of International Law in Intrastate Natural Resource Allocation:
Sovereignty, Human Rights, and Peoples Based Development” (2012) 45 Vanderbilt Journal of
Transnational Law 785–840; Emeka Duruigbo, “Permanent Sovereignty and Peoples’
Ownership of Natural Resources in International Law” (2006) 38 George Washington
International Law Review 33.
2
Newer Is Truer
Time, Space, and Subjectivity at the Bandung Conference
rose sydney parfitt*
introduction
Bandung, the “first intercontinental conference of coloured peoples in the
history of mankind,” has justly been celebrated as a historical turning point for
the peoples of Asia and Africa.1 Yet in recent years, assessments of the
Conference have become increasingly lukewarm. As the last vestiges of Third
World solidarity appear to be crumbling under the combined weight of the
“war on terror” and the fallout from the global financial crisis, it is perhaps not
unfathomable that we should now be hearing the Bandung meeting described
in terms of “a forum for lofty but vacuous invocations of ‘solidarity,’” with the
latter reduced to a “romantic, thoroughly depoliticized slogan.”2 Indeed, even
in 1955, the stress laid by the delegates in the Final Communiqué on respect
for such core Charter principles as human rights, state sovereignty, noninter-
vention, self-defense, the nonuse of force, and the sanctity of international
* I would like to express my gratitude to the editors, Luis Eslava, Michael Fakhri, and Vasuki
Nesiah, for the unstinting generosity with which they approached their task. Many thanks also
to Matilda Arvidsson, Matthew Craven, Adil Khan, Shaun McVeigh, Usha Natarajan, Zoran
Oklopcic, Umut Özsu, Sundhya Pahuja, Sara Paton, David Parfitt, Charlotte Peevers, Nahed
Samour, Hani Sayed, and Mohammad Shahabuddin, among others, for sharing their work
and ideas with me. Finally, my thanks to the Institute for International Law and the
Humanities, Melbourne Law School, and to the Institute for Global Law and Policy, Harvard
Law School, for making it possible for me to undertake this research, which was supported by a
McKenzie Research Fellowship from the University of Melbourne. The mistakes are
mine alone.
1
President Sukarno, “Speech at the Opening of the Bandung Conference, 18 Apr. 1955,” in
(Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1956), p. 40.
2
See Özsu, Chapter 17 in this volume. See also Balakrishnan Rajagopal, International Law from
Below: Development, Social Movements and Third World Resistance (Cambridge: Cambridge
49
50 Rose Sydney Parfitt
obligations led some participants to observe that there was actually “not much
that [was] significantly new” in that momentous document.3
It is well known that the tensions already evident among the Afro-Asian states
whose delegations assembled at Bandung escalated slowly but inexorably there-
after as the Cold War gathered pace; so inexorably, in fact, that the Confer-
ence’s emphasis on unity and collaboration today sounds almost quaint.
Nonetheless, this chapter will push back a little against the tendency to view
the solidarity striven for so valiantly at Bandung as wholly fictional in nature. It
will suggest that if the demands agreed on at the Conference are read in terms
not just of their substance but also of their form – that is, if they are read as a
narrative strategy – they take on a far more revolutionary aspect than it appears at
first glance. In undertaking such a reading, this chapter employs Mikhail
Bakhtin’s concept of the chronotope, describing the narrative relationship
between time, space, and subjectivity, as a microscope through which to look
more closely at the Final Communiqué and, in particular, at the interventions
of some of the Conference’s most charismatic attendees: Indonesia’s President
Sukarno and Prime Minister Ali Sastroamidjojo; Mohamed Ali, President of
Pakistan; U Nu, Prime Minister of Burma (now Myanmar); Jawaharlal Nehru,
India’s Prime Minister; Sir John Kotelawala, Prime Minister of Ceylon (now Sri
Lanka); and Zhou Enlai, Premier of the Peoples’ Republic of China.
This chapter is, in other words, less interested in consolidating an existing
critique of Bandung’s material disappointments and more in uncovering the
nuances of a discursive strategy that may yet have something to offer today’s
chronically fragmented and globally dispersed Third World. It has become
standard practice for scholars aiming to disenchant (in the Weberian sense) the
progress narrative associated with public international law and international
history to target the ‘myth’ of nascent Third World unity at Bandung.4 Writing
somewhat against the grain, this chapter seeks to recover a point of unity among
the delegates. That unity is to be found, I suggest, in their efforts to redescribe an
international legal world which they encountered always-already pre-described
by the major colonial/nuclear powers. In insisting that this master description
(or master narrative) mis-represented the pathologies of colonialism and
nuclear war as normal life, the delegates at the Bandung Conference sought
to break the spell of the superpowers’ much-vaunted “realism.”
3
A. Appadorai, Indian member of the Conference’s joint secretariat, quoted in Dipesh
Chakrabarty, “The Legacies of Bandung: Decolonization and the Politics of Culture,” in
Christopher J. Lee (ed.), Making a World after Empire: The Bandung Moment and Its Political
Afterlives (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2010), p. 51.
4
See, e.g., Robert Vitalis, “The Midnight Ride of Kwame Nkrumah and Other Fables of
Bandung (Ban-doong)” (2013) 4 Humanity 261.
Newer Is Truer 51
time, space, and international law

There were, it can hardly be denied, a great many issues dividing the delegates
at Bandung. To begin with, their encounters with imperialism varied enor-
mously. Many had experienced either straightforward colonial oppression (for
example, India, the Gold Coast (now Ghana), Ceylon (now Sri Lanka), Libya,
and Ethiopia), or the supposedly enlightened colonialism of the League of
Nations’ Mandate System (Syria, Jordan, Lebanon), or indeed the arm’s-
length imperialism offered by such legal devices as the protectorate (Egypt,
Iraq, Yemen) and the “unequal treaty” (Japan, China, Thailand). Some of the
Bandung states, however, had also perpetrated certain kinds of imperial rule –
not uncommonly against some of the the very territories whose representatives
now took seats beside them (e.g., Turkey/Egypt/Iraq/Yemen; Japan/China/
Indonesia/Thailand; Egypt/Ethiopia/Sudan). As if that did not make agree-
ment difficult enough, the proceedings had barely begun before Ceylon’s
prime minister Kotelawala opened up a can of geopolitical worms with the
remark that “if we are united in our opposition to colonialism, should it not be
our duty openly to declare our opposition to Soviet colonialism as much as to
Western imperialism?”5 This idea, which drew many supporters, “threatened
to produce a serious and disruptive deadlock,” for the other very serious fault-
line among the delegates, of course, concerned their Cold War affiliations.6
In certain cases, these affiliations had already developed into full-blown
alliances, such as the pro-West Southeast Asia Treaty Organisation (SEATO),
which included Pakistan, Thailand, and the Philippines along with the United
States, Great Britain, France, Australia, and New Zealand. In other cases (e.g.,
Indonesia on the left; Ceylon (now Sri Lanka) on the right), such affiliations
played out as more subtle ideological affinities. And yet, even these were
frequently complicated (as with Thailand and the Philippines, for example)
by a recent history of geopolitically nuanced military takeovers and/or concerns
about communist “infiltration” or Western “dollar diplomacy.”7 In still other
cases (most obviously those of North and South Vietnam), the Cold War had
already reached boiling point. In retrospect, perhaps the best-known Bandung
position has become that of neutralism, the precursor of nonalignment.8 Yet
5
John Kotelawala, “Speech to the Political Committee,” Asian-African Conference, p. 19.
6
Ibid.
7
Press, 2007), pp. 38–39.
8
See Oklopcic, Chapter 16 in this volume.
the neutralists – primarily India, Burma (now Myanmar), and Indonesia –

were still in a minority at Bandung.9
In spite of these flashpoints, however, solidarity remained the central concern.
Even the PRC’s Zhou Enlai was at pains to emphasize that “we should seek
common ground among us, while keeping our differences.”10 And there were,
indeed, two central points behind which all the delegates were able to throw their
weight: first, their conviction of the fundamental illegitimacy of imperialism; and
second, their fears of a nuclear war.11 Though broad, these two axes of solidarity
were, I suggest, neither woolly nor inconsequential. On the contrary, between
these two poles ran the axis of a narrative strategy through which the Bandung
states sought subtly to reinterpret the script of international law, as contained in
the UN Charter. In doing so, they sought to refashion their position within the
international legal hi/story into which, as the discipline’s newest subjects, they
had so recently been cast. In making their interventions at Bandung, the delegates
constituted and drew on particular images of time and space in relation to each of
these two threats – imperialism and nuclear war. Their aim, I suggest, was to
make a particular rhetorical-political move against the perpetrators of these
threats: the United States and the other NATO powers on the one hand; the
Soviet Union and the other Warsaw Pact states on the other. With this move, the
delegates sought to challenge the assumption that these states, being inter-
national law’s more mature subjects, were for that reason its archetypal subjects.
Instead, the Bandung states sought to position themselves, international law’s
newest subjects, as also and for that reason its truest – more committed to the
deliverance of international law’s promises; more willing to shoulder the burden
of their sovereign duties and to appreciate the scope of their rights.
In order to flesh out this strategy, the following section will first take a brief
look at the concept of the chronotope and at the construction of time, space,
and subjectivity in “modern” international law, as narrated by the authors of
the UN Charter.
the chronotope of modernity

Although his primary concern was with the narrative contours of the novel and
not with those of international law, it is interesting to note how closely Mikhail
Bakhtin’s account of the emergence of the bildungsroman – the classic
9
See generally Christopher J. Lee, “Between a Moment and an Era: The Origins and Afterlives
of Bandung,” in Making a World after Empire, p. 1.
10
Zhou Enlai, “Speech to the Political Committee,” Asian-African Conference, p. 53.
11
See Prashad, The Darker Nations, pp. 33–44.
Newer Is Truer 53
nineteenth-century novel tracking the emergence of the free-willed individual

into maturity – resembles the history of the development of “modern” inter-
national law, as told, for example, by the “most highly qualified publicists of the
various nations.”12
According to Bakhtin, the development of the bildungsroman in the
late eighteenth century marked a crucial moment in the history of prosaic
literature. At this moment, the “ready-made hero” was replaced by a self-
determining protagonist, the evolution of whose personality drove the plot.
This “image of man in the process of becoming” is created by means of a
particular construction, by the author, of time and space.13 In the bildungs-
roman, the plot’s constituent events take place not in the disjointed imperative
of “adventure time,” characteristic of the ancient “novel of ordeal”; nor are
they narrated in the “cyclical time” of the idyll, but rather in “real historical
time,” the temporality of modernity. “Man” (the subject/protagonist) emerges
“along with the world and he reflects the historical emergence of the world
itself. He is no longer within an epoch but . . . at the transition point from one
to the other.”14 Thus, in the bildungsroman, “man’s individual emergence is
inseparably linked to historical emergence.”15
This transition between the “epochs” of pre-modernity and modernity had,
for Bakhtin, spatial as well as temporal effects, which likewise came to be
reflected in the novel. Prior to the Renaissance, “the ‘entire world’ was a
unique symbol that could not be adequately represented by any model, by any
map or globe.”16 Gradually, however (as a result of European imperialism,
although Bakhtin does not mention this), “[this] ‘entire world’ began to
condense into a real and compact whole” and in this way “became subject
to interpretation and, in a real-life sense, historical” – that is, possessed of a
teleology or plot.17 These changes were reflected in literature as (Western)
writers began to see it as their task “to constitute this great world on a new
basis, to render it familiar, to humanize it.”18 “Man” was faced with the need
12
Statute of the International Court of Justice, annexed to the Charter of the United Nations, San
Francisco, 26 June 1945, Art. 38(1)d.
13
Mikhail Bakhtin, “The Bildungsroman and Its Significance in the History of Realism (Towards
a Historical Typology of the Novel),” in Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (eds.), Speech
Genres and Other Late Essays, trans. Vern W. McGee (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1986),
pp. 19–21. For a brilliant critical analysis of international human rights law through the lens of
the Bildungsroman, see Joseph R. Slaughter, Human Rights, Inc.: The World Novel, Narrative
Form, and International Law (New York: Fordham University Press, 2007).
14 15 16 17
Ibid., p. 23. Ibid. Ibid., p. 43. Ibid., p. 43–44.
18
Mikhail Bakhtin, “Forms of Time and the Chronotope in the Novel,” in Michael Holquist
(ed.), The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays by M. M. Bakhtin, trans. Caryl Emerson and
Michael Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981), p. 84.
to “re-educate himself for life in a world that is . . . enormous and foreign; he

must make it his own, domesticate it.”19 In order to be “realistic,” that is to say,
the modern protagonist had to be the author of her own destiny; yet in order to
be meaningful, that destiny was required to reflect the progressive teleology of
this new total space, the “entire world.”20 The author of the modern novel was
therefore faced with the problem of reconciling two very different temporalities:
on the one hand, the cyclical time of everyday human life (meal-times, anni-
versaries, seasons and so on); on the other, the dynamic, “progressive” time
associated with the linear teleology of history. The space in which these two
temporalities – human/particular and cosmic/universal – came to be recon-
ciled, according to Bakhtin, was that of the territorially-bounded nation-state.21
These developments in history and historiography had far-reaching implica-
tions for the question of what Bakhtin calls “addressivity” – the relationship
between author, protagonist(s), and reader.22 For if the protagonist was to
appear truly independent, her choices had to seem autonomous, reliant on
her own character rather than on the author’s desires. What unfolded in the
“novel of emergence” was therefore not (as in pre-modern prosaic literature) “a
multitude of characters and fates in a single objective world, illuminated by a
single authorial consciousness,” but rather “a plurality of consciousness, with
equal rights and each with its own world” which “combine but are not merged
in the unity of the event.”23 This, for Bakhtin, was the mark of the truly
“polyphonic,” and hence truly modern, novel.24 Not only is the relationship
between author and protagonist(s) equalized; the role of the listener (or reader)
is likewise transformed from that of passive object to that of active participant.
A polyphonic narrative is therefore truly “dialogic” in its operation,25 with its
words entering into a verbal context that defies the limits of space and time.26
the chronotope of international law

Interestingly enough, the archetypically modern characteristic of polyphony
described by Bakhtin characterizes with some precision what the narrators of
international law (state representatives, “highly qualified publicists” and so on)
19
Bakhtin, “Forms of Time,” in The Dialogic Imagination p. 234.
20
Tobias Boes, “Apprenticeship of the Novel: The Bildungsroman and the Invention of History,
ca. 177–1820” (2008) 45 Comparative Literature Studies 269, at 278–279.
21
Boes, “Apprenticeship of the Novel,” at 284. See, e.g., Bakhtin, “The Bildungsroman,” pp. 52–54.
22
See Michael Bakhtin, “The Problem of Speech Genres,” in Speech Genres, p. 95.
23
Mikhail Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, trans. Caryl Emerson (Manchester:
Manchester University Press, 1984), p. 7.
24
Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, p. 6.
25
Mikhail Bakhtin, “Discourse and the Novel,” in The Dialogic Imagination, p. 279.
26
Ibid., pp. 279–280.
Newer Is Truer 55
have achieved, from the last quarter of the nineteenth century onwards, by
orientating the story of the discipline around the principle of sovereign equality.
In its orthodox telling, this story recounts a transition (which, as in Bakhtin’s
account of the emergence of the bildungsroman, also takes place in the late
eighteenth century) from what we might call a natural law to a positivist “genre”
of narrative legitimacy. Viewed in chronotopic terms, one might say that the
plot of natural law theory was narrated from outside – by God, “the author of
nature,”27 in the complex double (chronological/kaironical) temporality of
Christianity.28 From the mid-nineteenth century, meanwhile, the plot of inter-
national legal positivism begins in this story to revolve around an explicitly
imperial project of global “domestication,” authored by the sovereign subjects
of international law themselves, on a formally equal basis, and enacted in the
“real historical time” of international legal custom. From 1919 onward, how-
ever, states – international law’s only full subjects – are joined on the stage by a
number of minor characters, such as individuals, minorities, peoples, and so on.
This shift is associated with the emergence of the idea of the “international
community,” which seems to take the place of God as the external author of the
narrative to the limited extent provided by its capacity to police adherence to
“peremptory” norms. Nonetheless, the principle of sovereign equality con-
tinues to underpin an expressly polyphonic narrative – and yet one that mar-
ginalizes the interventions of nonstate collectivities which do not meet the
threshold for “full” international legal subjectivity.
Communities from Africa and Asia are, for this reason, conspicuously
absent from the standard history of the discipline until the emergence of
the right of peoples to self-determination in the wake of Bandung – excluded
even from the Charter, except in the subaltern form of the “non-self-
governing” or “trust” territory awaiting subjective readiness. In spite of this,
the newly independent states present at Bandung chose to embrace the
normative order articulated in the Charter, choosing as their preferred
emancipatory strategy to hold its creators to account for their violations of
its underlying precepts. The merits of that decision have been much
debated.29 The purpose of this chapter, however, is to think, for a moment,
27
Hugo Grotius (1625), De Jure Belli ac Pacis, trans. Francis W. Kelsey (Oxford: Clarendon Press,
1925), Bk 1, p. 39.
28
On the distinction between chronos and kairos in the context of the international law of
occupation, see Matilda Arvidsson, “From Teleology to Eschatology: The Katechon and the
Political Theology of the International Law of Belligerent Occupation,” in Arvidsson,
Brännström, and Minkkinen (eds.), The Contemporary Relevance of Carl Schmitt: Law,
Politics, Theology (New York: Routledge, 2015), p. 233.
29
See, e.g., Sundhya Pahuja, Decolonizing International Law: Development, Economic Growth
and the Politics of Universality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011).
not against but with the Bandung states in their attempt to construct a
narrative of solidarity on that basis.
the chronotope of imperialism

President Sukarno30 began his opening speech by presenting the Bandung
Conference as “a new departure in the history of the world.”31 In order to
cement the narrative link between the new, sovereign time of the Bandung
“now” and the new “postcolonial” space of independent statehood, Sukarno –
like his prime minister Sastroamidjojo, Pakistan’s President Ali, and many of
the other delegates – sought to contrast this emancipatory Bandung space-time
or chronotope against an oppressive which they associated with imperialism.
In terms of its temporality, European imperialism in particular was cast in their
interventions as a lamentable yesterday – a period of temporal limbo in which the
futures of Asians and Africans had been “mortgaged to an alien system.”32 Sukarno
regretted the “heritage” of underdevelopment that colonialism “[left] behind
when, eventually and reluctantly, it is driven out by the inevitable march of
history.”33 Somewhat paradoxically, he cast decolonization simultaneously as the
ineluctable outcome of progress and as a fundamentally new temporality,
heralding a radical break with the past: “A New Asia and a New Africa have been
born!”34 Nonetheless, he warned colonialism had now put on its “modern dress” in
the form of neocolonialism, remaining “an evil thing” to be “eradiated from the
earth” as soon as possible.35 And with regards to those parts of Africa and Asia “still
groaning under the hell of foreign domination,” as Ali put it, this task of eradication
was all the more urgent. For both Sukarno and Ali, the temporality of colonialism
was that of a sluggish “anachronism,” well “on the road to liquidation.”36
By contrast with imperial time, postcolonial time was narrated by the
delegates as precipitate rather than torpid. Postcolonial time pushed the
teleology of international law onward, instead of dragging it back into the past
as the colonial powers desired. With this temporal construction, Sukarno, Ali,
and their colleagues threw down a challenge to the Charter’s evolutionary
temporality of “not yet,” reflected in its provisions for “progressive develop-
ment” according to “varying stages of advancement.”37 They sought not to
replace the linear, progressive temporality on which it was based, but radically
30
See Bakhtin, “Forms of Time,” in The Dialogic Imagination pp. 97–99.
31
Sukarno, “Speech at the Opening of the Bandung Conference” in The Asian-African
Conference p. 40.
32 33 34 35
Ibid., p. 42. Ibid., p. 43. Ibid., p. 50. Ibid., p. 44.
36
Mohamed Ali, “Speech to the Conference,” in Documents of [the] Asian-African Conference
(Bandung, 1980), pp. 59–60.
37
UN Charter, Art. 73(b). See also Arts. 75–85.
Newer Is Truer 57
to speed it up, transforming it into a temporality, not of the then-and-now, but

of the now-and-next, in which international subjectivity could be demanded,
and taken, as an unconditional right.38
Spatially, meanwhile, the North/South split engendered by colonialism’s
misguided “racialism” was constructed as profoundly limiting to the subject-
ivity of the Bandung states. For example, Sastroamidjojo asked: “Is not
apartheid-policy a form of absolute intolerance more befitting the Dark
Ages than this modern world?”39 Nonetheless, with decolonization
under way, the delegates looked forward to the moment when the world
would at last become a genuinely unified space. The Burmese Prime
Minister U Nu, for example, found it fitting to speak of “the affairs of this
planet of ours,” a figure of speech that would have been laughable a decade
earlier.40 Yet as his and other interventions attested, the global postcolonial
space of a soon-to-be decolonized world was too vast to operate as a single
unit – just as “the entire world” was, in Bakhtin’s account, too big as a
setting for a single “novel of emergence.” Nor, it seems, could the truly
human story of these two vast continents, Asia and Africa, be told using a
single linear teleology of human history. Bakhtin was perhaps correct, then,
to argue that in order to be represented convincingly, humanity requires not
only a universal sense of purpose but also smaller, more domestic, cyclical
combinations of time and space in which individual lives can be made
comprehensible and, hence, liveable. At Bandung, the domestic, human
space seen as inherently capable of reconciling local particularity with
global solidarity was inevitably, as in the bildungsroman, that of the
nation-state. Indeed, respect for “the sovereignty and territorial integrity of
all nations” was the first point both of Nehru’s “five principles of coexist-
ence,”41 and of Zhou Enlai’s seven,42 and came second in the Final Com-
muniqué’s ten points of “friendly cooperation.”43
As the delegates noted bitterly, however, it was precisely this modern,
domestic, human chronotope of independent statehood, won so recently after
generations of denial, that the nuclear conflict now looming on the horizon
put at risk.
38
On the paradoxical nature of the right of peoples to self-determination as a right possessed by
entities which, being predetermined, by definition cannot bear rights, see Nathaniel Berman,
“Sovereignty in Abeyance: Self-Determination and International Law” (1988–1989) 7
Wisconsin International Law Journal 51.
39
Sastroamidjojo, “Speech to the Conference,” in Asian-African Conference, p. 51.
40
U Nu, Closing Address, in Asian-African Conference, p. 79.
41
Asian-African Conference, p. 8, n. 1.
42
Zhou Enlai, “Speech to the Political Committee,” in Asian-African Conference, p. 59.
43
Asian-African Conference, p. 84.
the chronotope of nuclear war

In stark contrast with the slow-and-sticky time of imperialism and the idyllic
now of decolonisation, the delegates constructed the temporality of imminent
nuclear war, brought ever closer by the escalating arms race, as suicidally over-
accelerated toward a future it threatened to destroy at any second, in just a
second. In the event of such a war, Sukarno warned, “even if we ourselves
escaped lightly, the unborn generations of our children would bear on their
distorted bodies the marks of our failure to control the forces which have been
released on the world.”44 Paradoxically, therefore, even as they urged decol-
onization on so that the “sacrifices” of the past could at last be rewarded,
implying that the past was of the utmost relevance to the present,45 the
Bandung states admitted that the past’s relevance to the present was diminish-
ing fast, thanks to the new technologies by which modernity was coming to be
defined. The Conference was, for this reason, obliged to “leave out past
history,” Nehru declared. They must, he said, stop “thinking and acting in
terms of a past age.” Together, the presence of two geopolitical “colossuses,”
the US and USSR, combined with “the coming of the atomic and hydrogen-
bomb age,” meant that “the whole concept of war, of peace, of politics, has
changed.”46
In terms of spatiality, the two chronotopes of imperialism and nuclear war
likewise contrasted sharply. Where imperialism held history and liberty hos-
tage in a particular space (that of subjected Africa and Asia), the anticipated
nuclear war bore no rational relationship to space whatsoever in the narrative
constructed by the delegates at Bandung. For Sukarno, indeed, nuclear
temporality was fundamentally out of kilter with space. The technical capacity
of humankind had zoomed too quickly into the future, so that “[t]he political
skill of man has been far outstripped by his technical skill, and what he has
made he cannot be sure of controlling.”47 Similarly, Sastroamidjojo argued
that “[it] looks as if mankind is not morally prepared for the fruits of its own
genius.”48 The result, they concluded, was fear – “[a]nd man gasps for safety
and morality.”49 Thanks to the “misguided and diabolical” misuse of science,
“weapons of ultimate horror” had been developed, which threatened to inflict
“a plague on humanity.”50 To analyze this aspect of the narrative within
44
Sukarno, “Opening Speech,” in Asian-African Conference, p. 45. 45
Ibid., p. 39.
46
Nehru, “Speech before the Political Committee,” in Asian-African Conference, p. 69.
47
Sukarno, “Opening Speech,” in Asian-African Conference, p. 42.
48
49
Sukarno, “Opening Speech,” in Asian-African Conference, p. 42. 50
Ibid., p. 45.
Newer Is Truer 59
Bakhtin’s frame of reference, nuclear time was depicted as a kind of terrifying

“adventure time,” with “no essential ties with any particular details of individ-
ual countries that might figure [in the narrative].” Instead, “the event” – the
nuclear strike, in this case – would indeed be “determined by chance alone,
by random contingency in a given spatial locus,” entirely unrelated to the
specific place in which it happened, which “figures solely as a naked, abstract
expanse of space.”51
The violent, sporadic, disjointed temporality of nuclear war intersected here
with a (global) space to which the safe, domestic space of nation-statehood was
entirely irrelevant. On the one hand, as Nehru pointed out, bipolarity ensured
that “aggression anywhere in the world” was “bound to result in a world war.”
On the other, “radioactive waves which go thousands and thousands of miles”
were sure to “destroy everything.”52 Nuclear spatiality was determined by a
radical shrinking of the world such that a miniscule event – the pressing of a
button – could trigger an apocalypse. Sukarno, likewise, warned that “[t]he
food that we eat, the water that we drink, yes, even the air that we breathe can
be contaminated by poisons originating from thousands of miles away.”53 As a
result of the threat of nuclear war, the North/South divide associated with the
chronotope of colonialism had in effect been overwritten by an equally (to use
another of Bakhtin’s terms) “monologic” East/West divide based on ideology
rather than racism – and yet rendered meaningless, simultaneously, by the
instantaneous logic of “mutually assured destruction.” In the hi-tech, futuristic
chronotope of nuclear war, the space of the “entire world” threatened to
collapse into an imminent no man’s land – depopulated, uninhabitable, a
space of historical termination. Indeed, the nuclear arms race threatened to
erase the very specificity of Africa and Asia as places with multiple and distinct
collective histories and futures.
It was for these reasons that the representatives of India, Burma (now
Myanmar), and Indonesia, in particular, sought to convince their fellow
delegates to reject the idea that their new-found freedom – realized, as they
saw it, in the form of multiple, formally-equal territorial states – should come
immediately to be shoehorned into the tense, passive-aggressive space of East/
West bipolarity. This, their speeches suggested, was a space in which the
polyphonic distinctions of multiple independence were being reduced vio-
lently to a predetermined dilemma. Nehru posed the question as follows:
51
Bakhtin, “Forms of Time,” in the Dialogic Imagination p. 100.
52
53
[A]re we, the countries of Asia and Africa, devoid of any positive position
except being pro-communist or anti-communist? It is most degrading and
humiliating to any self-respecting people or nation. It is an intolerable
thought to me that the great countries of Asia and Africa should come out
of bondage into freedom only to degrade themselves or humiliate themselves
in this way.54
The only solution, he insisted, was to “[broaden] that area in the world which
may be called the unaligned area” – that is, to defend and expand as far as
possible an alternative, unbifurcated, pluralized conception of global space.55
new international subjects as true

international subjects
It is at this point that the structure of what Bakhtin called “addressivity”
becomes important. For the authors of the narrative generated at Bandung
addressed not only one another, but also two absent groups: colonies still
fighting for independence and the “Great Powers” themselves.
Regarding the first group, the empty seats in the conference hall were, it
seems, a constant presence for the delegates. The Final Communiqué, for
example, declared “its support of the cause of freedom and independence for
all [dependent] peoples,”56 and Sastroamidjojo affirmed that the delegates’
“thoughts were very much with our brothers who are still living in bondage.”57
Letters of support, he said, had been received “from all corners of the earth,”
indicating that “many, all over the world, expect us to show them a way out of
the impasse.”58 Among the spokespeople who interpellated on behalf of these
future international subjects were Archbishop Makarios of Cyprus59 and
C. H. Koh of the Singapore Labour Front, the latter requesting that even
though Singapore “[had] not been invited to this conference – nevertheless
permit us to join you in this historic march of the Asian and African peoples.”60
The second group of invisible addressees was made up of the excluded
“Great Powers” (in several significant cases also Cold War “superpowers”)
who continued to cling with such tenacity to their colonies. And where the
54
55 56
Ibid., p. 66. Final Communiqué, Section D, Art. 1(c).
57
58
Ibid., p. 54.
59
Extracts from Statements made by Archbishop Makarios on the Cyprus Question, in
Documents of [the] Asian-African Conference, pp. 94–95. See Reynolds, Chapter 14 in this
volume.
60
“Memorandum of the Singapore Labour Front to the Asian-African Conference,” in
Documents of [the] Asian-African Conference, p. 96.
Newer Is Truer 61
members of the first group were constructed as infinitely deserving of the gift of
self-determining subjectivity, those of the second were castigated as having taken
that gift for granted such that, like spoiled children, they had learned to abuse
their privileges. Kotelawala asserted, for instance, that the “Great Powers,” states
that had “within recent generations . . . guided the destinies of mankind,” had
“brought themselves and us” to such a “calamitous pass” that nothing less than
“the complete annihilation of mankind” now lay on the horizon.61
As critical international lawyers, we might regret the conservatism of the
Bandung states in turning to formalism and specifically to the Charter in order
to launch this attack. Yet it is important to recognize that, against the backdrop
of what they perceived – with good reason – to be the two greatest threats to
their subjectivity (imperialism and nuclear war), international law as articu-
lated in the Charter served a powerful rhetorical function in making it possible
to hold the perpetrators of these two evils to their own account. International
law supplied a language of opposition of which the Western states could not
claim to be ignorant.62
In contrast with the superpowers and their allies, the Bandung states
presented themselves as quintessential international subjects. Unlike the ori-
ginal authors of the Charter and the body of customary international law on
which it drew, the newly independent states understood that “with . . . inde-
pendence came . . . heavy responsibilities to ourselves, and to the world, and to
the yet unborn generations.”63 Unlike the irresponsible “Great Powers,”
corrupted by hubris, the Bandung states would not take their newfound status
for granted. For Sastroamidjojo, indeed, the Conference had been “born out
of the fulness [sic] of time which has entrusted to the independent nations of
Asia and Africa their new task in the destiny of mankind.”64 Similarly,
according to Kotelawala, “the salvation of the world” would be from this
moment on dependent “not on the great powers but on the lesser countries,
many of whom are still voiceless in the councils of the nations.”65 The new
states, representing incredibly diverse geographies, histories, and cultures,
were in this way presented as embodying precisely the polyphony that inter-
national law, in its obsession with sovereign equality, claimed as its
61
Kotelawala, “Speech to the Conference,” in Documents of [the] Asian-African Conference,
p. 56.
62
On Egyptian President Nasser’s adoption of precisely this “Bandung ” strategy during the Suez
Crisis, see Peevers, Chapter 34 in this volume.
63
64
65
p. 57.
fundamental animating principle. To quote Sukarno again: “Yes, there is

diversity among us . . . But what harm is there in diversity, when there is unity
in desire? . . . [Let us make] the ‘Unity in Diversity’ motto the unifying force
which brings us all together.”66 As younger and wiser subjects of international
law, it was therefore up to the Bandung states to “inject the voice of reason
into world affairs.”67
The question of addressivity in this context was therefore both spatially and
temporally complex. Three groups – subjects present, subjects unformed but
anticipated, and subjects established but excluded – featured simultaneously and
equivalently as authors of, characters in, and listeners to the narrative constructed
at Bandung. Bakhtin’s concept of polyphony makes it possible to see that its
reaffirmation of existing international legal doctrine should not be dismissed as a
mere parroting of preexisting principles devised in advance by a collection of
external, and therefore structurally superior, author-protagonists. On the con-
trary, when read chronotopically, the restatement offered at Bandung presents
itself not just as an equally valid interpretation of the Charter’s underlying
principles on the part of the nascent Third World, but as a more valid interpret-
ation – a re/author/ization of those principles both arising from and giving
legitimacy to the freshly minted subjectivity of the newly independent states,
present and future. In this way, I suggest, the delegates attempted subtly and yet
decisively to reformulate and re-emphasize the destiny of international law which
they gleaned from its Charter formation: its journey toward that most characteris-
tically “Bandung” of all principles – that of “unity in diversity.”
bandung and the chronotope of enchantment

An expert on fairy-tales and legends, Camilla Asplund Ingemark points to the
importance of the supranormal when it comes to the construction of images of
human subjectivity.68 Enchantment, she argues, distorts both time and space,
signifying a profound loss of free will. The bewitched protagonist of such
fables is frequently able to think only in terms of the present moment, and is
often paralyzed or transformed into a speechless animal or inanimate object.69
Drawing on Bakhtin, Ingemark depicts this as a loss of addressivity: enchanted
individuals have lost their connection with humanity, becoming “not only
immoral, but deeply amoral beings,” indifferent to the fate of others.70 The
66
Sukarno, “Opening Speech,” in Asian-African Conference, pp. 48–49. 67
Ibid., pp. 45–46.
68
Camilla Asplund Ingemark, “The Chronotope of Enchantment” (2006) 43 Journal of Folklore
Research 1.
69 70
Ibid., at 16. Ibid., at 21.
Newer Is Truer 63
only way to escape the spell is typically to evoke the “divine sphere,” which,
“located outside time and space . . . is hence achronotopic,” and can therefore
intervene “to separate human and supranormal space.”71 In one of the fairy-tales
Ingemark cites, for example, a bewitched girl is roused from her isolated apathy
in the land of the trolls by the sound of a church bell ringing: in an instant, the
trolls’ power over her is destroyed and she is free – human – again.72
The nineteenth-century Swedish-speaking parts of Finland from which
Ingemark draws her material could scarcely be further, in time and space,
from the “new” Africa and Asia of 1955, let alone from the Third World of
today. Yet the parallels between the “chronotope of enchantment” identi-
fied by Ingemark and the chronotopes of imperialism and nuclear war
evoked by the delegates at Bandung are striking. For example, in the
interventions of the latter, the superpowers – bewitched by the “diabolical”
potential of twentieth-century science and technology73 and “hag-ridden by
the demon of progress, the monsters their scientists have created” – occupy
the position of enchanted subjects whose addressivity has been comprom-
ised.74 On the one hand, as imperial powers, they are accused of narrating
into being a racist, hierarchically organized, hemispherical world-space,
possessed of a linear, evolutionary temporality. The “reality” opposed to
that worldview by the new states of Asia and Africa is that of a regular,
egalitarian space of sovereign equality and the still-linear and yet slow-and-
steady real-historical temporality of “development.” On the other hand, as
initiators of the Cold War, the nuclear powers are castigated for conjuring
up a bifurcated, bipolar global space, zooming forward in the jerky, unpre-
dictable (“adventure”) time of proxy wars, arms-racing, and deterrence. The
pacific Afro-Asian “reality” opposed to this perspective (however aspirational
it may have been in practice) is that of a universal and fully-reciprocal,
ideally nonaligned space, animated by the domestic, mutually cooperative
temporality suggested by the “[p]romotion of mutual interests and cooper-
ation.”75 In restating international law’s most important principles in these
terms, one way to understand the interventions of the Bandung states is as
an attempt to ring the bell of international justice, in the hope of rousing
the superpowers from their murderous stupor with (what they hoped was)
the sound of the universal, not to say celestial melody of humanity.
71 72
Ibid., at 11–12. Ibid., at 15.
73
74
p. 56.
75
Final Communiqué, Art. 9.
conclusion
The results of the narrative strategy formulated at Bandung have been disap-
pointing in many ways. Sixty-two years later, the bell continues to be rung –
and yet its sound, one might say, has been stripped of melody and in this way
emptied of meaning. Why is this? Was the effect of the slogan of “unity in
diversity” to reduce the tangible differences articulated by the delegations to
an empty, depoliticized compatibility? At what point does polyphony become
cacophony, such that the sum of many voices is zero – (political) silence?76
One particularly potent Bandung silence concerns the delegates’ failure to
question the legitimacy and viability of the nation-state, which they presented
as the only mechanism capable of reconciling the cyclical-domestic chron-
otope of humanness with the linear-global chronotope of collective planetary
existence.77 Indeed, this silence might be considered the central, and deadly,
silence of international law itself, that which ensures that its invocations of
international solidarity are, indeed, doomed to vacuity.
Yet if the difference between polyphony and cacophony is a question of
underlying harmony and hence of structure, the narrative composed at Ban-
dung possessed both. By means of a complex chronotopic structure of addres-
sivity, the delegates projected their demands across a listening space
encompassing of the “entire world.” They envisaged their words traveling
simultaneously backwards in time to re-elevate the denigrated cultures of their
ancestors; sideways to challenge the anachronistic temporality of those still
struggling with the zombie of imperialism; and forwards to protect “future
generations” at risk of nuclear annihilation. The result, as we have seen, was a
radical equalization of the positions of author, subject, and listener. As future
generations addressed, ourselves, by this narrative, therefore, the question
arises as to whether we are required to discard it simply because, in an era
of material inequality and impending environmental catastrophe unimagin-
able in 1955, we continue to be stalked by the same zombie, and threatened by
another (not unrelated) home-grown global holocaust.
If nothing else, however, echoes of the demands made at Bandung in 1955
serve as a reminder that remain, at least in principle, the authors of our own
subjectivity, and therefore also of our own plot. Is it possible to argue that the
76
I am grateful to Vasuki Nesiah and Luis Eslava for these points.
77
For fuller developments of this argument, see Rose Sydney Parfitt, “Thinking through the
Arco dei Fileni: Fascist Sovereignty Yesterday and Tomorrow” (forthcoming, currently under
review); and Rose Parfitt, “Book Review: Brad Roth, Sovereign Equality and Moral
Disagreement” (2012) 23 European Journal of International Law 1175.
Newer Is Truer 65
nation-state was not itself the centerpiece of those 62-year-old original

demands, but rather a background assumption about how they would be
met – a vessel into which the delegations at Bandung poured their hopes of
liberation without first checking it for cracks? More generally, are we capable,
today, of recognising, as Joseph Slaughter calls on us to do, the fact of a
“sociohistorical alliance” between the Bildungsroman and international law,
conceived “as mutually enabling fictions that institutionalize and naturalize
the terms of incorporation in (and exclusion from) an imagined community of
readers and rights holders”?78 If so then we, armed with hindsight, may yet be
in time to relinquish the individualist and statist biases that are reinforced by
this alliance . . . for the material axes of solidarity remain the same.
78
Slaughter, Human Rights, Inc., p. 328.
3
From Versailles to Bandung

The Interwar Origins of Anticolonialism
fredrik petersson
introduction
In 1927, the First International Congress against Imperialism and Colonialism
was convened in Brussels at Palais d’Egmont. The event celebrated the
establishment of the League Against Imperialism and for National Independ-
ence (LAI: 1927–1937). When the Congress reached its crescendo, Willi
Münzenberg, the German communist and General Secretary of Internatio-
nale Arbeiterhilfe (IAH, or Workers’ International Relief: 1921–1935), declared
it was “neither the end, nor the beginning of a new powerful movement.”1
Münzenberg’s speech was preceded by others, particularly those who repre-
sented the colonies at the Congress. The Indian nationalist and future Prime
Minister of India, Jawaharlal Nehru, was present as representative of the
Indian National Congress among the accredited 174 delegates. In his speech,
Nehru stated, “[W]e cannot go on, not merely because freedom is good and
slavery bad, but because it is a matter of life and death for us and our country.”
1
For Münzenberg’s quote, see Russian State Archive for Political and Social History (RGASPI,
Moscow), 542/1/69, 37–49, Manuscript of Willi Münzenberg’s speech, Brussels, 13/2–1927. The
speech was included in the official report from the Brussels Congress, Louis Gibarti (Hrsg.),
Das Flammenzeichen vom Palais Egmont. Offizielles Protokoll des Kongresses gegen koloniale
Unterdrückung und Imperialismus Brüssel (in English: The Beacon at Palais Egmont. Official
Protocol from the Congress Against Colonial Oppression and Imperialism in Brussels) (Berlin:
Neuer Deutscher Verlag, 1927). Münzenberg’s role in the history of the LAI is assessed in
Fredrik Petersson, “We Are Neither Visionaries Nor Utopian Dreamers”: Willi Münzenberg, the
League against Imperialism, and the Comintern, 1925–1933 (dissertation; Åbo: Åbo Akademi
University, 2013, published as Vol. I–II, Lewiston: Queenston Press, 2013). The Brussels
Congress was attended by 174 accredited delegates, representing a cross-section of
134 European left-wing organizations and political parties side by side with colonial
organizations and associations. This chapter is a reworked version of the author’s blog, “Prelude
to Bandung: The Interwar Origins of Anti-Colonialism,” published on the Imperial & Global
Forum (Exeter University, October 20, 2014).
66
From Versailles to Bandung 67
Connected to Münzenberg’s anti-imperial vision of a strong movement and

nearly twenty-eight years later, amid the aftermath of the brutality of the
Second World War, both Münzenberg’s and Nehru’s arguments were revital-
ized at the Bandung Conference, when Nehru concluded that the Asian and
African nations should never again “be dominated in any way by any other
country or continent.”2 In the opening address, Indonesian President Sukarno
also declared to the leaders of the twenty-nine countries in attendance: “I
recognise that we are gathered here today as a result of sacrifices . . . I recall in
this connection the Conference of the ‘League against Imperialism and
Colonialism’ which was held in Brussels almost thirty years ago.”3
These statements connecting the First International Congress in Brussels
and Bandung illustrate why a global history of transnational anticolonial
movements in the twentieth century cannot be fixed around a particular
moment in time and space. Anticolonialism was, and still is, in essence a
history enacted in multiple radical spaces in a changing world.
The idea of radical spaces as meeting points and connective sources of
anticolonialism is part of the suggestion that postwar decolonization was a
process with its origins in imperial and nonimperial cosmopolitan centers in
Europe and the United States – Berlin, Paris, Brussels, London, Hamburg,
New York – in the interwar years. Bandung represents a turning point for
anticolonialism in the postwar era, and as Tony Ballantyne and Antoinette
Burton argue, by “thinking backward from Bandung,” it is possible to trace
people, policies, ideas, and political platforms that were interconnected in
trying to change the world prior to and after the Second World War. This
chapter aims to provide an outline of the origins of interwar anticolonialism,
which, in a longer perspective, connects the anticolonial narrative of the
twentieth century with Bandung. While some topics are addressed in greater
detail, others are mentioned briefly.
First, anticolonialism as a global phenomenon was not a new post-1919
event that emerged as a consequence of the Versailles Peace Conference.
Other incidents and episodes prior to Versailles can be seen as even more
inspirational for the emergence of vibrant anticolonialism in the first decades
of the twentieth century; for example, the Japanese victory over Russia in
1905 celebrated the defeat of a European imperial power by a non-European
country. News of the victory traveled across the world and became a source
2
RGASPI 542/1/69, 62–64, Nehru’s speech at the Congress in Brussels, February 1927; Selected
Works of Jawaharlal Nehru, Volume 28, Bandung, April 24, 1955.
3
George McTurnan Kahin (ed.), The Asian-African Conference: Bandung, Indonesia, April 1955
(Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1956), p. 40.
68 Fredrik Petersson
of inspiration for future leaders in the struggle against colonialism and

imperialism, such as Mohandas Gandhi, Mustafa Kemal, W. E. B. Du Bois,
Sun Yat-sen, and Jawaharlal Nehru. However, the 1920s witnessed how these
movements of resistance became politically conscious and consolidated at that
point.4 According to Christopher Lee’s observation on the Conference and its
connection to the Brussels Congress, this is a historiographical process that
must “reexamine the events and features of decolonization,”5 or, as Vijay
Prashad states, the Brussels Congress was an “experiment in intraplanetary
solidarity” that called for “the rights of the darker nations to rule themselves.”6 In
Bandung, this question was at the very center of attention. Dipesh Chakrabarty
writes that “the demand for political and intellectual decolonization” had its
origins in the colonized countries;7 however, as this chapter argues, imperial
and cosmopolitan centers in Europe in the interwar years concretized and
made it possible for anticolonialism to express itself as a politically conscious
movement.
From anticolonial actors – organizations, associations, and individuals –
that migrated to or visited Europe in the 1920 and 1930s emerges a trans-
national history of anticolonialism that dates back to the Versailles Confer-
ence and earlier, taking a decisive turning point in Brussels, and partly
concluding at Bandung. This historical reading of these events reduces the
perception of Bandung as an endgame of twentieth-century anticolonialism;
that is, Bandung showed how leaders of the decolonized world took an
independent position as they embraced the Nehruvian concept of nonalign-
ment, and introduced Third World opposition against the polarized Cold War
division of the world.8 Above all, however, Bandung questioned the Eurocen-
tric interpretation of the global order, a stance that was beginning to be
articulated in the preceding decades. The Brussels Congress assumes in this
4
Tony Ballantyne and Antoinette Burton, “Empires and the Reach of the Global,” in Emily S.
Rosenberg (ed.), A World Connecting 1870–1945 (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press, 2012)
p. 285, pp. 390–391; Pankaj Mishra, From the Ruins of Empire: The Revolt Against the West and
the Remaking of Asia (New York: Picador, 2012), pp. 1–11; Erez Manela, The Wilsonian
Moment: Self-Determination and the International Origins of Anticolonial Nationalism
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007).
5
Christopher J. Lee, “Introduction,” in Christopher J. Lee (ed.), Making a World After Empire:
The Bandung Moment and Its Political Afterlives (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2010), pp. 9–10.
6
Vijay Prashad, The Darker Nations (New York: The New Press, 2007), p. 22.
7
in Christopher J. Lee (ed.), Making a World after Empire, p. 45.
8
Thomas W. Zeiler, “Opening Doors in the World Economy,” in Akira Iriye (ed.), Global
Interdependence (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press, 2014), p. 254; Vijay Prashad, The Poorer
Nations (London: Verso, 2012).
context, therefore, a pivotal role and factor that help us deepen our historical
understanding of decolonization and the Bandung moment.
But what constitutes, in particular, the transnational historical narrative of
interwar anticolonialism? The central task of this inquiry is to disclose why
and how anticolonialism was interconnected in radical spaces as sharing and
benefiting from both informal and formal networks, capable of assembling
and putting into practice campaigns and propaganda organized through
associations, committees, or organizations. These sources of anticolonial
solidarity are representative of political and cultural articulations shaped by
the spatiality of places and spaces.9 Interwar anticolonial movements were
representative of the type of resistance that was (and still is) embedded in
transnational exchanges of information and opposition regardless of class,
gender, or ideology and carried out in the shape of organizations. Radical
movements and international organizations have shaped the modern world, so
to write twentieth-century history without including the above would be
“incomprehensible.”10 Transnational studies of movements, flows, and circu-
lations of ideas and peoples11 allow us to link together anticolonialism in
spaces and places from the multiple spatialities of Versailles, the world wars,
and the road to Bandung.
origins and spaces of interwar anticolonialism

Before the League against Imperialism, there was the Versailles Peace Con-
ference and the establishment of the League of Nations in 1919. Versailles
represented a crucial turning point for interwar anticolonialism, particularly as
the Conference’s managers agreed on a template for the continuance of global
empires. However, it offered hope to anticolonial activists who had traveled to
attend the Conference, as well as a chance to engage in political and cultural
discussions and, in a longer perspective, perceive Europe as the center of
anticolonialism in the 1920s.12
The Versailles Conference coincided with and (as a consequence of the
poor resolution of the colonial question during the negotiations) exacerbated
protests against colonialism and imperialism in China, Korea, Egypt, and India.
9
David Featherstone, “The Spatial Politics of the Past Unbound” (2007) 7 Global Networks 430.
10
Akira Iriye, Global Community: The Role of International Organizations in the Making of the
Contemporary World (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), p. 17.
11
C. A. Bayly et al., “AHR Conversation: On Transnational History” (2006) 111 American
Historical Review 1440, at 1443.
12
Manela, The Wilsonian Moment; Petersson, We Are Neither Visionaries.
This anti-imperial counterresponse against the euphoria of the Wilsonian

moment has, in interpretations put forward by historians Erez Manela and
Cemil Aydin, contributed to turning anticolonial movements into conscious
and organized transnational political actors. At the same time, the international
and liberal reformist message of Wilsonianism had to compete against the
growth of nationalist movements in the Middle East and Asia after 1918, Aydin
states. This relates to how pan-Arab and pan-Asian ideas evolved into alternate
critics against the envisioned global order of the League of Nations, where the
former perceived the latter as being manipulated by imperial interests and
racial attitudes. The gradual disappearance of the Wilsonian moment in
1919 was consequently replaced by the growth of disillusioned anticolonial
movements globally.13
This process leads, for example, to the establishment in 1921 of the Union
Intercoloniale in France through the moral and financial support from the
Parti Communiste Français (PCF), which sought to unite colonial activists in
Paris by providing them with means, methods, and outlets like the newspaper
La Paria. The Union Intercoloniale belonged to anticolonialism as a political
and social movement that had matured and radicalized itself in Paris after the
First World War. For the PCF, this was not enough. In 1921, the party
organized the Comité d’Etudes Coloniales in order to gain further influence
among colonial residents in France. According to Jonathan Derrick, the
impression this early activism left was one of “small numbers of dedicated
but penniless people.”14 Yet this undertaking displayed the interwar consoli-
dation of anticolonial actors, some of whom drifted from radical patriotism to
the radicalism of Bolshevism and international communism, organized
through the networks and contacts of the Communist International (Comin-
tern: 1919–1943).
Characteristic of the above was the charismatic Nguyen ai Quoc/Ho Chi
Minh from Indochina, who left Paris in disappointment after attending the
Versailles Conference, where he wanted to meet Wilson. Later, he described
how he gradually “understood that only socialism and communism can
liberate the oppressed nations.” Thus, in 1920, he attended the Second
International Comintern Congress in Moscow.15 For the Comintern, the
13
David Fromkin, A Peace to End All Peace (New York: Henry Holt, 2009), pp. 417–419; Manela,
The Wilsonian Moment; Cemil Aydin, The Politics of Anti-Westernism in Asia (New York:
Columbia University Press, 2007), p. 160.
14
Jonathan Derrick, Africa’s Agitators: Militant Anti-Colonialism in Africa and the West,
1918–1939 (London: Hurst Publishers, 2008), pp. 122–130.
15
Jacob Zumoff, “The African Blood Brotherhood: From Caribbean Nationalism to Communism”
(2007) Journal of Caribbean History 41, at 211; Manela, The Wilsonian Moment, pp. 3–5.
colonial question was vexing. Internal discussions pondered how to formulate

an agenda, while the Comintern faced the dilemma of developing a strategy
that could enhance the development of communist movements in the col-
onies despite the frequent subversion of colonial security services. Yet the
Comintern’s initiative to convene the First Congress of the Peoples of the East
in Baku in September 1920 gained attention on the Asiatic question. The
event offered the more than 2,000 attending delegates a chance to meet and
discuss colonial rule and foreign intervention – all in the name of anti-
imperialism.16 The Comintern regularly issued protests against British,
French, and American imperialism in the interwar years. Yet the challenge
was getting the national sections (the communist parties) to grasp the issue of
including anticolonialism as a central component in their agendas. For
example, in 1922, the Executive Committee of the Comintern demanded
the sections to place the demands “for the liberation of the oppressed Colonial
peoples” at the center of their political agendas.17 In 1924, the Comintern
organized the International Colonial Bureau in Paris, hoping it would func-
tion as an anticolonial platform in Western Europe. Under the leadership of
the Indian communist and national revolutionary Manabendra Nath Roy, the
enterprise nevertheless ended in failure because of poor organization, a
constant lack of funds, and internal schisms. When the French Sûreté
deported Roy in January 1925, this put a momentary halt to the Comintern’s
anticolonial ambitions in France.18 However, in 1925, the once-marginalized
Black African community in Paris gained greater voice through the efforts of
Lamine Senghor of Senegal, who formed a section within the Union Inter-
coloniale to infuse a discussion on the Black African agenda. In 1926, Senghor
assumed a leading position in the Comité de Défense de la Race Nègre
(CDRN), and in 1927, he attended the Brussels Congress as its representative.
Later same year, Senghor left the CDRN and, after receiving financial support
from the PCF, formed the radical Ligue de Défense de la Race Négre
(LDRN) together with the French Sudanese (now Mali) Garan Tiemoko
Kouyaté, which published the journal La Race Nègre.19
16
Robert J. C. Young, Postcolonialism: An Historical Introduction (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing,
2001), pp. 134–135.
17
RGASPI 495/155/4, 16–26, Draft Manifesto on the Negro Question, Executive Committee of
the Comintern, Moscow, 1922.
18
Petersson, We Are Neither Visionaries, pp. 59–60.
19
Lamine Senghor passed away on November 25, 1927, after a long illness caused by tuberculosis.
For the LDRN, see Philippe Dewitte, Les Mouvements nègres en France, 1919–1939 (Paris:
Editions L’Harmattan, 1985), and Holger Weiss, Framing a Radical African Atlantic (Leiden:
Brill, 2014), p. 3.
Similar anticolonial groups emerged in London, Manchester, and Liver-

pool during this time. London had been a center for Indian nationalist
movements prior to the outbreak of the First World War (e.g., the India
House), and from 1919 onward, African and Indian anticolonialism gained a
steady foothold in political spaces (committees, journals, organizations) in the
heart of the British Empire. Pacifist by nature and through the efforts of
individuals from a colonial or British origin, associations and committees
sprang into action to connect the political actions taking place in London
with the colonies. In 1925 in London, the Nigerian Lapido Solanke and the
journalist Casely Hayford from the Gold Coast (now Ghana) founded The
West African Students’ Union as a protest against racial prejudice. Through
the fragile networks of West African activists in London, contacts were estab-
lished back to West Africa and other parts of the continent, such as the Sierra
Leone Railway Workers’ Union, Hayford’s paper The Gold Coast Leader, and
the African National Congress in South Africa.20
Anticolonialism in Germany assumed a different character. Berlin turned
into a haven for colonial residents after the First World War, where approxi-
mately 5,000 individuals lived and studied in the Weimar capital, representing
Chinese, Indian, Arab, and North African groups. In 1925, Willi Münzenberg
and the IAH focused much attention on philanthropic questions related to the
political and social development in the colonial and semi-colonial countries,
an insight after creating a strong following among European intellectuals to
side with IAH’s relief campaign in support for the victims of the Japanese
earthquake in 1923. Partly sanctioned by the Comintern in Moscow, and
partly as a strategy to widen the global activities of the IAH, Münzenberg
coordinated the establishment of committees and campaigns in support of the
Chinese and Syrian national liberation struggle in 1925 (Hands Off China,
Against the Cruelties in Syria). The IAH also connected with anticolonial
groups in Berlin, such as Indian nationalists, the Egyptian Klub der Zaglulis-
ten, and North African and Middle Eastern activists.21
20
Weiss, Framing a Radical, p. 164; Africa’s Agitators; Imanuel Geiss, Panafrikanismus: Zur
Geschichte der Dekolonisation (in English: Pan-Africanism: On the History of Decolonization.
The book was edited and published in an English version 1975, The Pan-African Movement:
A History of Pan Africanism in America, Europe, and Africa (Frankfurt am Main: Europäische
Verlagsanstalt, 1968), pp. 173, 220–226; Petersson, We Are Neither Visionaries.
21
Willi Münzenberg, Fünf Jahre Internationale Arbeiterhilfe (in English: Five Years of Workers’
International Relief) (Berlin: Neuer Deutscher Verlag, 1926). The anticolonial project of the
IAH and Münzenberg’s involvement is analyzed in Petersson, We Are Neither Visionaries
(chapter: “Conceiving the Anti-Colonial Project”) pp. 53–91, and Fredrik Petersson, “Hub of
the Anti-Imperialist Movement: The League against Imperialism and Berlin, 1927–1933,” in
However, according to Münzenberg, the consolidation of anticolonialism

in Europe required convening an international congress against colonialism
and imperialism. The Comintern authorized Münzenberg to form the
League against Colonial Oppression in 1926 as a connective and organizing
source to accomplish the twofold objective of convening a demonstration
against colonialism and imperialism and establishing the League Against
Imperialism and for National Independence.22 Invitations to the Congress
circulated from the International Secretariat of the League against Colonial
Oppression in Berlin to recipients in Europe, Asia, North America, and South
America. According to an invitation sent to the so-called Father of Pan-
Africanism, W.E.B. Du Bois, in July, the Congress aimed at reporting on
“imperialist suppression in the colonial and semi-colonial countries,” colonial
“emancipation movements,” and its relations to “working-organizations in
the capitalistic countries,” the “co-ordination of the national emancipation-
movements” with “the social question in the colonies,” and to establish “the
League against Colonial Suppression” as a “great international organiza-
tion.”23 The “Provisional Committee of the International Congress against
Colonial Oppression” surfaced at the end of 1926. The committee displayed
the disparate political and cultural character of anticolonialism as it declared
that “we heartily invite you to attend the Congress.” Members of the commit-
tee were, among others, Jawaharlal Nehru, William Pickens from the
National Association for the Advancement of Coloured People (NAACP),
the Chinese Soong Qingling (Sun Yat-sen’s widow), Mohamed Hafiz
Ramadan Bey from Egypt, the Mexican Ramon de Negri, the leader of the
American Civil Liberties Union Roger Baldwin, Münzenberg, and the French
author Henri Barbusse.24 Despite internal schisms between Münzenberg and
the Comintern in reaching a final agreement on the political scope of the
congress, on February 10, 1927, Barbusse greeted everyone in Brussels with the
Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies, Vol. 16, no. 1 (London: Routledge,
Taylor & Francis, 2014), pp. 49–71.
22
RGASPI 542/1/4, 2–4, Protokoll der im Berliner Rathauskeller am 10. Februar abgehaltenen
Konferenz der deutschen Organisationen und der Kolonialvertreter (in English: Protocol of
the Rathauskeller conference for German organizations and colonial delegates in Berlin on 10
February), Berlin, 10/2–1926; RGASPI 495/18/425, 32–33, Resolution from the Commission for
the Examination of the Question of a Colonial Congress in Brussels, Moscow, 30/3–1926.
23
W. E. B. Du Bois Papers (MS 312, Special Collections and University Archives, University of
Massachusetts), Letter from Liga gegen Kolonialgreuel und Unterdrückung (F. Bach), Berlin,
to W. E. B. Du Bois, New York, July 1926. For other invitations and recipients in 1926, see
24
International Institute of Social History (IISH), LAI Collection 3392.1, Invitation to the
International Congress against Colonial Oppression and Imperialism, Berlin, 15/12–1926.
statement: “[F]or the first time, the imprisoned, sacrificed and murdered
peoples are united together in a bloc.”25
the league against imperialism and for national

independence (1927–1937)
The LAI was the culmination of a process that mirrored the development of
anticolonialism in Europe. To turn the LAI into an international organiza-
tion, much depended on the benevolence of engaged persons active outside
the communist movement and anticolonial groups in Europe: the labor and
socialist movement, radical and pacifist elements, and transatlantic intellec-
tuals like Upton Sinclair, Barbusse, and Albert Einstein. While the LAI posed
as an international organization after 1927, Berlin represented its principal
geographical and connective platform, where the Indian nationalist revolu-
tionary Virendranath Chattopadhyaya masterminded European and global
networks.26 The organization had to combat the suspicion from agents such
as the Labour and Socialist International and national security services in
Europe. The former launched a campaign with its release of the report “Zur
Geschichte der Liga gegen koloniale Unterdrückung” in October 1927. Euro-
pean anticolonial activists, like the British socialist and leader of the Independ-
ent Labour Party A. Fenner Brockway, thought the report was disastrous
because it exposed the communist connections the LAI had with the Comin-
tern and Münzenberg’s IAH. Brockway had attended the Brussels Congress,
and afterward he strongly endorsed the LAI, which he declared was the
“Coloured Peoples’ International.” However, the findings of the October
report forced him to renounce any kind of involvement with the
organization.27
Anticolonial activists from colonial and semi-colonial countries – among
them George Padmore from Trinidad, Mohammad Hatta from Indonesia,
25
For the final preparations in January 1927, see Petersson, We Are Neither Visionaries,
pp. 122–134; Gibarti 1927, pp. 14–16.
26
Virendranath Chattopadhyaya (1880–1937) was International Secretary of the LAI from 1928 to
1931. The same year, Chatto was summoned to Moscow, facing charges of “political
dishonesty,” and in 1937, during the Great Terror in the Soviet Union, he was condemned as a
German spy and executed on September 2, 1937. See Nirode K. Barooah, Chatto: The Life and
Times of an Indian Anti-Imperialist in Europe (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), and
27
“Zur Geschichte der Liga gegen koloniale Unterdrückung” (in English: On the History of the
League against Colonial Oppression), in Internationale Information, IV, No. 52, 7/10–1927,
Zürich, pp. 438–448; RGASPI 542/1/18, 58 (Confidential) Letter from Brockway, London, to
Gibarti, Paris, 10/10–1927.
and Jawaharlal Nehru from India – drew experience during their time in
Europe from the LAI by either establishing or contributing to such commit-
tees and organizations as the French LDRN, Perhimpunan Indonesia (1924),
the Independence for India League (1928), the International Trade Union
Committee of Negro Workers (ITUCNW: 1931), the Negro Welfare Associ-
ation (1931), and the League of Coloured Peoples’ (1931). These organizations
remained connected to the LAI while articulating their own agendas based on
different sets of ideological interpretations of the world.28 Aside from trying to
function as the hub for anticolonial organizations and international anti-
imperialism, prior to and after the Brussels Congress, the LAI had developed
contacts with numerous groups in Europe and the United States.
However, a majority of the LAI’s undertakings and networks ended or were
drastically altered because of its intertwined relationship with the Comintern. In
1928, the Comintern replaced the united front strategy with the infamous “class
against class” policy. This implicitly indicated the continued Bolshevization and
Stalinization of international communism, while explicitly declaring the coming
of capitalist crisis and increased war threat against the Soviet Union. The leading
decision-makers in the Comintern put it brusquely in 1929: “[T]he united front
strategy, which we used to carry out from below, we have since [1928] no longer
pursued from below, but from above.” Yet for the LAI, founded on the basis of the
united front strategy, this proved to be disastrous.29
However, the LAI’s relations with anticolonial organizations disclose a web
of transnational contacts and patterns between the wars – contacts and patterns
that extended to Southeast Asia. Hatta’s Perhimpunan Indonesia (PI) was
energetic in exposing the nature and character of Dutch imperialism in
Western Europe. In 1930, the Indonesian communist Raden Darsono
described how the PI could be used to circumvent Dutch colonial security
agencies and ensure the distribution of anticolonial propaganda from Europe
to Indonesia. Sukarno had emerged as a leading figure in 1927 for the
Indonesian liberation struggle after the establishment of the National Party
of Indonesia. In 1930, Sukarno was arrested and sentenced to four years’
28
The corpus of accumulated literature on these topics is vast. See Petersson, We Are Neither
Visionaries; Weiss, Framing a Radical; Barooah, Chatto; Young, Postcolonialism; Prashad, The
Darker Nations.
29
RGASPI 495/168/120, 1–25, X Plenum, 16. Sitzung/nachmittags, Moscow, 13/7–1929. This
resulted in a serious crisis in the LAI after the “Second International Congress against
Imperialism and Colonialism” in Frankfurt am Main, Germany, on July 21–27, 1929, which
ended in chaos after the communists verbally attacked noncommunist delegates, accusing
them of being reformists and “agents of imperialism.” For this controversy, and the LAI’s
internal crisis, see Petersson, We Are Neither Visionaries.
imprisonment, but in December 1931 the prison sentence was reduced and he
was released. At this moment the Comintern instructed the LAI’s headquarters
in Berlin to finance a journey for Sukarno to Germany in order for him to
arrive at a safe haven away from Dutch colonial authorities (this never
transpired because the LAI had no funds). This is a remote observation if we
compare how Hatta (who left the LAI in 1929) in 1945 remembered the LAI as
“those champions of humanitarianism,” describing the Brussels Congress as
an event of “world importance.”30
The LAI’s contacts with Afro-American organizations are also known.
However, only a few of these contacts were developed, and others disappeared
because of conflicts. The latter involve how the LAI tried to establish relations
with the NAACP and the Harlem radical Richard B. Moore’s Universal Negro
Improvement Association (founded by Marcus Garvey), whereas Jomo Kenya-
tta’s Kikiyu Central Association occurred in the periphery in 1929.31 Why
nothing of the above ever materialized into anything meaningful is evident
in two factors. First, communist ideology increasingly limited the extent of the
LAI’s contacts because of the organizations’ militant focus on revolution and
class rather than national liberation and race. Second, interwar international
communism and anticolonialism depended extensively on few and fragile
connections. James W. Ford, the American communist and Profintern func-
tionary (Red International of Labour Unions), outlined in 1929 the colonial
conundrum in France in fine detail: “[T]he Negro workers in France . . . had
a social-democratic outlook, that the Party had very little contact with the
French African colonies.”32
In 1929–1930, Padmore and Ford attempted to centralize African and
transatlantic networks with the preparations and convening of the founding
conference of the ITUCNW in Hamburg in July 1930. The ITUCNW aimed
at radicalizing Afro-American movements through a message of “militancy,”
an approach that furthered the inspiration of new organizations such as the
Negro Welfare Association in London 1931 while maintaining close relations
with former contacts such as LDRN. However, the ITUCNW never gained
momentum, and in 1933 Padmore left and was later expelled by the
30
RGASPI 542/1/42, 22–25, Besprechung mit Darsono, [report by:] Bohumîl Smeral, Moskau, 20/
8–1930; RGASPI 542/1/54, 18a, “An die Liga” Berlin, “Boris”/Ost Sekretariat, Moskau, 11/1–1932;
Mohammad Hatta, “A personal message to my old comrades wherever they may be,” in
Portrait of a Patriot (The Hague: Hatta, 1972), p. 504.
31
On Afro-American and transatlantic Negro networks, see Weiss, Framing a Radical and
Postcolonialism.
32
RGASPI 495/155/70, 62–68, Report by James W. Ford, to the ECCI Negro Bureau, Moscow,
February 1929.
Comintern. Yet the political methods Padmore learned from his experience
with the ITUCNW provided him with a lifelong experience on how to
organize political and radical anticolonial actions.33
the year 1933 and beyond: surviving totalitarianism

and war
Perhaps even more important, the interwar years showed that anticolonialism,
as an idea and a movement, had the inherent strength to survive authoritarian
regimes and totalitarian systems. After the Nazi regime assumed power in
Germany on January 30, 1933, the LAI shifted its location from Berlin to Paris.
Yet this proved to be a brief hiatus caused by organizational confusion and
distress after the large-scale emigration of political refugees from Germany.
The Comintern decided to permanently locate the organization in London.
British socialist and long-standing member of the LAI Reginald Francis
Orlando Bridgeman (1884–1968) was granted authority to assume formal
leadership in August 1933.34 In 1934, however, Bridgeman conceded that it
had been “necessary to reconstitute the work of the League from the begin-
ning.”35 This involved reestablishing former relations to anticolonial advocates
in England. Italy’s annexation of Ethiopia and the Abyssinian crisis in
1935 seemed to offer an opportunity to do so. Bridgeman attempted to outline
the LAI’s position in a public statement on October 8, 1935, declaring that if
the “world [is] to be saved,” it had to be freed “from the colonial factor.”36
Despite Bridgeman’s anticolonial ethos and the attempts to revive the LAI as
an international petitioner against colonialism and imperialism, other devel-
opments questioned whether the organization had any functional role to play.
In practical terms, former collaborations began to disappear in Great Britain.
For example, the British Independent Labour Party (ILP) and its leader,
A. Fenner Brockway, declared they had no intention of supporting the LAI’s
Abyssinian campaign, a statement grounded in the intertwined relation of the
33
Weiss has outlined Padmore’s and Ford’s activities in relation to the ITUCNW. See Weiss,
Framing a Radical, pp. 291–453.
34
RGASPI 542/1/60, 39–49, Bericht über Lage und Tätigkeit des Intern[ationales] Sekretariats der
Liga ab 30. Januar 1933, author: Allo Bayer, Paris, 1/4–1933; RGASPI 495/4/260, 72, Short note
from Münzenberg, Moscow, to Osip Piatnitsky, Moscow, 20/8–1933.
35
RGASPI 542/1/61, 1–43, Report from Bridgeman, London, to Shapurji Saklatvala/Colonial
Commission of the Communist Party of Great Britain, London, December 1934.
36
RGASPI 542/1/62, 62–63, Statement by the LAI for the Defence of the Independence and
Territorial Integrity of Ethiopia, R. Bridgeman, London, 8/10–1935. The Abyssinian crisis stirred up
reactions and created an array of different campaigns, connected through transnational initiatives
in Europe and the United States. See Weiss, Framing a Radical, pp. 651–653.
organization with communism.37 This was symptomatic of things to come. It

no longer mattered that the LAI’s British section had been one of the driving
forces in highlighting colonial topics such as the Meerut trial in India from
1929 to 1933, or that Bridgeman’s verbal and linguistic skills in criticizing
colonialism and racism in South Africa, Iraq, Egypt, India, and West Africa
had created a stir in the British left-wing press. Owing to the communist bias
and faltering interest in the LAI in Great Britain and Europe, and with the rise
of antifascism and the Popular Front in France 1936 as the driving political
forces of the European left-wing movement, this superseded anticolonialism
as a radical advocate of political change in the 1930s. For Bridgeman, this
pushed him to disband the organization in 1937. Yet Bridgeman declared that
the LAI’s heritage had been nonetheless decisive to introduce anticolonialism
as a political vision, and it had “done consistent work in connection with the
different aspects of the colonial struggle.” In addition to being readmitted as
member of the British Labour Party after pronouncing the dissolution of the
LAI, Bridgeman took part in founding the successor, the Colonial Information
Bureau, in 1937, an organization that claimed to have no communist conno-
tations but identified itself as socialist in nature and composition.38
Here, the genealogy of the LAI assumes a longer perspective, which sug-
gests an intriguing question open for further investigation. The British Center
Against Imperialism was purportedly founded in 1937 alongside the Colonial
Information Bureau, under the leadership of the British socialist Arthur
Ballard, the associate of Pan-Africanist Cyril L. R. James. Were these two
centers actually one and the same? James R. Hooker suggests in his biography
on George Padmore that the Center Against Imperialism was the factual heir
of the LAI.39 This discloses the following chronology: the two centers formu-
lated in cooperation an Anglo-based campaign for colonial liberation. In 1948,
they merged with the Congress of Peoples Against Imperialism, an organiza-
tion linked to the ILP and founded on Brockway’s initiative as a result of the
“Congress of the Peoples of Europe, Asia and Africa” in Puteaux, Paris, in
1948, represented by two offices in London and Paris. In conclusion, the
Congress was the forerunner of the Movement for Colonial Freedom,
founded on Brockway’s initiative in 1954, which aimed at organizing
37
The National Archives (TNA) Kew Gardens, London, KV2/1919, Letter from A. Fenner
Brockway, London, to R. Bridgeman, London, 23/10–1935.
38
John Saville, “Bridgeman, Reginald Orlando Bloom,” and “The League Against Imperialism
1927–1937,” in Joyce M. Bellamy and John Saville (eds.), Dictionary of Labour Biography:
Volume VII (London: The Macmillan Press, 1984), pp. 34–38, 45–46.
39
James R. Hooker, Black Revolutionary: George Padmore’s Path from Communism to Pan-
Africanism (New York: Praeger, 1967), p. 55.
campaigns for the freedom of colonial subjects from political and economic
domination.40
post-1945 and the road to bandung

The post-1945 transnational radical anticolonial movements continued the
activities, structures, practices, and cultures of the interwar years.41 Individuals
and organizations devoted to promoting African anticolonialism gained
momentum while the world faced the horrors of the Second World War.
The West African Students’ Union convened a series of wartime conferences,
and in 1945, Padmore and Du Bois concretized the discussion of reviving the
Pan-African congresses. The fourth congress was held in 1927; thus, Padmore’s
International African Service Bureau (established in 1937), together with the
West African Students’ Union and the League of Coloured Peoples, revived
the idea and coordinated the preparations and convening of the Fifth Pan-
African Congress in Manchester in October 1945.42 After the Versailles con-
ference and the Brussels Congress, in the interwar years, transnational anti-
colonial political networks were built and sustained as an outcome of various
anticolonial meetings and congresses across the world. These networks relied
extensively on personal relations. But this was about to change. With the
foundation of the Pan-African Federation after the Manchester congress in
1945, Padmore contacted Nehru in 1946 to inform him that “our Congress”
had “close fraternal relationship” with the Indian National Congress.43 These
types of political and individual connections culminated with the Afro-Asian
Conference in Bandung in 1955. However, the cataclysm of the Bandung
Spirit had been preceded by careful planning and organizing of anticolonial
demonstrations and conferences in the postwar years.
40
Peter Barberis et al., Encyclopedia of British and Irish Political Organizations (London: Pinter,
2000), pp. 242–243. See Movement for Colonial Freedom Archive, available at http://archiveshub
.ac.uk/data/gb102-mcf, and Brockway Archives available at http://janus.lib.cam.ac.uk/db/node.xsp?
id=EAD%2FGBR%2F0014%2FFEBR (accessed January 22, 2015). See also A. Fenner Brockway,
The Colonial Revolution (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1974); Anne-Isabelle Richard, “The Limits of
Solidarity: Europeanism, Anti-colonialism and Socialism at the Congress of the Peoples of Europe,
Asia and Africa in Puteaux, 1948” in (2014) 21 European Review of History 519.
41
Ballantyne and Burton, Empires and the Reach, pp. 390–393.
42
For a more detailed account of the preparations for the congress, see Hakim Adi, Marika
Sherwood, and George Padmore, The 1945 Manchester Pan-African Congress Revisited
(London: New Beacon Books, 1995), pp. 11–32; W.E.B. Du Bois Papers MS 312, Letter from
W.E.B. Du Bois, New York, to Padmore, London, 9/7–1945.
43
W.E.B. Du Bois Papers MS 312, Letter from Padmore, London, to Nehru, 2/12–1946.
conclusion
From a longer transnational perspective, the link between Versailles and
Bandung is a strong one. The 1919 Versailles Conference had left in its wake
a legacy that spurred the growth of politically conscious and global antic-
olonial movements, of which the Bandung Conference was but one in a long
story of anticolonialism. Further, this suggests the progression of anticolonial-
ism as a practice over time where (1) individuals in the interwar era created
organizations to uphold anticolonialism as an idea and (2) in the postwar era,
organizations were established that represented anticolonialism as a practice.
Bandung can perhaps be perceived as originary; that is, representing the
utopian hopes on the future of Third World solidarities. Yet Ballantyne and
Burton write that transnational anticolonial history should be centered around
“long histories of intercolonial connection, collaboration, and . . . friction.”44
Bandung symbolized the future of Third World solidarities as it sent off a wave
of reactions, aspirations, and hopes. But the post-1955 Bandung Spirit was a
transnational practice that surfaced owing to interwar political and cultural
currents in the Western world.45 Such a transnational approach shows us how
these anticolonial movements stretch over time and space, and provide us with
a historical context for why and how anticolonial movements formulated and
constructed agendas of resistance against colonialism and imperialism.
44
Ballantyne and Burton, Empires and the Reach, p. 391.
45
Prashad, The Darker Nations; Robert J. C. Young, “The Postcolonial Condition,” in Dan
Stone (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Postwar European History (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2012), p. 600, Samuel Moyn, The Last Utopia: Human Rights in History (Cambridge,
MA: The Belknap Press, 2010); Mishra, Making a World after Empire.
4
Bandung
Reflections on the Sea, the World, and Colonialism
samera esmeir
“And do not think that oceans and the seas will protect us. The food that we eat, the
water that we drink, yes, even the very air that we breathe can be contaminated by
poisons originating from thousands of miles away. And it could be that, even if we
ourselves escaped lightly, the unborn generations of our children would bear on their
distorted bodies the marks of our failure to control the forces which have been released
to the world.”1
poison from sea

In his opening address at the Bandung Conference, Indonesia’s President
Sukarno made a number of references to oceans and seas. He depicted them
as pipes of poison, main arteries of imperialism, and distances across which
man projects his voice and his picture. Oceans and seas, he said, make up a
line that runs “from the Straits of Gibraltar, through the Mediterranean, the
Suez Canal, the Red Sea, the Indian Ocean, the South China Sea, and the
Sea of Japan.” On both sides of this lifeline, he continued, peoples and
countries were colonized, and their lives and futures were mortgaged to the
colonizers. The destructiveness of colonialism in Asia and Africa arose from
the routes of those oceans and seas: “Along that life-line, that main artery of
imperialism, there was pumped the life-blood of colonialism.” Even as many
countries gained their independence, colonialism was “not yet dead,”
announced Sukarno, reminding his audience of the many unfree regions of
Africa and Asia and of the new modern guises of colonialism, including
economic, political, and physical. This world of lasting domination was also
a world of fear from the loose forces of evil. Referring to war in particular, he
1
President Sukarno of Indonesia, “Address by the President of Indonesia,” in Asia-Africa Speaks
from Bandung (The Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Republic of Indonesia, 1955), pp. 19–29.
81
82 Samera Esmeir
said, “There is a force loose in the world whose potentiality for evil no man
truly knows. Even in practice and rehearsal for war the effects may well be
building up into something of unknown horror.” He cautioned that oceans
and seas would not shield the countries of Asia and Africa from the horrors of
war, as the waterways had the potential to become routes of poison. From
lifelines of imperialism, oceans and seas could transform into lifelines of other
forms of human horror, domination, and destruction that would affect current
and future generations.2
Nevertheless, Sukarno warned, one must not abide by fear. A measure of
protection against the world of a catastrophe, from land and from sea, was the
collective cooperation of Africa and Asia. Against the world of horror he
depicted, the gathering at Bandung and the unity of the newly independent
sovereign states became the bond of a new world. How did Sukarno, the
founding president of a state that is an archipelago comprising thousands of
islands, come to articulate this negative relationship between the sea and the
world? What were the conditions of possibility of this relationship? Was there
an anticolonial dimension to his articulations, other than the condemnation
of colonial mobilization of the sea? And finally, to what extent have these
dimensions continued to shape the arguments put forward by the heirs of
Bandung in the field of international law?
This chapter argues that Sukarno’s depiction of the sea was at once anti-
colonial and confined to the logic of the colonial. His depiction was anti-
colonial in that it responded to and resisted a vision that posited the oceans
and the seas as free by nature and therefore productive of a unified, enlarged
world. First articulated by Hugo Grotius, this vision facilitated the production
of an enlarged surface of the world as an object to be captured through
European navigation and trade. By describing a fractured world of horror
and impending catastrophe destroyed by the seas, Sukarno offered a counter-
narrative. The central trope of his account was not the freedom of humankind
to encompass the sea (and the land) and to enact the world as whole, but the
license that some groups of humankind exercise in destroying others via the
sea. But Sukarno’s account also entailed a loss. In his aspiration to and
embracing of sovereignty, the states of Asia and Africa became the agents of
a new possible world and its bond; they were to condemn the hierarchy of
sovereigns, while espousing international society as representing the world.3
2
Ibid.
3
See David L. Blaney and Naeem Inayatullah, “The Third World and a Problem of Borders,” in
Perspectives on Third World Sovereignty: The Postmodern Paradox, Mark E. Denham and Mark
Owen Lombardi (eds.) (New York: St. Martin Press, 1996), pp. 83–101.
Bandung 83
In this world, the seas and the oceans were no longer the bond of the earth,
the site for human crossings, such as those of laborers, refugees, immigrants,
students, and scholars – people who never aspired to capture the sea, but to
traverse it. The loss of this vision was also evident in the efforts of postcolonial
states in the decades following Bandung, when they attempted to regulate the
freedom granted by international law to exploit the depths of the seas. Ultim-
ately, the colonial past, and primarily its concern for sovereignty (albeit
unequally distributed), conditioned these anti- and postcolonial visions of
the sea. As it turned out, the destructiveness of colonialism, of which Sukarno
spoke, also included the loss of another vision of world and of the sea. But this
loss is perhaps not finite.
the world captured

Centuries earlier, but in relation to the same spot in the world where modern
Indonesia lies, Hugo Grotius offered his own vision of the sea. Grotius’s
1609 work Mare Liberum conceptualized the sea as free and open to seafaring
trade of all nations.4 His articulation of the free legal status of the sea was
instrumental to facilitating Dutch trade with the East Indies, laying the
groundwork for its subsequent formal colonization. Many Dutch companies
had already arrived in the East Indies in the fifteenth century. In 1602, the
Dutch government amalgamated them into the Dutch United East India
Company (VOC) and gave it a charter to wage war, make treaties, and build
fortresses. The VOC indirectly colonized the archipelago of Indonesia for
about two centuries; in 1816 it became a formal Dutch colony following the
charter’s expiration in 1799. In 1609, the VOC asked Grotius for a legal
opinion securing the Dutch right to trade in the East Indies against the
Portuguese claims to exclusive rights. Grotius’s study defended the rights of
the Dutch for navigation, and by extension trade, on the grounds of the
natural law tradition and in particular the law of nations. Grotius’s free-sea
doctrine competed with the closed-sea doctrine that British legal scholar John
Selden advocated in a 1635 work.5 Grotius’s doctrine ultimately predomin-
ated.6 With the positivization of the law of nations and its transformation into
international law at the hand of Jeremy Bentham, the legal doctrine of the
freedom of the high seas was revived in the nineteenth century, when Great
4
Hugo Grotious, The Free Sea (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, David Armitage ed., 2004).
5
John Selden, Mare Clausum Seu De Dominio Maris (1635).
6
Tommy T. B. Koh, “Negotiating a New World Order for the Sea” (1984) 24 Virginia Journal of
International Law 4, at 761–784, 762.
84 Samera Esmeir
Britain advocated for the doctrine’s revival. Since then, it continues to be part
of codified international law.7 Initiated into being in the world of mercantile
capitalism, the freedom of the high seas doctrine survived into the worlds of
industrial and postindustrial capitalism.
Mare Liberum or The Free Sea is known for the relationship it articu-
lates between sovereignty (imperium) and possession (dominium). Grotius’s
objective was to counter the Portuguese claim of dominium over the seas.
In the process, he offered a detailed vision of the sea that would establish
its resistance to possession and therefore its status as free and open to
everyone, including the Dutch. His theory enabled European colonization
of parts of Asia and constituted the cornerstone for the development of
international law that Sukarno responded to more than four centuries
later.8 Citing authorities from the natural law tradition, including Vitoria,
Grotius writes:
For even that ocean wherewith God hath compassed the Earth is navigable
on every side round about, and the settled or extraordinary blasts of wind, not
always blowing from the same quarter, and sometimes from every quarter, do
they not sufficiently signify that nature hath granted a passage from all
nations unto all?9
On the most basic levels, the ocean appears as a passage or route for the
movement from one place to another, connecting the world and establishing
it as the unity intended by nature. Less instrumentally, the ocean also
embraces and holds the earth; it makes the world possible as a unity of land
and water. Nature, according to Grotius, has mingled “nations scattered in
regard of place and hath so divided all her goods into countries that moral
men must needs traffic among themselves.” In this oceanic image, nature has
ordained commerce between peoples and put oceans to facilitate this traffic
and trade. From here, he adds, descends “the most sacred law of hospitality.”10
Two centuries later, Immanuel Kant argued that in the realization of cosmo-
politan right, the seas are “the arrangements of nature most favoring their
commerce by means of navigation.” However, he qualified this right by
7
See in particular articles 87–90 of the United Nations Conventions on the Law of the Sea
(UNCLOS). See also Ram Prakash Anand, Origin and Development of the Law of the Sea
(Leiden: Brill, 1983), p. 229.
8
On the colonial aspects of Grotius’s corpus, see Peter Borchberg, Hugo Grotius, the Portuguese
and Free Trade in the East Indies (Singapore: NUS Press, 2011).
9
For Grotius’s reliance of Vitoria, see Anthony Padgen, The Burden of Empire (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2015), p. 159.
10
Armitage, The Free Sea, p. 11.
Bandung 85
arguing it “is not, however, a right to make settlement on the land of another
nation (ius incolatus), for this, a specific contract is required.”11
Grotius’s image of the sea corresponded to the newly acquired vision in the
sixteenth century of a “vastly enlarged world and of Europe’s triumph over so
much of it.”12 The two oceanic journeys of the fifteenth century – Columbus
to America and the Portuguese rounding of the Cape of Good Hope – were
foundational moments.13 Not coincidentally, Grotius was less interested in
what he called an inland sea that spreads itself here and there “upon the
earth.” While arguably these waterways connect the surface of the earth, they
neither bridge distances nor enlarge the world; they are not lifelines for the
staging of an expansive world. For Grotius, the legal question concerned only
the “whole ocean,” for navigation in the ocean alone made capturing an
enlarged world possible. In recruiting arguments from antiquity, he depicted
the ocean as “unmeasurable and infinite, the parent of things bordering upon
heaven.” Oceans are the grounds from which everything takes shape. Or, as he
writes, the ocean’s perpetual moisture maintained “fountains and rivers and
seas” as well as “clouds and the very stars themselves.”14 Oceans and the
commerce they make possible, in other words, are the foundations of the
world, and even of the universe.
The coloniality of The Free Sea, therefore, lies not only in its solicitation by
the VOC to expand Dutch trade to the East Indies but in its productive power,
which persists today in the field of international law. According to this colonial
vision, the oceans and the seas are not merely free and common to all
humans. Their freedom is the constitutive cement for staging an enlarged
world; they produce a unified world and, more significantly, spatial-political
possibilities for capturing it and intervening in it. Further, this unified world,
as it becomes an object available to European powers, does not fully come into
being without freeing the surfaces of the oceans. This much becomes even
more evident in Lord Strang’s explanation of Britain’s position that adopts
Grotius’s doctrine of the free sea in the nineteenth century: “As we came . . . to
adopt the practice of free trade and to apply the principle of ‘all seas freely open
to all,’ we moved towards the Pax Britannica, using the Royal Navy to keep the
11
Immanuel Kant, The Metaphysics of Morals (1785), p. 352. See also Immanuel Kant, “Toward
Perpetual Peace: A Philosophical Sketch” (1795), where he writes that a stranger has a right to
visit, by virtue of humans’ common possession of the surface of the earth, which the seas and
the deserts connect. However, this right is guaranteed only as long as the visitor is peaceful.
12
Anthony Padgen, “Europe: Conceptualizing a Continent,” in The Idea of Europe: From
Antiquity to the European Union, Anthony Padgen (ed.) (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2002), p. 51.
13 14
86 Samera Esmeir
seas open for the common benefit . . . and to prepare and publish charts of
every ocean.”15 At issue was mapping out a world, or capturing it on paper, by
tracing and connecting its surfaces on land and on sea. The doctrine of the free
sea made this capture conceivable.
the commons of humanity

In its address to Bandung, the Democratic Republic of Viet-Nam delegation
emphasized colonialism’s exploitation of Asia and Africa, whose riches
included precious mines, fertile plains, reserves of forest products, and “long
coastlines with illimitable sources of sea products.” These riches, it was said,
would make the people in the area “abundant and happy.”16 This emphasis
was in line with the changing political stakes of the law of the sea. As new
technologies to exploit the riches of the sea developed, the consequences of
the freedom of the sea doctrine changed. There was a shift from the freedom
to navigate across the oceans and to trade with distant peoples to the freedom
to descend into the oceans and to claim animate and inanimate resources.
This new vertical freedom would become the target of what we know today as
the first generation of Third World Approaches to International Law
(TWAIL), scholars and practitioners who challenged Grotius’s wisdom in
the 1960s.17 They targeted the laissez-faire of the high seas, which enabled a
few countries with highly developed machinery “to exploit the resource of the
sea, to terrorize the world and to destroy the marine environment.”18 Freedom
of the sea, they argued, amounted more to license to overfish and pollute,
threatening the already inadequate protein and foreign exchange resources
of poor countries and leading to the extinction of many species.19
15
William Strang, Britain in World Affairs: A Survey of the Fluctuations of British Power and
Influence, Henry VIII to Elizabeth II (London: Faber & Faber, 1961), p. 100.
16
Address by the Delegation of the Democratic Republic of Viet-Nam, in Asia-Africa Speaks from
Bandung, at 138.
17
Makau Mutua and Antony Anghie, “What Is TWAIL?” (2000) 94 The American Society of
International Law Proceedings 31; Antony Anghie et al., The Third World and International
Order: Law, Politics, and Globalization (Leiden: Martinus Nijhoff, 2003); Karin Mickelson,
“Taking Stock of TWAIL Histories” (2008) 10(4) International Community Law Review 355;
James Thuo Gathii, “TWAIL: A Brief History of Its Origins, Its Decentralized Network, and a
Tentative Bibliography” (2011) 3(1) Trade Law and Development 26; Luis Eslava and Sundhya
Pahuja, “Beyond the (Post)Colonial: TWAIL and the Everyday Life of International Law”
(2012) 45(2) Journal of Law and Politics in Africa, Asia and Latin America 195.
18
Ram Prakash Anand, “Winds of Change in the Law of the Sea,” in The Law of the Sea:
Caracas and Beyond, Ram Prakash Anand (ed.) (Norwell: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1981),
p. 46.
19
Ibid., at 39–40.
Bandung 87
Technologically advanced countries effectively divided oceans among them-

selves and exploited the riches in the ocean.20 Limiting the law of the sea to
the freedom of the high seas doctrine led to the plundering of areas beyond
the national jurisdiction of the coastal states. Critics called for the introduction
of measures such as the protection of sea areas beyond national jurisdiction,
the regulation of the exploitation of sea resources in continental shelves, and
the imposition of some restrictions on national jurisdiction in order to con-
serve the marine environment.21
Upon their independence and their admission into the United Nations,
postcolonial African and Asian states challenged the operations of vertical
freedom in the sea. Joining Latin American states, they participated in the
United Nations negotiations in the 1970s that led to the 1982 UN Convention
on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS). Changes in the law of the sea were already
under way in the aftermath of the Second World War, but they were not yet
codified.22 Furthermore, at that time, and unlike the expectation at the
1958 Geneva Conference, it was becoming feasible to exploit the resources
of the ocean floor and the deep seabed at any depth.23 Countries from the
Global South were able to pass several resolutions at the General Assembly.
Two of their most substantive institutional achievements were the introduc-
tion of two legal principles to the body of codified law: “exclusive economic
zone” and the “common heritage of mankind.” Under the first principle,
coastal states could declare their exclusive jurisdiction over the resources in
200 miles from the coast, as long as they did not overexploit living resources.24
The second principle covered resources on or beneath the ocean floor in areas
beyond the national jurisdiction of coastal states.25 The intention was to
counter the freedom of high seas doctrine by proclaiming them as inter-
national commons. As commons, oceans and their resources beyond coastal
jurisdiction would be open to all states but subject to international regulation
for the common good of humankind. The final text of the UNCLOS declared
the seabed, ocean floor, and subsoil beyond the limits of national jurisdiction
20
Ram Prakash Anand, Legal Regime of the Sea-Bed and the Developing Countries (New Delhi:
Thomson Press, 1975).
21
See Koh, “Negotiating a New World Order for the Sea.”
22
In 1945, U.S. President Harry S Truman proclaimed exclusive jurisdiction over the United
States’ continental shelf. Other countries, including some Latin American nations, followed.
23
Address by the Delegation of the Democratic Republic of Viet-Nam, at 42–43.
24
David Fidler, “Revolt against or from within the West? TWAIL, the Developing World, and
the Future Direction of International Law” (2003) Chinese Journal of International Law 29 at
44–46. See also UNCLOS, arts. 55–75.
25
UNCLOS, art. 136.
88 Samera Esmeir
as consisting in an “Area” that is the “common heritage of mankind”; the

International Seabed Authority would act on its behalf.
But what is the principle according to which the “common heritage of
mankind” is classified as an “Area”? How were the two categories of the
concrete (Area) and the worldly (humankind) reconciled? And if that which
is common to humankind is an Area, what is a non-Area? On the most basic
level, an area could be “a particular extent of surface; a space, region, tract” or
“extent conceived by the mind.”26 By conceiving of that which is common to
humankind as an Area, the legal mind that authored the UNCLOS inscribed
the universal, or humankind, in the depths of the oceans, and left the world of
non-Areas for sovereign states to compete among themselves. Commons of
humankind became local, and the waters and the land of the sovereign states
universal. Meanwhile, postcolonial states lacked effective sovereignty to com-
pete politically and economically over the riches of the seas.27 Therefore, they
gravitated toward the concrete common heritage of mankind, advocating for
its expansion. In the process, humankind and postcolonial states became
associated with an Area, both spatially and conceptually.
This was not necessarily the vision of the world and the sea that other jurists
from Africa and Asia advocated. Consider the words of Indian jurist Ram
Prakash Anand, one of the pioneers of TWAIL: “The ocean floor is no longer
a bottomless basin but an underwater with a beautiful ‘landscape’, a world
hitherto unknown and hostile to man but lying virtually at his doorstep.”28
Anand’s words expand the world vertically to include underwater, without
projecting the image of humans upon it or suggesting that humans can claim
that world; on the contrary, the underwater world gives perspective to human-
ity. In contrast, the UNCLOS shrank humankind to an Area at the bottom of
the sea.
At the Third UN Conference of the Law of the Sea, held in Caracas in
1974 leading up to the 1982 UNCLOS, it was maintained that the freedom of
the high seas “belonged to the old order and had outlived its time.” The
objective was to establish “a new law not charity, but justice based on the
equality of rights of sovereign countries with respect to the sea.”29 To what
extent was that legal order overturned? If Grotius’s doctrine constituted an
enlarged surface of the world for colonial free exploitation, the new doctrine
of UNCLOS introduced some limitations on laissez-faire in the form of
26
Oxford English Dictionary definition.
27
See Antony Anghie, Imperialism, Sovereignty and the Making of International Law
28
Ibid., at 2. 29
Anand, “Winds of Change in the Law of the Sea,” at 46–47.
Bandung 89
exclusive economic zones and Common Heritage of Mankind (CHM).

Arguably, additional advocacy is required to preserve a more expansive marine
environment, including its animate and inanimate lives. Yet under
UNCLOS, the limit of this Area, no matter how expansive it will be, is the
surface of the sea; the commons of humankind is inside the sea. The sea is
split into two: one where competing sovereigns can navigate the ocean’s
surfaces and project themselves onto them, and another whereto humankind
can descend to preserve its heritage (while also failing to counter the destruc-
tion of the commons). Crucially, the former is the condition of the possibility
of the latter in the form of an outer limit; the heritage of humankind in the
depths of the sea is conceivable only once its surface has been detached as a
distinct but enlarged domain for sovereign states. This split between sovereign
states and humankind is parallel to another split between citizens and humans
in international human rights law. The subjects of UN human rights cam-
paigns have consistently been members of the Global South. On the other
hand, there is an assumption that citizens of the North, of the strong sovereign
states, can appeal to their own legal institutions and civil rights regimes.30 The
two splits, in the law of sea and in human rights law, posit humans as an object
of protection of international law, leaving strong sovereign states free.
alternative crossings
Grotius’s doctrine of the free sea survived into the postcolonial world as a
restraint on other imaginative and historical political possibilities – of
inhabiting the world and moving across its different surfaces, horizontally
and vertically, without staging and capturing it. Examples of this movement
include that of travelers and wanderers, migrant laborers, and political and
climate refugees. Under this vision, oceans are not surfaces and depths for
the production of a world as an object to be captured and colonized, but
sites that bring otherwise distant and foreign people and species together
and enfold them into another world. These sites are the inside of an
unrepresentable force arriving from the outside, to borrow from Cesare
Casarino’s articulation of modernist sea narratives.31 In Casarino’s work,
these narratives posit the world of the ship as part of a wider world but also
its own small world. The wider world is brought in and folded into what he
30
See Samera Esmeir, “On Making Dehumanization Possible” (2006) Publications of the
Modern Language Association 21, at 1544–1551.
31
Cesare Casarino, Modernity at Sea: Melville, Marx, Conrad in Crisis (Minneapolis: University
of Minnesota Press, 2002).
90 Samera Esmeir
calls, following Foucault, the heterotopic space of the ship. It fashions a

new form of life and being-in-common, or being-with-the-other, constituting
a placeless place. If we follow Casarino, seas are not surfaces for the staging
of the world and its capturing as one big unity, but sites of worlds other than
that of the states. And being-in-common extends and descends into the
depths of the seas that have become graveyards for the rejected and the
banned by sovereign states.
Sukarno’s words register that in its expansion, the world has shrunk into a
surface of manipulation and intervention, indeed a locale of evil. The routes
of the seas that once gave blood-life to colonialism could at any point
metamorphose into vessels of poison. Rather than depict the seas that connect
the surface of the earth as the cement of the world, he identified in them
forces of danger and horror, indeed a looming catastrophe. For war, if it took
place again, he said, would not only be “a threat to the recently achieved
independence, but may also mean the end of civilization and of human
life.”32 Even the preparations for war, he argued, produce utmost horror. In
other words, he questioned the connectedness of the world positing the threat
of an implosion by an imminent catastrophe.
But something was lost in Sukarno’s questioning and consideration of the
potentiality of a catastrophe. Lost were histories of the sea that were not foreign
to Indonesia; they belonged to it and to its neighboring countries, to the
Indian Ocean and to the Bay of Bengal. Sunil Amrith’s Crossing the Bay
of Bengal includes histories of crossing the Bay of Bengal – precolonial,
colonial, and noncolonial. In The Free Sea, Grotius cited the “settled or
extraordinary blasts of wind” blowing from different quarters of the world,
“and sometimes from every quarter,” as signifying that nature has “granted a
passage from all nations unto all.” In contrast, Amrith writes not of general
winds blowing from all parts of the world, but of the peculiar monsoon wind
that “animates the Bay of Bengal.” It is, he recalls, “one of the most dramatic
climactic phenomena on Earth.” The monsoon, from the Arabic mawsim, or
“season,” is a system of seasonally reversing winds. “The regularity, even
predictability, of the monsoon winds has made the Bay of Bengal easier to
cross than many other seas. This feature of its geography has shaped its
history.”33 The monsoons are cyclical, repetitive, and natural, but not outside
of history; they change: “From year to year the monsoons are fickle.” Never-
theless, he adds, a “lasting intensification in the monsoon’s variability is one
32
Sukarno, “Address by the President of Indonesia.”
33
Sunil Amrith, Crossing the Bay of Bengal: The Furies of Nature and the Fortunes of Migrants
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013).
Bandung 91
likely result of climate change.”34 The monsoon and other forces of nature
have given life and continue to bring death to the Bay of Bengal and to the
Indian Ocean more generally. None of these descriptions of nature and of its
winds are conceivable in Grotius’s account. He aspires to stage a whole
unified world, produced and not destroyed by general winds and an infinite
ocean for the good of humankind.
Crossing the Bay of Bengal centers on the movements of humans, ideas,
and goods across the Bay, including those of the Portuguese, the British, and
the Dutch, but also those of voyagers, merchants, migrant laborers, scholars,
and refugees. European advance in Asian waters, he explains, was parasitic on
preexisting Asian commercial and communal networks. But the militarized
European trading companies that brought new ideas of property and posses-
sion “effected a sea of change in sovereignty.”35 Nevertheless, the history of the
Bay of Bengal was not a history of breaks in time. The ancient worlds of the
Bay of Bengal, of the movements of merchants and workers and slaves,
remained alive, if hidden: “They influenced what followed, and their traces
survive.” Loss often generated return as “migration revived ancient paths
across the Bay of Bengal” and “arrival became a kind of return.”36 Only the
Second World War shattered that world when the Bay closed, interrupting
centuries of crossing. The question became, “Who belonged where now,
across waters so many traversed?” Even when the Bay was open again, “it
was land that underpinned the politics of belonging.”37 Yet, that world of the
Bay of Bengal could never be fully destroyed. That is why it is still possible to
picture the Bay of Bengal in the way Amrith invites his readers to do in the
opening pages of the book:
Picture the Bay of Bengal as an expanse of tropical water: still and blue in the
calm of the January winter, or raging and turbid with silt at the peak of the
summer rains. Picture it in two dimensions on a map overlaid with a web of
fishing channels and telegraph cables and inscribed with lines of distance.
Now imagine, the sea as a mental map: as a family tree of cousins, uncles,
sisters, sons, connected by letters and journeys and stories. Think of it as a
debt, bound by advances and loans and obligations.38
To think of the Bay of Bengal as a debt is to take note of the relationships that
it makes possible, of being-in-common and in-conflict. But it is also to
formulate the Bay of Bengal as a site of reciprocity and responsibility,
including in relation to climate refugees with which Amrith concludes his
book. The Bay of Bengal for Amrith, unlike the ocean for Grotius, is not an
34 35 36 37 38
Ibid., at 13. Ibid., at 61. Ibid., at 88. Ibid., at 187. Ibid., at 8.
92 Samera Esmeir
abstract surface that connects the earth and makes the world legible, but
comprises waters layered by politics and nature, human and nonhuman
forces, catastrophe and hospitality. Still, the Second World War and the
consolidation of nation-states around the Bay of Bengal might have reduced
it to a surface that connects them: “The Bay of Bengal that had cohered over
centuries – a world of competing empires and overlapping diasporas – gave a
way to a sea of nations.” Or in other words, Grotius and his “law of nations”
made a return.
Sukarno’s observations about the sea appear to be not only anticolonial, but
also confined to the framework of the colonial, of the sea of nations. It would
take a rethinking of the sea outside this framework to enact other political
possibilities. The Bandung Final Communiqué had a lot to say about trade
and nothing about the sea; its absence is striking. Immigrant laborers or other
kind of crossers were also absent from the Final Communiqué. In an oceanic
area threatened by “furies of nature,” the Communiqué is of less help, unless
Bandung’s spirit of cooperation, and therefore of hospitality, is emphasized
over the agency of nations and their states.
ancient roots alive

It is said that Bandung introduced a new political spirit to the world, new
possibilities for inhabiting it, in particular with regards to promoting decol-
onization and equal sovereignty, economic and political. The participant
Asian and African states articulated ways by which their peoples could
“achieve fuller economic, cultural and economic cooperation”; promoted
“world peace”; deplored the evils arising from war, colonialism, and forms of
“subjugation, domination, and exploitation”; and supported the cause of
freedom, self-determination, and independence for all people. South Africa,
Algeria, Morocco, Tunisia, and Palestine were specifically mentioned in this
regard.39 Yet, feelings of ambivalence persist. It is impossible to miss the
gap between the ideals articulated in the conference and the hostility with
which participant states related to each other within a few years following
Bandung.40 But in this regard, its ideals were no different from other ideals
39
“Final Communiqué of the Asian-African conference of Bandung (24 April 1955),” Asia-Africa
Speak from Bandung, at pp. 161–169.
40
Antonia Finnane, “Bandung as History,” in Bandung 1955: Little Histories, Antonia Finnane
and Derek McDougal (eds.) (Victoria: Monash University Press, 2010), p. 1. See also Robert
Vitalis, “The Midnight Ride of Kwame Nkrumah and other Fables of Bandung (Ban-doong)”
(2013) 4 Humanity 261.
Bandung 93
that claim their ideality by separating themselves from material forces. And in
some sense, and as Roland Burke argues, “[t]he speeches at the Bandung
marked out many of the basic contours that came to define key UN human
rights battles, such as that on self-determination.”41 Bandung ideals might
therefore be understood as attempts to materialize those of international
law – which included in principle sovereign equality, self-determination,
and decolonization – through the collective power of Africa and Asia, in
continents deprived of these ideals.
Yet what remains of Bandung are not its anticolonial ideals, and the
question is not merely about their materialization. Anticolonial visions, at
least in relation to the sea, resisted colonialism while being conditioned by it.
Centuries of colonial destruction of the world and its visions could not be
immediately undone.
What remains of the spirit of Bandung is the act of gathering, of the
initiation of collective power and agency. This power could not and did not
transcend the grammar of the sovereign state, but manifested the possibility of
another collectivity or being-in-common, bringing back forms of life that were
once possible, in the Indian Ocean and on the ship. In 2015, the Mediterra-
nean was amassing more dead refugees and migrants in its collective grave-
yard. In the depths of the Mediterranean, perhaps in proximity of the Area that
could be designated as Commons, lie thousands of new corpses of people who
once lived on the shores of the Mediterranean or away from it, seeking shelter
in Europe. Rejected and banned by sovereign states, they embark on a journey
in the dangerous sea. Their modest journey seeks not to stage the world, or to
capture other lands and lives, but to find a life in their midst. Their journey,
notwithstanding its deadly outcome, is a testament to the possibilities that the
sea continues to present as a site of crossing, struggles, solidarity, and
some hope.
That this possibility of an alternative collectivity was first modeled at
Bandung on the logic of sovereignty (only nation-states participated as delega-
tions, and members of still colonized countries were incorporated in state
delegations)42 and later defeated by the logic of sovereignty should not be
surprising. However, reading this possibility solely in conversation with the
logic of sovereignty risks repeating Sukarno’s mistake. By depicting the sea and
the world from the viewpoint of anticolonialism, he dismembered another
vision of the sea and the world that once belonged to his ancestors. Similarly,
41
Roland Burke, Decolonization and the Evolution of International Human Rights (Philadelphia:
University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010), p. 13.
42
For example, the Palestinian delegate joined the Syrian delegation.
94 Samera Esmeir
by reading the Bandung being-in-common only in tension with sovereignty,

being-in-common is also destined to be lost. Perhaps, then, and along with
Amrith, we can think of the different Asian and African representatives arriving
in Bandung as reviving ancient paths of crossing. As they follow in the
footsteps of the ancestors of some of them, they make up a family tree
connected by journeys, struggles, and aspirations.
5
Nationalism, Imperialism, and Bandung

Nineteenth-Century Japan as a Prelude
mohammad shahabuddin
introduction
Japan has a unique relationship with imperialism. As a victim of Western
imperialism, the nation was forced to sign unequal treaties and open its ports
in the middle of the nineteenth century. But Japan also advanced its own
imperial projects toward its neighbors in East and Southeast Asia much
earlier than the outbreak of the Second World War. However, following a
humiliating defeat in the war and ensuing U.S. occupation, Japanese popu-
lar history began to depict the country as a victim of the war, and thereby
downplayed its imperial past. Interestingly, after the war in a number of
Southeast Asian countries – including Vietnam, Indonesia, and Malaysia –
Japanese soldiers helped local people in their ongoing fight against Western
colonial powers.1
Japanese involvement in such nationalist movements offered contemporary
Japanese intellectuals an opportunity to reinvent Japanese foreign policy
across Asia in anti-imperial terms. Given Japan’s ambivalent relationship with
imperialism, its participation at the Bandung Conference was stained by
suspicion, for Bandung developed global principles against imperialism in
all forms. One author described Japan’s presence as “the cat go[ing] to the
mice’s convention.”2
Thus, while Japanese rulers and scholars had a complicated relationship
with imperial ideas and policies, they also had a long-standing agenda against
the particular threat of Western imperialism. Japan’s involvement in Bandung
1
Kristine Dennehy, “Overcoming Colonialism at Bandung, 1955” in Sven Saaler and J. Victor
Koschmann (eds.), Pan-Asianism in Modern Japanese History: Colonialism, Regionalism, and
Border (London: Routledge, 2007), p. 213, pp. 217–222.
2
Kweku Ampiah, “Japan at the Bandung Conference: ‘The Cat Goes to the Mice’s
Convention’” (1995) 7 Japan Forum 15.
95
96 Mohammad Shahabuddin
appears hypocritical or ambiguous solely in the light of the agenda against all
forms of imperialism. If we also focus on Bandung’s nationalist agenda,
expressed in the legal terms of sovereignty, Japan’s involvement appears more
consistent. At Bandung, sovereignty was primarily characterized as a necessary
bulwark against imperialism and a precondition for world peace among
nations.3 This chapter focuses on the period during the nineteenth century
when Japanese intellectuals encouraged nationalist ideas as a means of
defending Japan’s independence in the face of Western imperialism. Against
this backdrop, Japan’s intellectual history was consistent with Bandung’s
notions of sovereignty. Indeed, Japan’s involvement in Bandung highlights
how sovereignty often has a close yet contradictory relationship with
imperialism.
This relationship is elucidated in the works of two iconic figures of
nineteenth-century Japan: Seishisai (Yasushi) Aizawa (1781–1863), an emi-
nent Japanese Confucian scholar; and Yukichi Fukuzawa (1835–1901), a
prominent Meiji architect of modernization. While the two men had distinct
concepts of national spirit and theories regarding the reinvention of Japan,
they shared an urge to save Japan from Western imperial interventions. Both
scholars also turned to nationalism to mitigate this imperial threat and
ultimately to save Japan from colonization. Aizawa published New Theses4
in 1825 mainly as a policy work for the Tokugawa Feudal System (Bakufu) of
Japan, the de facto sovereign. His purpose was to endorse the Tokugawa
policy of “expelling all Westerners” (joi) and to prescribe a long-term strategy
to defend Japan from the imminent threat of Western imperialism. Aizawa
believed Tokugawa Shogun should proactively nurture a national spirit
(kokutai) that would unify people, land, and the ruler. On the other hand,
Fukuzawa, in An Outline of the Theory of Civilization,5 written in 1875,
relied on the essence of Western civilization, rather than the external exhib-
ition of materialism, as a source of kokutai. Neither scholar conceptualized
sovereignty as a reflection of popular will. Rather, they used the idea as a
means to transform the people in a way that strengthened Japan’s position
against Western imperialism.
3
The Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Republic of Indonesia (ed.), “Final Communiqué of the
Asian-African conference of Bandung (24 April 1955),” Asia-Africa Speak from Bandung.
4
Seishisai Aizawa, New Theses (1825), in Bob Tadashi Wakabayashi, Anti-Foreignism and
Western Learning in Early-Modern Japan (Cambridge, MA: Council on East Asian Studies,
Harvard University Press, 1986), p. 147.
5
Yukichi Fukuzawa, An Outline of a Theory of Civilization (1875), David A. Dilworth and
G. Cameron Hurst III (trans.) (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008).
Nationalism, Imperialism, and Bandung 97
imperialism and aizawa’s search for national spirit

The Bakufu policy of expelling foreigners by force emerged in its final form
with the Expulsion Edict of 1825, which was triggered by the fear of Western-
ers preaching Christianity. The Expulsion Edict in part reads: “All southern
barbarians and westerners . . . worship Christianity, that wicked cult prohibited
in our land. Henceforth, whenever a foreign ship is sighted approaching any
point on our coast, all persons on hand should fire on and drive it off.”6
Aizawa had no problem endorsing the expulsion policy of the Bakufu; he
hated Westerners as well as Christianity. He conceived of joi as sweeping away
or eradicating what is culturally barbarian and building barriers between
Japanese commoners and foreigners.7 To appreciate such a policy, it is
necessary to understand the way Aizawa and others perceived the Western
imperial threat to Japan.
Aizawa believed that Western barbarian nations, with their common reli-
gious belief in Christianity and naval strength, were emerging as serious
threats to Japan’s independence. Among the Western powers, Aizawa was
most concerned about Russia and its increasing imperial claims over the
region, as Russia shared borders with Japan in the northwest.8 Other great
naval powers of the West – England, France, and Spain – also practiced
Christianity, and it seemed inevitable that they would get together to conspire
against Japan and ultimately divide up the world among themselves.9
Aizawa perceived such threats in a historical continuum, wherein Chris-
tianity remained a common element of imperialism.10 Aizawa believed West-
ern invaders used Christianity and trade as a strategy for taking over foreign
territories.11 Even if Christianity is strictly outlawed by the Bakufu, he argues,
“[t]he natural feelings of the people are such that they cannot but covet
personal gain and hold the spirits in awe. Should someone capture their
hearts by furtively appealing to such natural feelings, prohibition is impossible,
no matter how harsh our penalties may be.”12 He felt that the solution must go
much beyond mere legal provisions banning Christianity or harsh enforce-
ment of such provisions; he saw the solution in the very transformation of
these untrustworthy commoners by generating a sense of national unification,
or kokutai.
Aizawa conceived of kokutai as the popular unity and allegiance that is
essential to make a people into a nation. This meaning of kokutai,
6 7 8
Wakabayashi, Anti-Foreignism, p. 60. Ibid., p. 54. Aizawa, New Theses, p. 196.
9 10 11
Ibid., pp. 198–199. Ibid., p. 200. Wakabayashi, Anti-Foreignism, p. 93.
12
Aizawa, New Theses, p. 212.
Wakabayashi argues, constituted a significant departure from customary

usage. Tokugawa and Ch’ing writers used the term kokutai or kuo t’i to mean
“the nation’s honour” or “dynastic prestige.” In New Theses, Aizawa’s use
especially connoted “the unity of religion and government,” a ruler used to
create spiritual unity and integration among his subjects and thereby trans-
form a people into a nation.13 Aizawa depicted Christianity as a manipulative
tool in the hands of Westerners to misguide the ignorant commoners in other
countries. With his limited knowledge about the West, he also believed that
the Western rulers achieved popular unity and integration in their own
countries through the political use of Christianity.14 Aizawa’s conception
of kokutai and its central role in unifying the nation largely came out of a
“desire to achieve the same kind of popular unity in Japan that he believed
Christianity and Christian-inspired government had created in western
nations.”15
Yet, this imitation of the West was not driven by any appreciation of the
core values of Christianity. Instead, Aizawa traced the roots of unifying
Heaven, land, and people in ancient Japanese practices. He felt that people
in general, whom he called “nefarious commoners,” had nothing to rely on
spiritually except their allegiance to Buddhism or shamanism, or committing
themselves to some perverse forms of Confucianism or belletristic foolish-
ness. They were thus more likely to be attracted to harmful alien things, such
as Christianity, in the absence of internal spirituality.16 Japan feared losing its
independence mainly because of the ignorance of the commoners, so
Aizawa endeavored to shed light on the way a glorious Japanese past could
be revived.
Aizawa, a devout Confucian, believed loyalty of the subject to the ruler is
the greatest moral precept, and affection between the parent and the child is
the ultimate form of blessing. Through various rituals of the past, such as
ceremonial offering of new harvest to the ancestors and of the Emperor
distributing cloth offerings to shrines throughout the land, Aizawa argues that
filial devotion was passed from generation to generation without causing the
slightest change in filial sentiment. In this sense, loyalty and filial devotion had
always been one and the same, in that “filial devotion is transformed into
loyalty to ruler, and loyalty is demonstrated by respecting the wishes of
forbears.”17 And this is how the rulers influenced the people without resorting
to injunctions or exhortations. Aizawa saw this as the indivisibility of politics
and religion, in that religious rituals are a means of political rule, and political
13 14 15
Wakabayashi, Anti-Foreignism, p. 13. Ibid., p. 69. Ibid.
16 17
Aizawa, New Theses, p. 169. Ibid., p. 158.
rule is identical to ethical inculcation. Thus, when the people were taught
simply to revere the Sun-goddess Amaterasu and Her Divine Imperial Line,
their allegiances were undivided, and led to both spiritual unity among the
people and the union of Heaven and men.18
Although Aizawa prioritized a state religion as an essence of the nation, he
emphasized two additional elements of kokutai: strong, ground-rooted mili-
tary, and solemnization of rice economy. In antiquity, war was a divine affair,
and Emperors made no decisions regarding war or peace without divine
sanction. People stored their weapons in local shrines, and prayed to the gods
in times of war. Through this divine medium, the people were spiritually
unified, and a sacred integration between gods and men was possible.19
Similarly, rice derived from the original seeds that Amaterasu bestowed on
the ancestors nurtured Japanese people for generations. Knowing that the
grain derived from Amaterasu’s original rice seeds, everyone in the realm not
only labored to bring forth the richest possible harvest, but their hearts were
also one with Heaven and Earth, and thus formed a unity.20
In short, with these three core elements of kokutai – state religion, ground-
rooted military, and solemnization of rice economy – Aizawa attempted to
engender unity between the Divine and the people through moderating the
Imperial House via propagation of a purpose-built religion and a series of
social ceremonies. He believed that only through such rituals would the
prevalent lack of spirituality, which in his view was a breeding ground for evil
plots of Christianity, be addressed and would commoners become aware of
their embedded tie with the Divine Land of Amaterasu once again. Given that
the universe was not vast enough to contain both the Middle Kingdom and
the barbarians, Aizawa concluded, “[u]nless their barbarous way is blotted
out, the Way of Amaterasu and our Sage Emperors remains unelucidated.”21
In this sense, Aizawa’s concept of the Japanese nation – constructed by the
unification of Heaven, land, and people, and achieved through kokutai – was
essential.
Aizawa’s New Theses lived much beyond his time: the late nineteenth
century put into practice some of his ideas regarding the central role of
religion as a kokutai in Meiji policy.22 However, Tokugawa rulers changed
their approach to foreigners in the face of Commodore Perry’s warships, and
Japan realized it could not survive the Western invasion if it did not open up
18 19 20 21
Ibid. Ibid., p. 174. Ibid., p. 190. Ibid., p. 262.
22
Wakabayashi notes that the drafters of Imperial Rescript on Education issued in 1890 borrowed
this sentence from the section entitled, “What Is Essential to a Nation” (Kokutai) in Aizawa’s
New Theses: “All the people of the realm be of one heart and mind.” Ibid.
ports for foreign trade.23 Aizawa himself discarded the rhetoric of expulsion of
foreigners after the late 1850s. As a matter of fact, Japan not only engaged in
Western trade and diplomacy but also nearly totally transformed state and
society after the Meiji Restoration in 1868. During this decisive moment of
Japanese history, new challenges sprang up, and the notion of kokutai took on
different meanings.
national spirit in fukuzawa’s theory of civilization

Yukichi Fukuzawa, one of the finest intellectuals and social thinkers to
emerge from modern Japan, was a harsh critic of the Tokugawa feudal system
that preceded the Meiji restoration and prevailed for more than two centuries.
Fukuzawa believed that “the future direction of the new Japan would be
determined by how the Japanese understood Western civilization, and the
means by which they maintained balance while adopting from it.”24 This
belief was reinforced by his experience of traveling to Europe and the United
States before the Meiji Restoration. This experience not only exposed him to
Western society, ways of life, and the vitality and superior development of its
civilization but also to the miserable conditions of Western colonies, such as
India, through which he passed. He saw the dangerous scenario and the fate
that awaited any country that lost its independence. This knowledge, as well as
the apprehension that Japan might fall victim, eventually provided a basis for
An Outline of a Theory of Civilization.25
In his preface, Fukuzawa notes that only since the arrival of Americans in
1853 had the Japanese begun to know the West.26 He posited that this
interaction with foreigners had been the most powerful single set of events
to shake people’s minds since Confucianism and Buddhism were intro-
duced.27 Fukuzawa wrote An Outline to offer a framework within which this
23
See Hirohiko Otsuka, “Japan’s Early Encounter with the Concept of the ‘Law of Nations,’”
(1969) 13 Japanese Yearbook of International Law at 35–41; W. G. Beasley, Japanese Imperialism
1894–1945 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987), pp. 14–26.
24
Inoki Takenori, “Introduction,” Ry Beville (trans.), in Yukichi Fukuzawa, An Outline of a
Theory of Civilization (1875), David A. Dilworth and G. Cameron Hurst III (trans.) (New York:
Columbia University Press, 2008), p. xiii.
25
Ibid., p. xv. See also Yukichi Fukuzawa, The Autobiography of Yukichi Fukuzawa, Eiichi
Kiyooka (trans.) (New York: Columbia University Press, 1966), pp. 104–140.
26
Fukuzawa, An Outline, p. 1.
27
For details of introduction of Confucianism and Buddhism in Japan, see George Tanabe,
Religions of Japan in Practice (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999); Richard Bowring,
The Religious Traditions of Japan, 500–1600 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005),
pp. 12–35.
unprecedented impact of the outside world could be managed in the best

national interest. Fukuzawa’s theory of civilization was an effort to localize the
universal notion of “civilization” within an instrumental framework. He set
the essence of Western civilization as the goal of Japanese progress, aiming to
nurture the national spirit of the Japanese people and thereby preserve their
national independence in the face of Western imperialism.
Fukuzawa depicts civilization as concerning the development of the
human spirit and the spiritual development of the people of a nation as a
whole.28 Instead of focusing on the increase of comfort and luxuries in daily
necessities, he understood civilization as a way of refining knowledge and
cultivating virtue in order to elevate human life to a higher plane.29 In other
words, because knowledge and virtue produce well-being and refinement,
“civilization ultimately means the progress of man’s knowledge and virtue.”30
Fukuzawa’s understanding of knowledge and virtue as the essence of
civilization was essentially situated in the notion of evolutionary progress. In
line with liberal social Darwinist proposition, although without any specific
mention of it, he asserts that human societies pass through different stages,
referred to as the “ages of civilization.”31 The first stage is primitivity: although
men form communal groups to ensure basic life needs, they are unable to be
masters of their own situations before the forces of nature. This is followed by
the stage wherein men build houses, form communities, meet needs for daily
necessities, and create the outward semblance of a state. Fukuzawa sees this as
a semi-developed stage that falls short of civilization in the full sense. Finally,
there is the stage in which “men subsume the things of the universe within a
general structure, but the structure does not bind them. Their spirits enjoy free
play and are not credulous of old customs. . . . They cultivate their own virtue
and refine their own knowledge.”32 According to Fukuzawa, this modern
civilization is a leap far beyond the primitive or semi-developed stages.
Being thus convinced of the evolutionary process of civilization, and also
the European achievement of reaching the highest level that human intelli-
gence has been able to attain hitherto, he concludes, “[I]n all countries of the
world, be they primitive or semi-developed, those who are to give thought to
their country’s progress in civilization must necessarily take European civiliza-
tion as the criterion in making arguments, and must weigh the pros and cons
of the problem in the light of it.”33 In short, as the heading of a chapter of his
book explicates, Western civilization is the goal of Japanese progress.
28 29 30 31
Fukuzawa, An Outline, p. 1. Ibid., p. 45. Ibid., p. 48. Ibid., p. 18.
32 33
Ibid., pp. 18–9. Ibid., p. 20.
However, Fukuzawa advocated turning to Europe in order to internalize

the spirit of Western civilization, or the spiritual makeup that “permeates the
entire life-stream of a people and is manifest on a wide scale in the life of the
nation.”34 Fukuzawa asserted that only when this national spirit was revolu-
tionized would “the foundations of civilization will be laid, and the outward
forms of material civilization will follow in accord with a natural process
without special effort.”35
In a letter written in the fall of 1874, a year before the publication of An
Outline, Fukuzawa wrote, “My sole aim . . . is the preservation of our national
independence.”36 By preserving national independence he meant maintain-
ing “national polity,” a fundamental concept in his theory that was dragged
into controversy by the widely circulated suspicion that civilization would
jeopardize Japanese polity. By “national polity” he meant what was called a
“nationality” in Western countries. He distinguished between “national
polity,” “blood lineage,” and “political legitimation,” which refers to the
ultimate source of political authority recognized by the people. Although
political legitimation varies with world conditions and the times, according
to Fukuzawa, such change does not cause a loss of national polity as long as
the political life of the country is internal to that country.37 On the other hand,
while it is not difficult to preserve an unbroken line of monarchy, the essence
of a nation is the preservation of its national polity, depending on which both
political legitimation and blood lineage flourish or flounder.38 Therefore, he
concluded:
Now the only duty of the Japanese at present is to preserve Japan’s national
polity. For to preserve national polity will be to preserve national sovereignty.
And in order to preserve national sovereignty the intellectual powers of the
people must be elevated. There are many factors involved in this, but the first
order of business in development of our intellectual power lies in sweeping
away credulity to past customs and adopting the spirit of Western
civilization.39
Fukuzawa argued that it is the course of nature for advanced countries to

control the less advanced, and that Japan was likely to fall vulnerable given its
backwardness compared to Western civilization.40 Therefore, in the face of
this backwardness-driven threat to national polity, maintaining Japan’s inde-
pendence was his foremost concern.41 Fukuzawa not only contended the
34
Ibid., p. 22. 35
Ibid., p. 24. 36
Takenori, “Introduction,” p. xix.
37 38 39
Fukuzawa, An Outline, p. 33. Ibid., pp. 35–36. Ibid., pp. 36–37.
40 41
Ibid., p. 227. Ibid., p. 225.
popular suspicion about Western civilization by underscoring its necessity for

preserving the national polity but also contextualized his proposition for
internalizing the essence of Western civilization within an instrumental
framework.
This reflects his perception of realism as a crucial element of international
affairs. He felt that while people of one nation, in their private relationships,
might be able to befriend those of other countries, in international relations
only two things count: in times of peace, trade on goods and competition over
profit; in times of war, take up arms and kill each other.42 In the eyes of a
patriot, therefore, there is a clear distinction between the self and the other,
and although they do not necessarily intend harm to other countries, they
must prioritize their own country’s interest. According to Fukuzawa, “it is the
biased, partisan spirit that divides the globe into smaller sections and estab-
lishes within each section political factions, then calculates what benefits
these political factions gain,” and therefore, “it is clear that the ethic of
impartial and universal brotherhood is not compatible with the ethic of
patriotism and establishment of national independence.”43
Fukuzawa’s response to the proponents of universal justice thus followed:
They should first set their goal to abolish national governments throughout
the world in the same way Japan abolished the old han system.44 But as long as
countries set up national governments, “there can be no way to eliminate their
self-interests. If there is no way to eliminate their self-interests, then we too
must have our self-interests in any contacts with them.”45 As Harry Parkes, who
worked as the British Consul-General in Japan for eighteen years starting in
1865, noted, “To the Meiji mind, international relations in the second half of
the nineteenth century were based on a predatory system of might . . . [I]-
nternational law was followed only insofar as it benefited a nation to do so and
the strong ignored the law when it was to their advantage.”46
With this idea of nationally situated partisan spirit, Fukuzawa refused to be
content with the external aspects of Western civilization. Even if Japan
attained excellence in that pursuit, it was not going to be a Japanese civiliza-
tion.47 “Shall we leave political institutions, learning, and so forth, entirely up
to the civilized Europeans, become their slaves and puppets, and then, as long
42 43
Ibid., p. 234. Ibid., p. 235.
44
Han is a traditional feudal domain. The han system was abolished by the Meiji government in
1871 to establish central control over all of Japan.
45
46
Quoted in Olive Checkland, Britain’s Encounter with Meiji Japan, 1868–1912 (London:
Macmillan Press Limited, 1989), p. 17.
47
as the land itself is unaffected, become an independent civilization a hundred

times better than we are now? How ridiculous can one get?”48
Yet, Fukuzawa did not see the solution as indiscriminate expulsion of
foreigners, as some joi proponents advocated, or in enhancing military
strength of the nation. Like these concerned scholars, he had no doubt that
Japan was passing through a moment of crisis, and that foreign relations was
an area where the Japanese should be ready to sacrifice everything, even
their lives. However, the right path to that end remained advancing toward
civilization with a well-established goal of preserving independence: “The
only reason for making the people in our country today advance toward
civilization is to preserve our country’s independence. Therefore, our coun-
try’s independence is the goal, and our people’s civilization is the way to
that goal.”49
Fukuzawa’s theory thus recycles and localizes the universal notion of
civilization, relying on the essence of Western civilization as a model, and
with the aim of nurturing a national spirit among the Japanese. He advocated
learning from Western civilization and setting it as the goal for Japanese
progress, but only within an instrumental framework of partisan, biased
national interest without attributing any inherent value to such pursuit. He
refers to the ages of progress, and hails the magnificent achievements that
Western civilization had attained. Yet for him such achievements are tem-
poral rather than teleological; they rationalize why the European civilization
should be set as a goal at that moment, but not beyond that. He believed Japan
had to transcend European civilization. His theory of civilization is uniquely
localized. Fukuzawa’s influence lived beyond his time; in 2008, one scholar
claimed that An Outline – along with Fukuzawa’s An Encouragement of
Learning, which was written around the same time – is a classic that offers a
clear-cut indication of the path Japan should take in foreign relations while
maintaining its independence.50
conclusion
To mitigate the Western imperial threat to Japan’s sovereignty and ultimately
to save Japan from colonization, both Aizawa and Fukuzawa sought the
solution in national spirit. But understanding the nationalist discourse in
nineteenth-century Japan also explains the way Japan adopted imperialism
itself as a normative policy goal, and why it understood this as a requirement
48
Ibid. 49
Ibid., p. 254. 50
Takenori, “Introduction,” p. xv.
for civilization during the interwar period. As a part of its modernization in the
late nineteenth century, Japan pursued the policy of Datsu A-ron, or severing
relations with uncivilized Asia and looking westward. But when League of
Nations delegates did not adopt the racial equality clause in the League
Covenant, Japan realized that despite its status as a great power in the Paris
Peace Conference, there were racial hierarchies among great powers, and
Japan was not considered an equal.51 Following the Manchurian incidents,
when Japan withdrew itself from the League in 1933, an inclination toward a
de-Westernization and eventually an anti-Western policy on the one hand and
construction of an image of Japan as the leader and emancipator in Asia on
the other appeared central to Japan’s political and military thinking, which
was finally materialized in the policy of “Greater East Asian Co-Prosperity
Sphere.”52
However, this notion of co-prosperity was loaded with Japan’s imperial
ambition. Given that Southeast Asia was enormously rich in unexploited
resources and politically subordinate to Western rule, Japan believed that as
a superior Asian fellow nation it had the right to acquire these resources and
use them to create a new order in Asia, which ultimately would overthrow the
Western colonial system in the region.53 By the first half of 1942, all of South-
east Asia had come under Japanese rule. Although Japan acknowledged
Burma (now Myanmar) and the Philippines as independent states, mainly
for strategic reasons, the Japanese imperial administration decided that Indo-
nesia and Malaya should be under permanent control as sources of important
human and natural resources.54 To perpetuate its control over the latter,
Japanese official policy relied on cultural conditions of the natives, a practice
very much in line with Western imperialism. In the words of Sato Kenryo,
then–Chief of Military Affairs Bureau and later a convict of the Tokyo War
Crimes Tribunal, “[The Indonesians] are of a low cultural standard and their
economy is weak. Therefore, there is no possibility of a successful future if we
51
See generally Naoko Shimazu, Japan, Race and Equality: The Racial Equality Proposal of 1919
(London: Routledge, 2009).
52
Goto Ken’ichi, “Indonesia under the ‘Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere,’” Minako Sakai
and Tessa Morris-Suzuki (trans.) in Donald Denoon et al. (eds.), Multicultural Japan:
Palaeolithic to Postmodern (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), p. 160, pp. 162–163.
53
Ibid., p. 162.
54
See “Outlines for the Guidance of Political Strategy in Greater East Asia” (May 30, 1943), cited
in Ken’ichi, “Indonesia under the ‘Greater East Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere,’” p. 164. As
Ken’ichi claims, Japan’s decision to fight against the United States, on which Japan depended
for 60 percent of its oil imports, presupposed that oil could be obtained from Indonesia. See
ibid., p. 163.
grant independence to them. If independence is given to an unqualified

country, Japan will inevitably become involved in its internal affairs.”55
Japan convened the Greater East Asia Conference, attended by representa-
tives from six so-called independent Asian countries,56 in November 1943 to
ensure enhanced support from these countries in the face of worsening war
situations. Indonesia was not invited to attend, even though three important
national leaders of Indonesia, including Sukarno, were visiting Japan at the
time.57 It is therefore no surprise that twelve years later, in April 1955, when
Sukarno as the first Indonesian president convened the Afro-Asian Conference
in Bandung, he made no reference to the Great East Asia Conference of 1943,
although he referred to the “Anti-Imperialist, Anti-Colonialist League” Con-
ference held in Brussels in 1927 as the precedent for Bandung.58
However, Bandung was crucial for Japan because of a number of reasons. It
offered Japan yet another opportunity to engage with its Southeast Asian
neighbors that had been subject to Japanese imperial rule only decades
earlier. Japan saw this as an opportunity to side with the anti-imperial position
of the Conference participants against Western influence in Indonesia and
Indochina, which would also obscure its own imperial past.59 Japanese dele-
gates Takashi Tatsunosuke and Wajima Eiji used this opportunity to negotiate
with their counterparts from the Philippines and Indonesia, respectively,
regarding reparations for wartime atrocities.60 As Shigemumitsu Mamoru,
foreign minister during Bandung and the Greater East Asia Conference of
1943, stated before the Japanese Diet, Bandung Conference had “great signifi-
cance since the purpose is to enhance mutual understanding and amicable
relations in the area.”61
Yet, the urge to reunite Asia was not a mere product of Japan’s colonial
guilt. Dennehy claims that postwar Japanese progressives were also attracted to
notions of Pan-Asianism, and the appeal of Bandung was closely tied to their
support for ongoing struggles for national liberation in Asia.62 Also, even after
Japan regained its full sovereignty after the U.S.-led occupation (only three
55
Sato Kenryo, daito-a senso kaikoroku (Tokyo: Tokuma Shoten, 1966), p. 317, cited in Ken’ichi,
“Indonesia under the ‘Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere,’” p. 164.
56
Japan, Manchukuo, Thailand, China, the Philippines, and Burma participated in the
Conference. Subhash Chandra Bose, the Premier of the Free India Provisional Government,
also attended as an observer.
57
Ken’ichi, “Indonesia under the ‘Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere,’” p. 164.
58
Ibid., p. 168. 59
Dennehy, “Overcoming Colonialism at Bandung,” pp. 213, 215.
60
Ibid., p. 215.
61
Ken’ichi, “Indonesia under the ‘Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere,’” p. 168.
62
Dennehy, “Overcoming Colonialism at Bandung,” p. 215.
years before Bandung), a large American military presence continued to shape

Japan’s politics vis-à-vis its position in the postwar world order. Japanese
politicians, bureaucrats, and intellectuals used this opportunity of engaging
with Bandung nations to “promote a vision of Japan’s future beyond the
dominant force of American influence.”63 One of the results of Bandung
was a new kind of Pan-Asianism in which countries were now sovereign
equals.64 While Bandung may have helped states stave off formal imperialism,
it also set the conditions for Japan to use new techniques to establish power
and influence in the region. Soon after the Conference, countries across
Southeast Asia looked to Japan as a model for economic development and
quickly came under the influence of the Japanese economy. This raises the
question of whether this was a new form of imperialism that sovereign states
imposed via economic ideas and international finance. In this sense, Bandung
remains a symbol of Japan’s continued ambiguous relationship with imperial
practices and principles.
63 64
Ibid., p. 213. Ibid.
6
Ghostly Visitations
“Questioning Heirs” and the Tragic Tasks of Narrating
Bandung Futures
adil hasan khan
“Thou comest in such a questionable shape That I will speak to thee.”

Hamlet, Act 1, Scene 4
introduction
We are said to be living through times in which existing institutions and
structures are perpetually beset by crisis, yet somehow manage to persist
because of a purported failure to imagine alternatives.1 To ask about Bandung
futures might strike some as being too late, for Bandung revivalism is out of
fashion. Others may find it impossible, because neoliberalism, while waning,
is still the only institutional game in town.
Perhaps the most serious challenge to such a contretemps exercise concerns
the catastrophic itself. More specifically, how can we begin to contemplate
any Bandung futures given the undeniable catastrophes it has encountered in
the past? Surely the way out of our current state cannot lie in a project that is
said to have perished under its own disasters.
In the wake of these doubts and concerns, this chapter explores how
international lawyers can narrate Bandung – its events, legacies, and futures –
today, while also meaningfully reckoning with Bandung catastrophes. It
commences by considering how two dominant narrative forms – satire and
romance – have constructed Bandung and its catastrophes. It then identifies
and explores tragedy, a more critical story form. From these tragic narrations it
discerns a temporal vision in which transmitted legacies continue to be a vital
force in the present. Finally, it examines the conduct of “questioning heirs”
1
See David Scott, Omens of Adversity: Tragedy, Time, Memory, Justice (Durham: Duke
University Press, 2014).
108
Ghostly Visitations 109
and draws out the basic lineaments of the tasks required of heirs in order to
receive these spectral transmissions of Bandung so as to transform the present
and generate Bandung futures.2
bandung and its catastrophes

In much of mainstream scholarship, the histories of Bandung and its catas-
trophes have been narrated in two related but distinct narratives: satire and
romance.
satire
First, there is the narrating of Bandung as a satirical event in which stasis
ultimately prevails.3 Here the event under consideration is constructed as a
non-event, and thus as representing a futile repetition of the previously existing
order rather than a transformational change.4 Catastrophe is not a genuine
reversal, but a confirmation of the true (and constant) nature of the process
under consideration, when false, naïve idealism meets cold, hard reality.
For example, in Samir Amin’s influential rereading of Bandung and the
project it initiated, catastrophic reversals merely confirm what he (and other
Marxist critics) had maintained in their initial prognosis for the project:
2
Interspersed in this chapter are references to three related concepts of the Spirit, specters or
ghosts, and phantasms or phantasmagoria. Drawn from the work of Jacques Derrida, I deploy
Spirit as a metaphysical category connoting the ultimate transcendence of human finitude and
the limits of life in death emerging from a teleological movement through linear time.
Specters, on the other hand, are a key category in Derrida’s deconstruction of this tradition of
metaphysics and possesses a quality of “in-betweenness,” in between the present and the past,
life and death, materiality and potentiality, presence and absence, etc., and thus denying the
fixity of all of these categories by hovering over an uncontrollable border between them.
Finally, phantasms are illusory ideological creations associated with a timeless “eternal death”
and thus not holding any promise or possibility of life as, unlike specters, they cannot cross the
life-death border. See Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of
Mourning and the New International (Peggy Kamuf, trans.) (New York: Routledge, 1994).
3
White identifies the story form of satire as having the following features:
stories cast in the Ironic mode, of which Satire is the fictional form, gain their effects
precisely by frustrating normal expectations about the kind of resolutions provided by
stories cast in other modes . . . It views these hopes, possibilities, and truths ironically, in
the atmosphere generated by the apprehension of the ultimate inadequacy of the visions
of the world dramatically represented by the genres of Romance . . . and Tragedy alike.
(emphasis in the original)
Hayden White, Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth Century Europe
(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1975), pp. 8–10.
4
On the emphasis on stasis in satirical emplotment, see ibid, p. 10.
110 Adil Hasan Khan
The collapse of the Bandung project has surely proved us right in retrospect.
Were we wrong in the years from 1945 to 1955 to believe that the national
bourgeoisie had finished its historic role? Were we wrong to believe that the
project for national capitalist development on the periphery was obsolete and
utopian?5
More recently, Robert Vitalis engages in an assault on what he construes as

romantic myths and hopes that have accumulated around Bandung. Coun-
tering “good stories” that others tell with his own version of myth-busting
history, his account is replete with “true” tales of power struggles between the
leading figures, Byzantine behind-the-scenes intrigue, and competing nation-
building projects at Bandung and its immediate aftermath.6 This account is
not a narrative in which catastrophic reversals follow, but one that refuses to
construct Bandung as an event generating any openings for transforming the
existing world order.7
Similarly, and more contemporaneously to Bandung, G. H. Jansen’s
account is littered with attempts to reveal the chastisement of Bandung’s
phantasmal “illusion” with the “realities” that its failures laid bare.8 In an
illustrative section he unfavorably judges the part played by a fantasized
morality in world politics:
The Afro-Asian movement . . . and still more so the commandments of
Panscheel, all self-consciously and deliberately produced standards of judge-
ment and principles of political conduct. Yet, applying these very criteria to
the policies and conduct of their creators in Afro-Asia, one sees that the Afro-
Asians have failed . . . to meet the test of truth and courage.9
Satirical narrative constructs the identity of the narrator as a wizened old

realist who has been cured of any idealist illusions associated with an “exuber-
ant youth.”10 He is now engaged with curing others who are not as mature.
Catastrophe is constructed as the moment when the fog of illusion clears to
5
Samir Amin, Re-Reading the Postwar Period: An Intellectual Itinerary (Michael Wolfers, trans.)
(New York: Monthly Review Press, 1994), p. 134.
6
White notes that this trope of freeing “history from myth” by way of producing a pure and
objective history – and in doing so eliding its own poetic underpinning – is a trait of satirical
emplotment in historical writing. See White, Metahistory, p. 233.
7
See Robert Vitalis, “The Midnight Ride of Kwame Nkrumah and Other Fables of Bandung
(Ban-doong)” Humanity 4, 261, 274.
8
G. H. Jansen, Afro-Asia and Non-Alignment (London: Faber and Faber, 1966).
9
Ibid., p. 17. In another section he passes the following judgment on the entire Afro-Asian
movement and nonalignment faced by catastrophes: “The hard reality of separate national
interests ultimately asserted itself against all these illusions,” p. 18.
10
Ibid., p. 17.
reveal a reality that has been prevalent all along. This is no reversal of triumph,
but rather a moment when the illusory character of what was all along
mistaken to be a moment of triumph is actually shown to be the persistence
of stasis.
romance
The other dominant narrative resurrects Bandung as “the moment when
everything changed,”11 a time when everything was possible and a smooth
triumphant transition from colonial servitude to postcolonial solidarity and
equality seemed to beckon, very much in the genre that David Scott has
referred to as the “romance of overcoming.”12 This is a genuine moment of
opening and breaking free from the trappings of the past, and there is no
(immediate) darkening of the horizon by way of a looming catastrophe for the
progress narrative of redemption.13 This narrative is particularly prominent
among international lawyers, who construe it as a moment when the inter-
national society inexorably moves toward true universality and leaves behind a
sordid colonial past, as a nascent international community beckons and seems
almost within reach.14
But what is it that moves, that sweeps all before it and carries postcolonial
nation-states along on a tide toward a redemptive telos? To paraphrase Engels,
it would seem as though “old Hegel” were still directing history from the
grave, as we keep encountering an entity referred to as the “Bandung Spirit” in
the literature.15 Amorphous though it might be by its very nature, these
scholars variously identify it in terms of certain clear “ideal principles,” such
as Afro-Asian and later “Third World” alliance, peaceful coexistence, sover-
eign equality of independent nation-states, and mutual cooperation among
states stressing interdependence, noninterference in the domestic affairs of
11
See Sundhya Pahuja, “Decolonization and the Eventness of International Law,” in Fleur Johns
et al. (eds.), Events: The Force of International Law (Oxford: Routledge, 2011), p. 101.
12
Scott states that romantic narrative emplotment specifically in the case of anticolonial histories
“have tended to enact a distinctive rhythm and pacing, a distinctive direction, and to tell stories
of salvation and redemption.” David Scott, Conscripts of Modernity: The Tragedy of Colonial
Enlightenment (Durham: Duke University Press, 2004), p. 8.
13
M. Masango, “The Spirit of Bandung and the Struggle for Freedom in South Africa” (2002)
Verbum et Ecclesia 23, 408.
14
See R. P. Anand (ed.), Asian States and the Development of Universal International Law
(Delhi: Vikas Publications, 1972).
15
Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon (Marx Engels Internet Archive, 1995),
available at www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/download/pdf/18th-Brumaire.pdf (last
accessed November 22, 2014), p. 10.
112 Adil Hasan Khan
states, and respect for territorial integrity of states.16 In terms of the inter-
national order, Bandung was seen as heralding the emergence of a new
subject on the world stage that refused to follow the dictates of Great Powers
and struck out on its own independent path in international affairs.17 What
holds together the diverse set of actors that constitutes this new subject is, of
course, solidarity – a prominent manifestation of the “Bandung Spirit.”18
For romantics, the catastrophe is a reversal of the achievements and vision
of Bandung that arrives subsequent to the moment when all was clear and the
Promised Land seemed so close at hand. Something interrupts, betrays, and
perverts the spirit and its movement, leading from triumph to despair.19 The
causes of the catastrophe are external and subsequent to the moment itself,
and could be seen as lying in external interference or even in the failure of
subsequent generations to live up to the original vision of the Bandung
generation. Foaud Ajami laments a betrayal as he surveys the “chaos” of the
global (dis)order in the wake of the debt crisis, the Iranian revolution, and the
Soviet invasion of Afghanistan:
[T]he erosion of nonalignment . . . and the recent drift toward fundamental-
ism in large stretches of the Third World must be judged as retrogressive . . .
all represent a betrayal of what these societies fought for.20
Crucially, such catastrophe does not entirely eliminate the original pure
“spirit” – that is, the foundational ideals that manage to survive and await
resurrection. This persistent “spirit” of solidarity calls upon future generations
to more concretely achieve it. As Mortimer states,
What did survive, however, was the aspiration to forge a common Third
World consciousness . . . Bandung thus became the symbol of a goal . . .
In the following years, various leaders sought to materialize the spirit of
Bandung in more concrete terms.21
16
Here they draw on the ten principles stated in the Final Communiqué.
17
See Vijay Prashad, The Darker Nations: A People’s History of the Third World (New York: New
Press, 2008), p. 45.
18
Robert A. Mortimer, The Third World Coalition in International Politics (Boulder: Westview
Press, 1984), pp. 2–5.
19
Adeed Dawisha, Arab Nationalism in the Twentieth Century: From Triumph to Despair
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005). In some cases, this subsequent perversion is
almost immediate; see Vijay Prashad, The Darker Nations, p. 50.
20
Fouad Ajami, “The Third World Challenge: The Fate of Nonalignment” (1980/81) Foreign
Affairs Winter, part VII, available at www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/34586/fouad-ajami/the-
third-world-challenge-the-fate-of-nonalignment (last accessed June 30, 2014).
21
Mortimer, The Third World Coalition, p. 9.
In our present, amid the aftermaths of these catastrophes, the romantic narra-
tion of Bandung assumes the form of nostalgic longing for better times with
their pure utopias and impregnable anticolonial unity.22 The only alternative
to paralysis in the present is to somehow re-create those days before our
ignominious fall.
This critical description of the romantic script of Bandung is not an attempt
to simply dismiss the romantic narratives of Bandung because of a purported
failure to comply with some timeless parameters of objective historical accur-
acy. Rather, it aims to critique such tellings of Bandung in the present, when
its particular romantic mythopoesis no longer generate a critical purchase and
have been rendered normalized.23
On the other hand, when historically situated, the critical purchase of such
Bandung romantic narratives can be seen as disrupting colonial efforts to
perpetuate colonial relations of power by playing on colonial notions of the
immaturity and unpreparedness of the colonized to self-govern.24 With its
emphasis on the “coming of age” of its protagonists and their triumph over
ignorance and naivety, such a narrative had a disruptive effect in a historical
context where the colonizer’s “not yet” was still the norm that formally
independent nations faced.25 As a perceptive contemporary commentator
observed,
[A]t Bandung . . . Asia asserted its will to be heard more attentively in the halls
of world diplomacy . . . This assertion of . . . personality tended to beget an
increased self-confidence among many of the delegates, manifesting itself in
a greater determination to share more fully with the West in decisions
affecting the interests of their countries.26
We also get a sense of some of the critical purchase of their invocation of the
triumphant Bandung Spirit if we are attentive to the archaic phantasmagorias
that were projected onto Bandung by a paranoid West. The romance of the
spirit reversed images,
22
See Antoinette Burton, “Epilogue: The Sodalities of Bandung: Toward a Critical 21st-Century
History,” in Christopher J. Lee (ed.), Making a World after Empire: The Bandung Moment and
Its Political Afterlives (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2010), p. 351.
23
Scott, Conscripts of Modernity, pp. 7–8.
24
On this vindicationist function performed by romantic anticolonial discourse more generally,
see ibid.
25
For an illuminating exploration of this “coming of age” narrative, see Joseph R. Slaughter,
Human Rights Inc.: The World Novel, Narrative Form, and International Law (New York:
Fordham University Press, 2007).
26
George McTurnan Kahin, The Asian-African Conference: Bandung, Indonesia, April 1955
114 Adil Hasan Khan
conjured up by the U.S. State Department and British Foreign Office . . .

[that] were haunted . . . by the specter of race. . .27
For the Bandung generation, this spirit was a progressive force representing
life, a triumph of the (re)vitalized, formerly colonized nations over the struc-
tures of death that had afflicted them for so long. Echoing this vitalist
affirmation of their agency, Nehru asserted:
[T]here is yet another spirit of Asia today . . . Asia is no longer passive
today . . . Asia of today is dynamic; Asia is full of life.28
However, those who plotted these romances were afraid of all they perceived
as not belonging to their living present. They were haunted by specters and
incessantly sought to exorcise them, thus fully separating life from death, and
to eventually overcome death and its limits altogether.29 The returning specter
was a detested “evil thing” that spreads wastage and poverty and engages in
ruthless dispossession, all negative effects allied with death that sucks the very
life force from the colonized.30 This was the “specter of colonialism” with
which they battled, armed with the “spirit” and the “inevitable march of
history.”31 However, these exorcisms constantly prolonged the battle to the
iteration of “not yet completely won.”32
While the constitutive role of the specter is incessantly denied, it is their
“common detestation” toward it that is also simultaneously acknowledged as
forming the very basis of this solidarity that binds them, the Bandung Spirit
itself.33
In retrospect, we are able to discern that the more the Bandung generation
tried to separate its spirit from the specters of colonialism and to write a pure
history of Bandung, the more the two kept getting mixed up. They desperately
27
Vitalis, “The Midnight Ride of Kwame,” pp. 269.
28
Excerpt from the Closing Speech by Prime Minister Nehru at the Asian-African Conference,
April 24, 1955, reproduced in Kahin, The Asian-African Conference, p. 73.
29
For the distinct deployment of phantasms and specters, see note 4.
30
Sukarno, “Opening Address: Let a New Asia and Africa Be Born,” reproduced in Kahin, The
Asian-African Conference, p. 43.
31
Ibid. These remain familiar moves for many international lawyers who take their task as being
to help the undead “lie down.” See Martti Koskenniemi, “Legal Cosmopolitanism: Tom
Franck’s Messianic World” (2003) New York University Journal of International Law & Politics
35, 471, 485.
32
Sukarno, “Let a New Asia” p. 44.
33
So Sukarno, even as he proclaims the “birth” of a “new” Asia and Africa, observes: “All of us,
I am certain, are united by more important things than those which superficially divide us. We
are united . . . by a common detestation of colonialism in whatever form it appears.” Ibid.,
p. 43.
did not want to believe in a spectral presence, proclaiming, “there is no such

thing as being half alive,”34 but then obsessively keep conjuring them in order
to exorcise them in the very next moment:
We are often told, “Colonialism is dead.” Let us not be deceived or even
soothed by that. I say to you, colonialism is not yet dead. How can we say it is
dead, so long as vast areas of Asia and Africa are unfree.35
Try as hard as they may, the dividing line between the realm of the living and
that of the dead kept blurring, and it became increasingly difficult to separate
the good and living spirit from the evil, (un)dead specters. The “not yet dead”
proliferated.36
narrating bandung as tragic event

The tragic narrative of Bandung is teeming with divisions, ambiguity, and
impurity. It is a narrative wherein the spirit is torn between demands for
international cooperation and the quest for autonomy, a dynamic with which
most critical international lawyers are quite familiar.37 This indeterminate
spirit is seen as being necessarily contaminated by specters, not the least in
order to mediate its contradictions and splits and give it a coherent identity.
With this mixing of spirits and specters emerge simultaneous containment and
transformation, revolutionary poetics and the prose of institution-building.38
This narrative represents a more disjointed history of Bandung in which no
single path was already determined and a certain constrained contingency
meant that history was certainly being made, but not by way of some sort of
pure eruptions. This approach takes seriously the duality simultaneously
contained within Bandung, one that “contained both the residual romance
of revolution” and the “realpolitik of a new world order in the making.”39
These two elements comprise a narrative of Bandung as tragedy.40 Mapping
34 35
Ibid., p. 44. Ibid., p. 44 (emphasis in the original).
36
See Pheng Cheah, Spectral Nationality: Passages of Freedom from Kant to Postcolonial
Literatures of Liberation (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003).
37
See Martti Koskenniemi, From Apology to Utopia: The Structure of the International Legal
Argument, Reissue with New Epilogue (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005).
38
For a recent collection of writings on Bandung that take a similar approach, see Christopher J.
Lee (ed.), Making a World after Empire: The Bandung Moment and Its Political Afterlives
(Athens: Ohio University Press, 2010).
39
Burton, “Epilogue.”
40
A tragic narrative emplots historical action, along with all its reversals and paradoxes,
generating a messy and disjointed temporality wherein the past, present, and future cannot be
116 Adil Hasan Khan
onto these elements, there are two aspects of this argument. The first is
containment or catastrophe, and the second is transformational opening.
When it comes to the construction of catastrophe in a tragic narrative of
Bandung, the fundamental point is that it is treated as being simultaneous
with the event and not something that only subsequently follows. Thus, it is
with its clear endorsement and actualization of the five Panchsheel prin-
ciples – including mutual respect for territorial integrity, sovereignty, equal-
ity, and noninterference in internal affairs (the triumphant Bandung Spirit) –
that Partha Chatterjee also identifies the process of actualization and nor-
malization of the nation-state form carried out at Bandung and its after-
maths.41 As he puts it,
The normative idea was unequivocally endorsed in the principle of self-
determination of peoples and nations. The fact that the norm had not been
fully realized was pointed out as a shortcoming, something that had to be
overcome . . . a goal that had complete moral legitimacy.42
This drive to materialize the spirit leads to successful adoption of several

important General Assembly (GA) resolutions that repeat and thus norma-
tively flesh out the Panchsheel or Bandung principles.43 As several inter-
national lawyers of the South have since shown, this resulted in a prolific
expansion of the international institutional apparatus and a greater audibility
of the Third World voice at the international stage.44 Through this actualiza-
tion of the Bandung Spirit, the Third World successfully made international
law and sought to (successfully) counter Western interventions in its colonial
and neocolonial avatars and defend its newly acquired “independence.”45
However, while grappling with the reversal that has seemingly followed
these successes, Chatterjee identifies this very form of the universally equal
nation-state as containing within itself the mechanism mobilized by empire in
the present to intervene, incorporate, and violently transform the erstwhile
Third World. As he puts it,
clearly separated in succession and “they do not line up neatly as though history were heading
somewhere.” Conscripts of Modernity, p. 166.
41
Partha Chatterjee, “Empire and Nation Revisited: 50 Years After Bandung” (2004) Inter-Asia
Cultural Studies 6, 487, 488.
42
Ibid., p. 489 (emphasis added).
43
See GA Resolution 1236 (XII), 14 December 1957: GA Resolution 1815 (XVII), 18 December
1962; GA Resolution 2103 (XX), 20 December 1965.
44
See Balakrishan Rajagopal, International Law from Below: Development, Social Movements
and Third World Resistance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003).
45
Upendra Baxi, “What May the ‘Third World’ Expect from International Law?” (2006) Third
World Quarterly 37, 5, 713.
[T]he normalization of the nation-state form of the political organiza-

tion of humanity contains within itself a mechanism for measuring
cultural difference and for attributing moral significance to those
differences.46
This reversal is thus seen as being always already contained within the nation-
state form and not something that appears at some subsequent catastrophic
moment, as a factor external to the Bandung event or as its latter-day perver-
sion.47 Thus, catastrophe was written into the very successful actualization of
the Bandung Spirit – the price paid for audibility, as Sundhya Pahuja would
term it.48
Significantly, the etymological roots of catastrophe lie in the ancient
Greek word for overturning, which also refers to the final act in a tragic
drama.49 As per Aristotle’s Poetics, the foundational text on tragic narrative
emplotment, in the final act of a tragedy the hero undergoes a devastating
reversal of fortune (peripeteia), which is the source of tragic suffering and
evokes cathartic fear and pity in the audience.50 This tragic reversal does not
arise on account of a sudden episode external to the action or a later
perversion of character embodied by the tragic hero. Rather, it forms a
part of the tragic action as a complete whole.51 Tragic action is generated,
in the very first act, out of an embodied flaw (hamartia) or an inherited
passion (até).52
Furthermore, both hamartia and até are closely enmeshed with that which
allows the hero to act transformatively in the world in the first place.53 They
46
Chatterjee, “Empire and Nation,” p. 495.
47
Crucially, in terms of catastrophes, this covers the imperial invasions and neoliberal structural
adjustment programs that many see as clear cases of purely external reversals of Bandung; i.e.,
the return of empire and a recolonization drive. Ibid.
48
Sundhya Pahuja, Decolonizing International Law: Development, Economic Growth and the
Politics of Universality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), p. 45.
49
Merriam-Webster Dictionary defines catastrophe as “the final event of the dramatic action,
especially of a tragedy.”
50
Stephen Halliwell (trans. and commentary), The Poetics of Aristotle (Chapel Hill: University of
North Carolina Press, 1987), chapter 13, pp. 44–45.
51
Ibid. p. 37.
52
See ibid., chapters 13 and 15, pp. 44–45, 47–48; J. P. Vernant, “Intimations of the Will in Greek
Tragedy,” in Jean-Pierre Vernant and Pierre Vidal-Naquet, Tragedy and Myth in Ancient
Greece (Janet Lyod, trans.) (Sussex: Harvester Press, 1981).
53
As the chorus observes in Sophocle’s Antigone: “Nothing that is vast enters into the life of
mortals without a curse.” Sophocles, “Antigone,” in Moses Hadas (ed.), The Complete Plays of
Sophocles (Sir Richard Claverhouse Jebb, trans.) (New York: Bantam Classic, reissue 2006),
p. 138.
118 Adil Hasan Khan
are the very condition of her possibility to act as a finite being with necessarily
limited knowledge.54
This tragic conception of catastrophe is distinct from the satirical one. In
the latter, there is no question of genuine reversal, as the non-event merely
masks a repetition of stasis. On the other hand, the tragic narrative repeats, but
each repetition is transformative as it pushes back the “horizons of the
possible.”55
The second aspect of the tragic event pertains to the transformational
opening. Thus, Bandung is an opening wherein the nation-state form is but
one of the competing emergent alternatives, along with other potentialities,
and certainly not an inevitable and already naturalized one.56
That there existed several competing visions and possible alternative paths
comes across when we take into account the organization of the almost
concurrent “counter manifestation to the Bandung Conference,”57 which
included as possible actors at the international stage socialist movements,
liberation movements, oppositional parties, and colonial states.58 As men-
tioned previously, from among these available alternatives the Bandung gen-
eration decided to actualize the form of the sovereign and equal nation-state.
The tragic narrative, highlighting “the moments of deliberation and
choice,”59 illuminates this decision and thus renders the Bandung event as
being transformational and not a mere repetition of what came before.
A decision, by very definition, is never given but has to be made.
54
In developing this reading I am greatly influenced by Scott’s work. See Scott, Conscripts of
Modernity, p. 155.
55
See Talal Asad, “Agency and Pain: An Exploration” (2000) Culture and Religion: An
Interdisciplinary Journal 1,1, 29, 40. Northrop Frye’s comparative distinction between tragedy,
satire, and romance brings this out powerfully:
What makes tragedy tragic, and not simply ironic, is the presence in it of a counter-
movement of being that we call the heroic, a capacity for action or passion, for doing and
suffering, which is above ordinary human experience. The heroic energy, glorified by
itself as something invincible which bursts the boundaries of normal experience, is the
basis for romance. In tragedy the heroic is within the human context, and so is still
limited and finite, formed and shaped by death.
Fools of Time: Studies in Shakespearean Tragedy (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1967),
pp. 4–5.
56
See Frederick Cooper, “Possibility and Constraint: African Independence in Historical
Perspective” (2008) Journal of African History 49, 167, 168.
57
Mortimer, The Third World Coalition, p. 10.
58
The reference is to what became the Afro-Asian Peoples’ Solidarity Organization (AAPSO) and
which organized an Afro-Asian conference in Cairo in 1957. Ibid., pp. 10–11.
59
Pahuja, “Decolonization and the Eventness of International Law,” p. 93.
The inevitability of the universalization of the nation-state form was not as

secure because of the persistence of “formal” colonialism, which lingered as
the “not quite yet” displaced norm. This might help us better appreciate the
true transformational character of the decision to assert the illegality of
colonialism and assert the normative status of the universalization of the
nation-state form in the Final Communiqué.60 Bandung is thus an event that
transforms the present it inhabits. Pahuja’s formulation regarding the event of
decolonization is instructive:
It can be understood as a particular post-colonial event. “Post-colonial” in that
it was neither still imperial nor newly liberatory, and yet it was both; formal
sovereignty was forcefully claimed by and extended to the former colonies,
but it did not bring the new equality it promised. But “post-colonial” too in
the sense that the “universalization” of international law in this moment did
effect a shift from the old rationality of rule to one which in the operative
mode of that rationality was precisely the assertion of universality.61
Pahuja’s narrative brings to the fore the persistent and “radical impossibility of
closure”62 and an uncontainable “promise”63 at the heart of what has osten-
sibly been actualized, normalized, and contained, especially when the claim
for actualization rests on a purported “universality.” This uncontainable
promise has resonance with how Derrida construes the promise at the heart
of another event, when he writes:
Whatever one may think of this event, of the sometimes terrifying failure of
that which was thus begun, of the . . . perversions to which it gave rise
(perversions that some have been saying . . . are precisely not
perversions . . . they are not pathological and accidental corruptions but the
necessary deployment of an essential logic present at the birth . . . ) . . . this
unique attempt took place. A messianic promise, even if it was not fulfilled, at
least in the form in which it was uttered, even if it rushed headlong toward
and ontological content, will have imprinted an inaugural and unique mark
in history.64
These decisions and choices that the evental opening generated are never
entirely unconstrained. We have a duality and simultaneity of an opening and
constraint. As Pahuja observes regarding evental decisions and choices:
60
Final Comminqué of the Asian-African conference of Bandung (April 24, 1955).
61
Ibid. p. 102.
62
Sundhya Pahuja, “The Postcoloniality of International Law” (2005) Harvard Journal of
International Law 46, 459, 468.
63
Pahuja, Decolonizing International Law, p. 37.
64
Derrida, Specters of Marx, p. 114 (emphasis added).
120 Adil Hasan Khan
The moments of deliberation and choice that we wish to tease out are,
therefore, not those presented as “options” in an already institutionalized
political discourse, but nor are they unconstrained by their context. In a
sense, they are situated but “meta” choices that determine what paths will
seem to open to us at any given point.65
This constrained choice underlies her (re)description of the event of decol-

onization and Bandung as a case of continuity and discontinuity, containment
and transformation, a “moment of both/and.”66 Her narration allows us to
better grasp how transformational change occurs and how futures emerge
from presents, and that it occurs hesitantly and not as planned.
At this point I feel it might be best to listen to a specter that haunts not just
this chapter but all tragic narrations of Bandung. It motions:
Men make their own history but they do not make it just as they please; they
do not make it under circumstances chosen by themselves, but under
circumstances directly encountered, given and transmitted from the past.
The tradition of all the dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brain
of the living.67
For tragedians, the Bandung generation made history, or acted. Bandung

transformed its present but it did not do so as a rupture or eruption, and
the actors did not act under circumstances that they chose. Prior oper-
ations of colonial power always constituted their struggle against colonial
rule, which was possible only by way of appropriating “transmitted” colo-
nial forms.68
Among these “circumstances transmitted from the colonial past” they
highlight the “universal juridical frame covering the globe”69 – that is, inter-
national law, which constituted the terrain upon which these conscripted
actors had to formulate their struggles.70 Transmitted circumstances were thus
both constraints and transformative openings. Although the Bandung gener-
ation took them up in a manner at odds with their colonial formulation, they
remained forms still forged very much in the colonial era, whose traces
lingered.
This point about the possibilities of transformation coming about only
through “transmitted” conditions from the past also brings us back to the
65
Pahuja, “Decolonization and the Eventness of International Law,” p. 93. 66
Ibid., p. 101.
67 68
Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire, p. 5. Scott, Conscripts of Modernity, pp. 98–208.
69
Pahuja, “Decolonization and the Eventness of International law,” p. 92.
70
Ibid. In their own words: “They have not been established ex nihilo, nor have they come from
outer space.” Anand, New States and International Law, p. 62.
aspect of impurity, the impossibility of keeping apart spirits and specters, and
the maintenance of pure categories. As argued earlier, the Bandung Spirit
forged in the colonial encounter was always already contaminated and was
itself spectral. The point here is not to make the satirical intervention about
how nothing was really transformed through the colonial struggle, but rather
to suggest the tragic insight on the impossibility of ever fully overcoming the
“colonial specter” and transcending death, as it is the very condition of
possibility of unique life and of the event of decolonization.71
Transmission returns us to the question of futures. How can we generate
possible futures from this tragic event in the present? Developing on Der-
rida, we can suggest that we are all heirs responsible to this event in the
present as it generates the present’s very conditions of possibility.72 For
Derrida, past events haunt the present by transmitting both constraints and
possibilities as legacies for heirs, and in order for heirs to remake their
present and generate possible futures, they must conduct themselves with
responsibility and engage in “tasks of inheritance.”73 So, what tasks might
inheriting the Bandung event entail?
inheriting the specters of bandung
Bandung & Sons74

When recounting romantic Bandung histories in the present, how do narra-
tors responsibly conduct themselves with regard to inheritance? Questions of
patrimony, heritage, tradition, and bequests occupy a privileged position in
these narratives, and there is undoubtedly a very influential practice of
engaging with them at work in these texts, one that demands careful
unpacking so we can better discern the critical labors that the “task of inherit-
ance” demands.
For these narrators, the specific inheritance of Bandung is unambiguous
and clear in its essence. It is after all the “Bandung Spirit” that got concretely
materialized through numerous reiterations in principled declarations and
authoritative resolutions. These are very much the self-styled proper(tied)
71 72 73
See Derrida, Specters of Marx, p. 177. Ibid., pp. 114–116. Ibid., p. 67.
74
The reference here is to Derrida’s description of the patrimonial heirs claiming sole proprietary
ownership over Marx’s legacies. See Jacques Derrida, “Marx & Sons,” in Michael Sprinkler
(ed.), Ghostly Demarcations: A Symposium on Jacques Derrida’s Specters of Marx (London:
Verso, 2008), pp. 213–269.
122 Adil Hasan Khan
and “true heirs”75 to the bequeathed patrimony of Bandung, and any ambigu-
ity and paucity of documentary evidence can prove fatal for such proprietary
claims. Here, the unambiguity concerns both the act of bequeathing the
inheritance and also of the very object being inherited.76
These “true heirs,” who are often functionaries of the nation-states that are
perceived as being the “true” authors of the original moment, have actively
engaged in the production of celebratory and commemorative literature to
mark the achievement of various anniversaries of the originary moment.77
Thus, a short pamphlet from the Ministry of External Affairs in India waxes
lyrical about the Panchsheel principles:
Fifty years later, on the golden anniversary of Panchsheel, the chord that was
struck in 1954 still rings pure and true in a world yet seeking the lodestar that
will guide it into the harbour of peaceful co-existence.78
For these “true heirs” this heritage remains constant, thing-like, and pure, as it
effortlessly manages to travel across time, being naturally handed down from
one generation to the next, from the ancient past to the foreseeable future.
Responsibility toward inheritance and the undertaking of filial obligations is
seen as entailing faithful repetition of the practices carried out by ancestors,
including the very narrative form of romance.79 The romantic “true heir”
turns around with a nostalgic and melancholic yearning for the glory days,
when family fortunes were looking up and catastrophe had not yet struck. The
aim is to resuscitate and restore the days of Nasser, Nehru, and Sukarno, and
persist with their original project of securing state sovereignty.80 Without this,
the romantic – faced with catastrophes and proliferating specters in the
present – is rendered quite hopeless.81
75
Ibid., p. 232.
76
On this proprietorial streak in those claiming to be proper heirs, see ibid., pp. 222–223.
77
Significantly including the Declaration on the New Asian-African Strategic Partnership
(NAASP) adopted by one hundred and six Asian and African states during a summit held to
commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of Bandung at Jakarta, available at www.kbri-canberra
.org.au/lains/Hasil%20KTT%20AA%202005.pdf (last accessed July 30, 2014).
78
External Publicity Division, Ministry of External Affairs, Government of India, Panchsheel,
available at www.mea.gov.in/Uploads/PublicationDocs/191_panchsheel.pdf (last accessed July
29, 2014), p. 1.
79
The repetition in practice is striking when one reads passages from the Bandung Final
Communiqué dealing with the cultural tradition of African and Asian states and how these are
handed down. “Final Comminqué of the Asian-African Conference of Bandung” (April 24,
1955), pp. 4–5.
80
See Declaration on the New Asian-African Strategic Partnership, 2005.
81
See Wendy Brown, “Resisting Left Melancholy” (1999) “boundary 2”, 26(3), 19.
questionable shapes and “questioning heirs”

What are the possible tragic practices of engaging with the legacies of Ban-
dung? How do the other heirs undertake this task of inheritance? They are
inheriting the “tragic event,” a flickering, impure event simultaneously carry-
ing catastrophic containment and transformative openness. This is not a
determined and unambiguous heirloom, but a contradictory and heteroge-
neous legacy that comes in a questionable shape without clear intentions of
bequeathment.82 There is no single spirit being inherited, but rather legacies
in the plural, heterogeneous and contradictory. As Derrida writes,
An inheritance is never given gathered together, it is never one with itself. Its
presumed unity, if there is one, can consist only in the injunction to reaffirm
by choosing. “One must” means one must filter, sift, criticize, one must sort out
several different possible that inhabit the same injunction.83
How have these questioning heirs sifted through and sorted out these legacies
of Bandung? Dipesh Chakrabarty provides an illuminating example by iden-
tifying two strains of legacies that emerge from Bandung.84 The first is the
politics of pedagogy and its actualization in the aftermath of Bandung, which
was clearly signified by the uniformity with which various members of the
Bandung generation adopted it.85 They were very clear in its endorsement and
the actualization of this mode of politics and practice of state-building.
However, Chakrabarty notes that it would be a mistake to repeat this legacy.
The “vital legacy” of Bandung, or “its most ‘living’ part,”86 is a much more
questionable one. It does not come to us in the form of some solutions or
broad agreements on the part of this previous generation, but rather as an open
set of questions with ancestors gesturing toward broadly contradictory
positions.87 We thus have an illustration of how the “task of inheritance” alerts
us to the presence of aporias, unresolved tensions and potentialities that we
inherit, potentialities that might prove to be vital in transforming the limits of
82
See Upendra Baxi, “The Colonialist Heritage,” in Pierre Legrand and Roderick Munday,
Comparative Legal Studies: Traditions and Transitions (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2003), p. 46, pp. 72–75.
83
Derrida, “Marx & Sons,” p. 18 (emphasis added).
84
Political Afterlives (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2010), p. 45.
85 86
Ibid., pp. 53–55. Derrida, Specters of Marx, p. 67.
87
Chakrabarty, “The Legacies of Bandung,” pp. 59–64.
124 Adil Hasan Khan
the present. They are transformative because they are not handed down
resolved and coherent, because they still remain undetonated.88
It is this questionable shape that generates our responsibility toward this
inheritance. We can begin to contemplate responsibility for an inheritance
only if it is not already fully determined and fixed. Only those who can choose
and decide among a heterogeneous set of possible courses of action can be
deemed responsible.89 Another way of formulating this is that heirs can be
responsible for and toward inheritance only if they critically act to transform
it.90
In addition, the task of heirs also entails eventing the very actualized and
normalized legacies of Bandung, the “stifled legacies” of which Chakrabarty
speaks. Again, drawing on the work of Pahuja on the (limited) openness of that
event, questioning heirs reveal the complexity and messiness of the past and
bring to the fore the fact that the Bandung generation wrought these actual-
ities (e.g., the normalized nation-state form) by deciding among competing
paths and options. Pahuja undertakes this task in her retelling of decoloniza-
tion, including Bandung, as an open “varied and heterogeneous series of
events,”91 thus stressing its duality and ambiguity.92 Actualized legacies thus
require labors of transformation, and they are rendered open to transformation
by revealing their constructed character – that is, they get actualized by way of
decisions that can possibly be rendered otherwise in the present.93 Such an
approach also destabilizes any sort of neat separation between “stifled” and
88
Elizabeth Freeman, Time Binds: Queer Temporalities, Queer Histories (Durham: Duke
University Press, 2011), p. xvi.
89
Paul Ricoeur, The Just (David Pellauer, trans.) (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press,
2000), p. 26.
90
On the question of the task of inheritance and the responsibility it entails for heirs, see
Ann Genovese, “On Australian Feminist Tradition: Three Notes on Conduct, Inheritance
and the Relations of Historiography and Jurisprudence” (2014) 38 Journal of Australian Studies
430.
91
Pahuja, “Decolonization and the Eventness of International Law,” p. 91.
92
As against a coherent story of straightforward and progressive movement of actualized legacies,
she frames her tracking of legacies in terms of ambiguous moments of deliberation and choice.
Ibid., p. 93.
93
This argument needs to be distinguished from one suggesting that the previous generation
should have chosen otherwise. Instead of engaging in such romantic lamentations along the
lines of “only if . . .,” and keeping in mind the tragic hamartia and até, the argument here is
that even though they definitely chose, they could not have chosen better in their own present,
working as they were within the measure of the probable. Rather, the labor of retrospectively
revealing choices made in the past seeks to illuminate the limits of the present, a present that
has been partly constituted by the choices made by our ancestors and the actualized effects of
their actions, and suggests that we, their “questioning heirs,” could choose otherwise in our
present.
“vital” legacies, as it suggests that we cannot access one without encountering

the other.
By carrying out this task of retrospectively revealing the decisions ancestors
made in the past, heirs are faced with the critical decision to transform their
inheritance in the present. What gets inherited itself is a task. The vital,
inherited task is to make the critical decision to transform our inheritance
and our present with it.94
However, legacies are never fully in the heirs’ control, and as much as they
choose them, they are themselves chosen by the legacies (much as the
decisions made by ancestors were not ever unconstrained either).95 To return
to Marx, heirs (re)make legacies, but never in circumstances entirely of their
own choosing. Thus, much like the Bandung ancestors, their “questioning
heirs” must act and decide on always already constituted terrains and trans-
form their present from a conditioned and transmitted set of possibilities.
From all this we might begin to discern that the task of inheritance is
itself evental. It is simultaneously a continuation of legacies and their
transformation.
conclusion
Narrating Bandung as tragic event with the undertaking of responsible con-
duct toward its transmitted legacies by questioning heirs constitutes a central
part of our “tasks of inheritance.” The tragic narration allows heirs to bring out
the “questionable shapes” in the past, thus rendering the limits of the present
questionable and opening the possibilities for imagining alternative futures.96
In other words, in these dark times, Bandung futures arise out the creative
labors of narrating Bandung as our tragic inheritance.
94
In doing so, there is no question that we will be generating our own ghosts, our own paths not
taken, our own waste products (questionable shapes all). See Specters of Marx, p. 109.
95
Jacques Derrida and Elizabeth Roudinesco, “Choosing One’s Heritage,” in Jacques Derrida
and Elisabeth Roudinesco, For What Tomorrow . . . A Dialogue (Jeff Fort, trans.) (Palo Alto:
Stanford University Press, 2004), pp. 3–4.
96
See Scott, Conscripts of Modernity; Scott, Omens of Adversity.
7
Bandung 1955
The Deceit and the Conceit
ibrahim j. gassama*
And this also . . . has been one of the dark places on Earth.
– Joseph Conrad1
introduction
When thinking about Bandung in 1955, one wonders whether the August
gathering could have anticipated the approaching storm of malevolent vio-
lence and horror that would soon engulf the territories of so many of the
participants. About a decade after the Conference, host nation Indonesia
experienced one of the era’s most shocking social convulsions: a genocidal
assault against communists and others of the left. While the United States and
Great Britain supported this effort to a considerable degree, a nascent virulent
species of domestic postcolonial politics played a critical role in the catas-
trophe.2 Soon afterward, similar horrors became the norm in the emerging
Third World; these were the unexpected bitter harvest of the seeds of heroic
struggles for independence and self-determination.
Of course, participants at Bandung were already intimate with the virulent
conflicts that often followed in the wake of independence celebrations.
Indonesia was certainly not the first battleground. The First and Second
World Wars ended imperial rule for some even as they nurtured increased
domination of others. The new imperialism, or neocolonialism, had little
*
I am grateful that the editors invited me to participate in this volume. My thanks to colleagues
Michelle McKinley, L. Hope Lewis, and A.B. Assensoh for their guidance and support. Colin
R. Saint-Evens and Marissa Martinez provided invaluable research and editorial assistance.
1
Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness (New York: Norton, 1988), p.9.
2
See Isabel Hilton, “Our Bloody Coup in Indonesia” The Guardian, July 31, 2001; Noam
Chomsky, Powers and Prospects: Reflections on Human Nature and the Social Order (Boston:
South End Press, 1996).
126
Bandung 1955 127
difficulty finding willing and enthusiastic allies among the domestic elites of
former colonies. The subsequent violent overthrow of many of those at
Bandung was actually the continuation of a pattern established before the
Conference, such as Mossadegh of Iran and Arbenz of Guatemala, who were
overthrown in 1953 and 1954, respectively. The eager embrace of national
armies inherited from former colonial masters and the prevalence of military
officers trained in Western academies aided the trend. Kwame Nkrumah of
Ghana, among others, understood the evolving nature of colonialism. Always
an optimist, he described neocolonialism in 1965 as the last stage of imperial-
ism.3 His perspicacity did not save his regime; he was deposed in 1966 by
General Ankrah around the time his host at Bandung, President Sukarno, was
being deposed by General Suharto.4 Both military officers were inherited from
colonial armies.
By the time of the Bandung Conference, the United States in particular had
developed more than a century’s worth of experience in perfecting a ruthless
commitment to hegemony in the Western hemisphere.5 There had been
numerous interventions in nearby nations in service of this cause, even before
the 1954 overthrow of the Arbenz government. Perhaps this history helped
induce Latin American leaders to stay clear of the Bandung Conference. But
the broader template for removing Third World nationalist leaders by military-
led insurrections was probably developed in the 1953 overthrow of the govern-
ment of the popular Iranian Prime Minister Mohammed Mossadegh.6
The pace of imperial or neocolonialist interventions picked up after Ban-
dung. Sukarno, Patrice Lumumba of the newly independent Congo, and
Kwame Nkrumah of Ghana are notable examples of those whose leadership
did not survive the post-Bandung euphoria.7 However, in all these cases,
focusing on the fates of individual leaders or particular governments or
movements commits a grave injustice if it de-emphasizes the systematic mass
murder and the institutionalized violence that became a substitute for
national politics following these remarkably formulaic and deadly putsches.
3
See Kwame Nkrumah, Neocolonialism: The Last Stage of Imperialism (London: Thomas
Nelson & Sons, Ltd, 1965).
4
See John Kraus, Ghana without Nkrumah: The Men in Charge (Africa Report, April 1966).
Available at http://home.koranteng.com/writings/ghana-without-nkrumah-men-in-charge
.html.
5
See Stephen Schlesinger et al., Bitter Fruit: the Story of the American Coup in Guatemala
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006).
6
See Dan Merica and Jason Hanna, in declassified document, “CIA acknowledges role in ’53
Iran coup,” CNN, Aug. 19, 2013.
7
See Ludo De Witte, The Assassination of Lumumba (London: Verso, 2001); A. B. Assensoh,
African Political Leadership (Malabar: Krieger Pub. Co., 1998).
128 Ibrahim J. Gassama
The mass graves, known and unknown, that inhabit these places and the
dearth of vision or hope that characterizes daily life in many of them to the
present day provide more adequate testimony to Joseph Conrad’s observations
about the ubiquity and banality of evil.
This reflection on Bandung examines the overriding deceit of that moment
and how it was encased in the conceit of its articulated vision of a postcolonial
future. In brief, this chapter employs the charge of deceit to capture the tragic
leadership failures and toxic political culture these leaders nurtured, which set
up emerging Third World nations for the disastrous present. This chapter also
makes the charge of conceit against Bandung-era leadership to define these
leaders’ pathological incapacity to recognize possibilities outside of their
narrow selves and the visions they articulated. The Bandung generation of
leaders, shorn of their modernist rhetoric, behaved essentially like medieval
tyrants centuries removed.
A major result of this combination of deceit and conceit is the catastrophic
politics that have since defined much of the Third World. The all-powerful
sovereign state, defined almost exclusively in terms of a dominant personal-
ity, became a death camp for ideas and a barrier to global human solidarity.
Of course, this barrier is also enforced by the more developed sovereign
states – exactly those that have adequate resources to make a substantial
difference. It was in their interest to have the sort of leadership and divide
that Bandung both challenged and propagated. We also see this mutuality of
interests today, as thousands of people from all over the Third World perish
during desperate voyages to seek refuge in Europe while their governments
remain silent.
The dispossessed and the victims of assorted pestilences are best served by a
humbler and infinitely more restrained or chastened politics of engagement
with grace. This breed of politics would claim not so much to seek to change
the world with grand ideas or unyielding political doctrines as to simply
manage it. It will do so with the full recognition of humanity’s enormous
individual and communal limitations, as well as our inexhaustible capacities
for spectacular failures, even those fairly described as evil, which are too often
wrapped up in the rhetoric of progress. This consciously restrained perspective
is, in some ways, an echo of the spirit once captured by former Haitian
President Jean Bertrand Aristide, whose economic platform once called for
helping the most dispossessed in the Western Hemisphere’s poorest nation by
encouraging a “transition from misery to poverty with dignity.”8
8
See Alex Dupuy, The Prophet and the Power: Jean Bertrand Aristide, the International
Community and Haiti (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2007), p. 110.
Bandung 1955 129
the deceit of bandung

The despised, the insulted, the hurt, the dispossessed – in short, the underdogs of
the human race were meeting. Here were class and racial and religious con-
sciousness on a global scale. Who had thought of organizing such a meeting?
And what had these nations in common? Nothing, it seemed to me, but what
their past relationship to the Western world had made them feel. This meeting
of the rejected was in itself a kind of judgment upon the Western world!9
Richard Wright was wrong when he limited the common thread among
Bandung participants to “their past relationship to the western world.” The
leaders at the Conference had also inherited one of the most powerful
weapons of human domination and destruction from their former colonial
masters: the modern state. Bandung was a stage to consolidate another round
of unprincipled, good old-fashioned struggle for power and domination –
complete with subterfuge, violence, and terror, justified with a high rhetoric
of cultivated deceit. The deceit was wrapped tightly in the conceit of an
unreflective embrace of the rhetoric of false solidarity and grand visions.
Conrad has observed that in terms of the age-old competition for power and
dominance among humans, the difference between the past and the present is
that humans are now thoroughly artful in masking the fact that success is still
the only standard of morality: “Stratagems, providing they did not fail, were
honourable; the easy massacre of an unsuspecting enemy evoked no feelings
but those of gladness, pride and admiration.”10 For example, Moises Tshombe
of the newly independent nation of Congo and his coterie of ministers eagerly
participated in the brutal abduction, torture, and murder of one of their own,
Congolese Prime Minister Patrice Lumumba.11 For this action they were
rewarded by the embrace of many in the international community. The
United States and Old Europe provided expert guidance and encouragement
to men like Tshombe, here and elsewhere. In general, imperial powers did not
have to look hard to find such new, enthusiastic partners.
Consider also General Zia Ul Haq of Pakistan, who assured deposed Prime
Minister Bhutto that the military coup Zia had staged was only for a few
months, until the nation could hold elections that would surely return Bhutto
to power. In the meantime, he tightened the noose of coerced charges to
ensure “the Bastard” Bhutto’s eventual execution.12 Medieval tyrants would
9
Richard Wright, The Color Curtain (Cleveland: World. Pub. Co., 1956).
10
Joseph Conrad, Nostromo (Mineola, NY: Dover, 2002), p. 234.
11
De Witte, Assassination of Lumumba, p. 119.
12
See Peter Niesewand, “Bhutto Is Hanged in Pakistan,” Wash. Post, Apr. 4, 1979.
have been impressed with the ease and gusto with which leaders of the post-
independence Third World went about the business of killing each other and
supporters of their opponents in the service of unregulated power. The new
sovereigns gathered at Bandung did not need to import such capacities for
horror or willingness to eliminate competitors and dissenting voices from
Europe or the United States.
The participants at Bandung and their successors knew exactly what they
were doing, even as they tried to sell it in their speeches and communiqués as
otherwise. Recall Sukarno’s brilliant opening address to the gathering:
Perhaps now more than at any other moment in the history of the world,
society, government and statesmanship need to be based upon the highest
code of morality and ethics. And in political terms, what is the highest code
of morality? It is the subordination of everything to the well-being of man-
kind. But today we are faced with a situation where the well-being of
mankind is not always the primary consideration. Many who are in places
of high power think, rather, of controlling the world.13
Emotive language like this encased and obfuscated fundamental exercises in

deceit. In almost every case, their aim was to amass unrivalled power within
their worlds, which international law had helped construct. The leaders of the
time had the perfect tool for comprehensive repression – the modern state –
replete with a standing army often inherited wholesale from former colonial
powers. But they told the people they claimed to serve that such centralization
of power in the state was essential to collective freedom, progress, and all of
the other values for which oppressed people yearn. Bandung fostered a
simplistic vision of human struggle and the belief that the source of oppression
could be particularized, cabined, and limited to an identified group, time, and
place. The tragic consequences of this deceit persist to a significant degree
today because of the romantic embrace of myths that trace back to the
Conference. These myths have multiplied and, over time, magnified the gulf
between what was promised and what was delivered or deliverable.
Perhaps the Bandung participants could not foresee all the civil wars,
genocides, ethnic cleansings, routinizing of rule by torture, and multitude of
other crimes against humanity – or even the inexhaustible capacity for cor-
ruption that would soon envelop every one of these vanguard republics. Not
the perpetual wars or particular species of malevolence that inspired the
horrors of Argentina, Chile, Congo, Indonesia, Rwanda, Sierra Leone,
13
President Sukarno of Indonesia, Speech at the Opening of the Bandung Conference, Apr.
8, 1955.
Bandung 1955 131
Somalia, Sri Lanka, and Sudan. Not the coming infamy of the Pinochets,
Suhartos, Zias, Gaddafis, Abachas, Amins, Toures, or Mobutus. Or, they
might argue that this was all part of the struggle. Yet Bandung prepared the
space and rationale for all these horrors and more as it extolled a simplistic
vision of freedom as liberation from defined outsiders to be anchored by the
creation of an all-powerful sovereign state. This was essentially the antidote to
old imperialism. Therefore, it was necessary to destroy all opposition to state
power in order to protect from external threats. In the course of this agenda,
they succeeded in making their people defenseless even as new tyrants,
oligarchs, and sycophants from within unleashed new cycles of domination.
There could be no wider gulf in organized human society than the one that
separated the ideals of sovereignty and fantasies about freedom and solidarity
engendered by Bandung and the utter misery and despair left in their wake.
It is indisputable that Bandung needed to happen. Indeed, the idea of
Bandung was exquisite, and its timing and pageantry were brilliant. As a
review of Richard Wright’s report on the Conference noted,
It brought together for the first time representative(s) of a billion and a half
people of Asia and Africa for a meeting at which delegates of the Western
peoples were excluded. It was a coming out party for the Peoples Republic of
China and the Democratic Republic of Vietnam (North Vietnam) and
marked the first time that emissaries of Asia’s two communist States had
met with a general assemblage of Africans and other Asians.14
The world needed alternatives to the decaying Manichean visions of the West
and East. Bandung could have been the first step toward a radically new, more
humane path. However, it ultimately helped promote new false dichotomies.
The Conference was a valiant attempt, at best, to construct an escape for
dispossessed peoples from inexplicable and unyielding forces of history and
time that no evocation of false worlds or paradise could counter. The organ-
izers may have thought, perhaps even believed – if only briefly – that it would
be different when they were in charge. But even if we grant them hubris, they
were like many others before them, undisciplined and dangerously romantic.
They prepared against what they understood but they did not fully appreciate
the irreducible immensity, dynamism, relentlessness, and comprehensiveness
of the human capacity for the absurd. Their egotism or hubris cannot be a
sufficient excuse and their legacies should not be covered up in retelling
of myths.
14
See Tillman Durdin, “Richard Wright Examines the Meaning of Bandung,” NY Times,
Mar. 18, 1956.
A brief discussion of the rule of two iconic figures of the era, Sukarno of
Indonesia and Kwame Nkrumah of Ghana, further illustrates the level of
deceit perpetrated by those who saw Bandung in the reign of these servants
turned saviors turned oppressors.
sukarno: father of the nation

Sukarno was a preeminent leader of Indonesia’s epic struggle for independ-
ence against the Dutch and their European allies. His courage, tenacity, and
commitment in that struggle cannot be faulted.15 The Dutch and their British
allies challenged Indonesia’s declaration of independence in the wake of
Japanese defeat during the Second World War, but the nationalists would
not yield. After a protracted and violent struggle, Indonesian independence
was negotiated and the Dutch accepted it in 1949.16 Sukarno became the
nation’s first president. He led the nation until he was effectively overthrown
by one of his generals, Suharto, in 1965.17
The overthrow of Sukarno was an especially brutal affair; a one-sided civil
war that claimed an estimated one million lives as a right-wing faction in the
military, with considerable Western help, sought to eliminate its opponents.18
The prize for former colonial powers was access to or control of Indonesia’s
abundant natural resources as well as its strategic location. Indonesian com-
munists and those perceived to be close to them were the primary targets. In
1966, Bertrand Russell claimed, “In four months, five times as many people
died in Indonesia as in Vietnam in twelve years.”19 The number grew when
15
See “Indonesia 1945–1949: A Colony Fights for Freedom.” Available at www.entoen.nu/
indonesie/en.
16
Ibid.
17
Paul Lashmar and James Oliver, “How We Destroyed Sukarno,” The Independent, Dec. 1,
1998.
18
The Suharto-led military coup and campaign of terror began in 1965. Suharto consolidated
power by 1967 and dismissed Sukarno. “The supposed pro-communist coup that triggered the
crisis was almost certainly also the work of the CIA. Sukarno was finally removed from power in
1967. Suharto, meanwhile, was offered economic aid and the British lifted their embargo on
sales of military aircraft. Suharto’s massacres were whitewashed in a campaign of
disinformation in which the British government willingly participated. The Atlantic Monthly
assured its readers: ‘In attacking the communists, he (Suharto) was not acting as a western
puppet; he was doing simply what he believed to be best for Indonesia.’ Best for Indonesia, in
this view, was the granting of lucrative concessions to western mining and oil companies. It was
the beginning of a post-independence economic order that has continued to today.” See Isabel
Hilton, “Our Bloody Coup in Indonesia,” The Guardian, July 31, 2001.
19
See Malcolm Caldwell, Ten Years after Military Terror in Indonesia (Nottingham: Spokesman
Books, 1976).
Bandung 1955 133
the Suharto regime’s war on communism propelled him to try a version of

Third World colonialism by invading and occupying East Timor in 1975.20 It
would be too easy to blame only the military generals and their western
patrons. However, the seeds of genocide in Indonesia and subsequent outrages
were sown and nurtured during the nearly two-decade reign of Sukarno. Rule
by terror and mass murder and an unwillingness to give up power at any cost
were among the signal lessons engraved in the political cultures nurtured by
the Bandung host and participants, almost without exception. You couldn’t
tell this from the lofty rhetoric at the Conference.
The problems with this sort of post-independence leadership pursued by
Bandung leaders like Sukarno were embedded both in its aims and in the
execution of those aims. Faced with the extraordinary task of uniting a
fractious nascent nation, he chose to force-feed a unity that quickly became
a quest for singular rule. By the time Sukarno was deposed, he had perfected
the politics of the self. Indonesia had become all about him, and he trusted
neither politics nor the future. So he ruled by decree, voided an inconvenient
constitution, dissolved parliament, declared martial law, and employed the
military to put down opposition. Freedom was gradually snuffed out in the
name of freedom. He easily went from being Father of the Nation to President
for Life, imposing a singular vision of the future that he called “guided
democracy,” and then required mass education as to its virtues. In effect, he
and those gathered around him could not trust the very people they claimed to
represent to have options and to be able to define their own future. They took
the humanity out of their people and sought to transform them into material
commodities whose principal value was in their being a necessary means to an
end. Thus, a popular revolution against external oppression was hijacked and
transformed into a dictatorship by some within. Sukarno and those who
agreed with his vision and programs may have sincerely believed they had
all the wisdom and answers, but that is beside the point. They waged a brutal,
uncompromising war on all those who did not share their version of freedom
or independence.
Sukarno may have become overly impressed by his adroit maneuvering
among the various interest groups struggling for power in the vast and diverse
archipelago. He built his rule on temporary alliances. He played the military
against the communists, the religious against the secular, and this faction
against that; his domestic rule devolved into something that would not be
unfamiliar to Caesars, medieval monarchs, or Ottoman Sultans.
20
See generally Peter Carey, “East Timor under Indonesian Occupation, 1975–99,” in Andrew
Tan (ed.), Handbook on Terrorism and Insurgency (Cheltenham: Edward Elgar, 2006).
Indonesia transitioned from Sukarno’s nearly two-decade, singular, unques-

tioned leadership to an even more ruthless thirty-year dictatorship under
Suharto. The nation continues to struggle sixty years after Bandung, from this
initial failure to develop a legitimate structure or ethic for managing political
disagreements.21 It is not surprising that while “The Act of Killing,” a recent
Kafkaesque documentary about the Indonesian reign of terror under Suharto,
has garnered substantial international acclaim, it has received only muted
attention in the country itself.22 Such are the fruits of deceit.
kwame nkrumah: the redeemer

Ghana – known as Gold Coast at the time of Bandung – tracked a similar
legacy of deceit inherited from its founding leadership. Kwame Nkrumah,
Ghana’s and sub-Saharan Africa’s first post-independence head of state, was
perhaps even more of a celebrated icon of Third World leadership than
Sukarno was. Nkrumah came to encapsulate the totality of African as well as
pan-African progressive hopes and aspirations for postcolonial self-
determination in the early decades of the postcolonial era. Many consider
him to be one of the greatest Africans ever to have lived, an honor that would
have pleased him enormously even as it would attest to the emptiness of his
legacy. Distinguished African scholar Ali Mazrui captured Nkrumah’s troub-
ling and contentious contributions when he asserted:
Nkrumah’s domestic policies for Ghana internally were wrong (detention
without trial, one-party system, dismissal of the Chief Justice, shortsighted
economics, intimidation of political opponents). But . . . my thesis was that
Nkrumah was a great African, but not a great Ghanaian in his domestic
policies.23
In their enthusiasm for celebrating the legend of Nkrumah, pan-Africanists

have chosen to minimize the perspectives of Ghanaians who experienced his
ruthless consolidation of power and the political as well as the social devasta-
tion that ensued during his rule. True, Western governments and economic
interests supported, if not encouraged, the destabilization of his government
and the military coup that toppled him in February 1966. To a considerable
21
See Joe Cochrane, “Ex-General in Indonesia to Challenge Election Results, Citing
Irregularities,” NY Times, July 23, 2014.
22
See Joe Cochrane, “‘Act of Killing’ Film Fails to Stir Indonesia,” NY Times, Mar. 1, 2014.
23
Ali A. Mazrui, “Debates about Ghana” (September 4, 2001) in Alamin M. Mazrui and Willy
Mutunga (eds.), Governance and Leadership: Debating the African Condition – Mazrui and
His Critics, Vol. 2 (Asmara: Africa Research & Publications, 2003).
Bandung 1955 135
degree, the economic failures and social unrests that gave strength to the
opposition were the result of a sophisticated Western campaign to undermine
a government that was increasingly comfortable in its opposition to Western
policies. In the atmosphere of a totalitarian struggle between East and West,
Nkrumah was dangerously nonaligned as the leader of Ghana. Still, no one
should ignore the diversity of interests within Ghana that came to support the
military coup that toppled Nkrumah’s government.
It would be hard to fault Nkrumah’s passion, courage, and sincerity of
vision. His warnings about the inherent weaknesses of the newly independent
African states ring even truer today. Unfortunately, like Sukarno, his rule
lacked faith in the capacity of the people who had first chosen him. He
claimed a mandate on behalf of the Ghanaian people, then moved quickly
to reduce them to his will. He too went from being a revolutionary, disciplined
by doubts and accountability, to being a dictator with an unsurpassed faith in
his singular wisdom and indispensability. Hence, there was no need to allow
for an unconstrained future for Ghanaians; there was no future beyond his
capacity to comprehend and value. For Nkrumah, his particular materialist
conception predetermined the future for “his people,” and he could not
conceive of any benefit to tolerating a rival vision or the value of embracing
dissent.24 His sycophants fed his ego even as he tolerated their outrages. With
reverence, they began calling him Osagyefo (redeemer in the Akan lan-
guage).25 Yet, when the military came for him, few stood in the way.
Among many Bandung participants, the edifices of deceit they had created
crumbled quickly, exposing the lies and decadence on which they had been
constructed. In almost all cases, opponents (both foreign and domestic) easily
employed the very instruments of power consolidation, ruthless repression, and
organized corruption to end the pretentions of these sad facsimiles of medieval
despots. In that manner, the deceit of Bandung, although exposed and initially
discredited, outlasted the participants as it was quickly reconstituted to serve new
deceivers. Deceit thus remains one of the moment’s most enduring legacies.
the conceit of bandung

To keep alive a false idea is a greater crime than to kill a man . . . Visionaries
work everlasting evil on earth. Their Utopias inspire in the mass of mediocre
minds a disgust of reality and a contempt for the secular logic of human
development.26
24
See Ali A. Mazrui and Michael Tidy, Nationalism and the New African States (London:
Heinemann, 1984), pp. 60–62.
25 26
Ibid. Joseph Conrad, Under Western Eyes (New York: MLA Classic, 2001), p. 71.
Integral to this deceit was the conceit of the leadership represented at

Bandung. The charge of conceit has two core elements. First, it describes
the rationales and justification the leaders employed to carry out their object-
ives of total control. Second, it attacks the very notion that these leaders had or
could have a clear understanding of what they were confronting. Specific
examples are Nkrumah’s thesis on neocolonialism and Sukarno’s notion of
guided democracy.
Deceit inexorably merges with the conceit; it is, in effect, the deceit of
conceit. Consider the case of Guinean President for Life Ahmed Sekou
Toure, who ruled Guinea from 1958 until his death in 1984. It would be
difficult to evoke a more tragic and pathological figure among the leaders of
that era. This former labor leader had all the answers as well as all the
questions; he was always clear on who the enemies were and how to fight
them. The people just had to keep struggling; they had to continue their
sacrifice and victory was inevitable. His speeches would go on for hours as he
inveighed against colonialism, neocolonialism, capitalism, and imperialism.
Many of his subjects wore his image on their clothing. They wrote songs
asserting his unrivaled pedigree and his unquestioned wisdom, love, and
compassion. North Korean dictators would have been envious. The people
knew what happened to those who did not continue to earn his trust. One of
those was Diallo Telli, an erudite scholar and jurist who became the first
Secretary-General of the Organization for African Unity (OAU), now called
the African Union (AU). After his term ended in 1972, Telli made the naive
mistake of returning home. He served as Justice Minister for four years,
dutifully carrying out Toure’s program, before he too was arrested in
1976 during one of the country’s periodic purges (this one directed against
Telli’s ethnic group). Telli appeared to have believed Toure’s deceitful
description of the national struggle, ignoring the gap between ideas and the
practical necessities of power acquisition. He did not object when they came
for others on trumped-up charges – indeed, he helped trump up the charges.
Then, he joined the victims: he disappeared from public view. One of Africa’s
most distinguished leaders of the time simply disappeared. After a while, no
one even asked about him. Later, it was revealed that he had been tortured and
gruesomely murdered, just one of the uncountable casualties of the time.27
27
“Ahmed Sekou Toure, A Radical Hero,” NY Times, Mar. 28, 1984 (“But Mr. Toure’s stature in
the third world was underscored by his becoming head of a nine-member Islamic mediation
mission striving to end the Iran-Iraq war. The decorations that Mr. Toure’s received over the
years included the Lenin Peace Prize, which he was awarded in 1960, and the Grand Cross of
the Legion of Honor of France.”).
Bandung 1955 137
Nkrumah, Sekou Toure, Sukarno, Suharto, and their ilk came to believe in
their own singular significance. It may have started out as propaganda to unify
their people in a popular struggle against outsiders, but they ultimately came
to believe in their versions of divine selection. Only an all-consuming sense of
self-importance would allow them to move so easily from a total commitment
to liberation of their people from one set of oppressors to a demand that those
people submit unquestionably to their diktat. The deceit and the conceit
depended on each other.
But it is important to consider the second element of conceit: the faith that
they and others before and after them have promoted in so many of us, the
followers, that we can find answers to our predicament in the theories, visions,
and utopias of the moment. We often so desperately need to feel the power
that should enable us to transcend our circumstances; we practically beg our
own submission. We become ready prey for those who offer us salvation in
concepts like independence, self-determination, nonalignment, capitalism,
socialism, guided democracy, Nkrumahism, and the like. Many of us feed
the conceited through our facile embrace of packaged salvations they offer.
This is true in religion as in politics. But the visions of the visionaries are often
just newer pathways, gilded with stirring rhetoric, into the darkness and the
horrors that accompany them.
Sekou Toure stayed in power and ruthlessly propagated his vision for as
long as it served his purpose. In the last years of his life, perhaps impelled by a
sense of mortality and need for Western medical intervention, he moved to
the equally problematic embrace of Western investment to save his precar-
ious rule. And the crowd that danced before came out to dance again in
praise of his new vision. Sukarno and Nkrumah, like Toure, also practiced
the politics of grand visions, the conviction that there is a particular, discern-
ible path to salvation that justifies snuffing out all other material or ideo-
logical alternatives that could pose a hindrance. Like most of the cohort at
Bandung, they suffered from the conceit of those who have clarity. Their
abiding legacies are in the tragically failed societies they bequeathed to future
generations.
conclusion
The leaders at Bandung were successful in mobilizing masses of people in
historic struggles against brutal, exploitative, and relentless imperial domin-
ation of diverse sorts. They were also successful in masking their efforts at total
domination of the very people they had infused with a romantic sense of
freedom. Neither the passion nor sincerity of the leaders could absolve them
of their responsibility for embracing their version of the end of history and
political theology in the name of freedom.
The conceit of Bandung was in the manner in which the new masters
propagated and apparently came to believe in their own propaganda and in
their faith that they were actually engaged in a fundamentally different and
more honorable exercise of suppressing savagery than those who came before
them, with “savagery” defined as any challenge to their supremacy. They
would not consider that they were the latest incarnations of Conrad’s “Society
for the Suppression of Savage Customs” that had sent Mr. Kurtz, on Europe’s
behalf, to “civilize” the natives of the Congo.28 Nor would they consider their
military and paramilitary security forces deployed to oppress and pacify oppon-
ents and dissatisfied citizens the new Mr. Kurtzes. However, it could not have
mattered to the tortured and the dead that soon came to signify their rule. The
grander their reach, the wider the gulf became between these leaders and their
people. In the end, it was a tragedy from which the future can find no easy
answers, except perhaps a better appreciation of human limitations and the
need for a conscious embrace of a state of chastened idealism. There are no
easy paths around the darkness that has been a steady companion of human
existence.
While this conclusion might appear to be fueled by despair, it need not be
so. It is entirely possible to engage life and its numerous challenges without
falling prey to messianic impulses pushing cheap salvation. One might even
find space for self-actualization while accepting our inability to fully compre-
hend our predicament or the pervasiveness of horror. Albert Camus, in The
Plague, has provided insights as to how one could proceed with life even with
full acceptance of the vagaries of existence.
There is hope, but it is not in our messiahs. It is in the perseverance and
grace exemplified by characters like Dr. Rieux and the journalist Tarrou. They
led and inspired by toiling in the midst of total terror, going from victim to
victim, without recourse to, or refuge in, grand theories or even faith. As
characters, they testify to the enduring spirit of humanity that is always there
awaiting discovery or deployment. Happily, they have present-day counterparts
in afflicted communities around the world whose compassionate commit-
ments contrast acutely with the priorities of benighted leadership. Only they
provide constructive substance to our thoroughly corrupted notions of global
community.
28
The society was Conrad’s creation, satirizing European missionary work in Africa. See Conrad,
Heart of Darkness.
Bandung 1955 139
There was a timeless universal message contained in words of Conrad’s Mr.

Kurtz, who cried: “The horror! The horror!” We have continued to ignore the
message at our peril. Why did we not hear that cry in Indonesia during the
reign of terror, Argentina under the Generals, or Rwanda in the throes of
genocide? Can we say that Conrad did not warn us of the passionate madness
wrapped up with dazzling ingenuity in such ideals as freedom, national
sovereignty, self-determination, and nonalignment? This was the traffic of
Bandung. But we were blind and deaf because we too had the conceit
of thinking we could tell the oppressors by what they had done in the past
or perhaps by how they looked or the words they used.
Perhaps Conrad exaggerated when he argued, “Visionaries work everlasting
evil on Earth.”29 But truly, isn’t this how diverse struggles and interventions,
regardless of their initial chest thumping, liberation movement manifesto
chanting, or Christian missionary/human rights worker certitude, have
resolved themselves? Biafra, Chile, Gaza, Guatemala, Indonesia, Iran, Iraq,
Syria, Rwanda, and Vietnam do not begin to do justice to the so-called horror
because all these places have been, at one time or another, “one of the dark
places on Earth.”30
29
Joseph Conrad, Under Western Eyes (New York: Harper & Bros, 1911), p. 71.
30
Conrad, Heart of Darkness, p. 9.
8
Not a Place, but a Project

Bandung, TWAIL, and the Aesthetics of Thirdness
vik kanwar*
introduction
“The Third World was not a place. It was a project,” wrote Vijay Prashad.1 Yet
the name so often given to that project is also the name of a place: Bandung.2
In 1955, the Afro-Asian conference was the site for a historic summit that is
now widely regarded as the birthplace of both the Non-Aligned Movement
(NAM) and the Third World. Leaders of the newly independent states
declared, “Colonialism in all its manifestations is an evil which should
speedily be brought to an end.”3 The General Assembly of the United Nations
reiterated this demand in a 1960 Declaration that “all peoples have an inalien-
able right to complete freedom,” emphasizing “the necessity of bringing
to a speedy and unconditional end of colonialism in all its forms and
*
For key insights, the author thanks José-Manuel Barreto, B. S. Chimni, Nick Croggon, John
Haskell, Chitra Ganesh, Adil Hassan Khan, Srinivas Aditya Mopidevi, Deepti Mulgund, Jaya
Neupaney, James Parker, Peter John Shaji, and Joseph Slaughter. For support and resources,
thanks to organizers of the Bandung at sixty sessions of the 2015 TWAIL Conference in Cairo,
the editors of this volume, Institute for Global Law and Policy at Harvard Law School, and the
libraries of the Laboratory of the Visual Arts (Pepper House, Kochi Biennale Foundation), the
Foundation for Indian Contemporary Art, and the Asian-African Legal Consultative
Organization, New Delhi. Special thanks to the artists Iswanto Hartono and Raqs Media
Collective, particularly Shuddabrata Sengupta, for permission to use “The 5 Principle No-s.”
1
Press, 2009). Insofar as one would want to argue that the Third World is both a place and a
project, a consideration of the Third World as a geographic construct, see Balakrishnan
Rajagopal, “Locating the Third World in Cultural Geography” (1998–1999) 15 Third World
Legal Studies 1, at 2.
2
See, e.g., C. P. Romulo, The Meaning of Bandung (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina
Press, 1956), and Robert Vitalis, “The Midnight Ride of Kwame Nkrumah and Other Fables of
Bandung (Ban-doong)” (2013) 4 Humanity 261.
3
Final Communiqué of the Asian-African Conference of Bandung, April 24, 1955, available at
www.ena.lu/final_communique_asian_african_conference_bandung_24_april_1955-2-1192.
140
Not a Place, but a Project 141
manifestations.”4 In this way the Bandung project, the Third World project,
and the international law project converged. The crucial actor in all these
projects was the nation-state, specifically the developmental state that asserted
itself as an alternative not only to colonialism but also to the economic models
offered by the dominant Eastern and Western blocs. In the sixty years since
Bandung, as the postcolonial planned state in its original form continues to
disappear or disappoint, what remains of the Bandung project?
Centering on a discussion of two contemporary outcomes of the Bandung
project – the developments in the contemporary art world in the decade
between Documenta 11 (2002) and the Bandung Pavilion at the Ninth
Shanghai Biennial (2012) on one hand and the intellectual movement known
as TWAIL (Third World Approaches to International Law)5 on the other –
this chapter specifies and expands on the sense in which Bandung remains
subject to constant reinvention. By focusing on alternative lineages of the
Bandung project outside political and state-based realms, it is possible to
foreground aesthetic aspects of Bandung where nonalignment is understood
as a kind of thirdness and postnationalism and is evident in a negotiation
between site-specificity and translocality, and where solidarities are formed not
between nation-states but among cities and circuits. In this way, the Bandung
successors – interventions in international law scholarship as well as contem-
porary art practice – expand the sense of the project and the sense of place in
what may still be called the Third World.
provocations on the project

Beyond both place and project, Bandung has also been temporalized as a
moment6 or an event,7 or given direction concretely as an agenda and
abstractly as a spirit.8 It lives through its lineages and survives in the play of
analogies. Just as looking backward Bandung dignified itself in diplomatic
imagination by reference to Westphalia or Versailles, contemporary
4
Declaration on granting of Independence to Colonial Countries and Peoples, Res. 1514 (XV)
14 December 1960: United Nations Review (January 1961), p. 6.
5
TWAIL is also the intellectual tradition informing the current edited collection.
6
Christopher J. Lee (ed.), Making a World after Empire: The Bandung Moment and Its Political
Afterlives (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2010).
7
Sundhya Pahuja, “Decolonization and the Eventness of International Law,” in Fleur Johns
et al. (eds.), Events: The Force of International Law (Oxford: Routledge, 2011), p. 101.
8
Vijay Prashad notes, “From Belgrade to Tokyo, from Cairo to Dar es Salaam, politicians and
intellectuals began to speak of the ‘Bandung Spirit’ . . . The audacity of Bandung produced its
own image.” Prashad, The Darker Nations, pp. 45–46.
142 Vik Kanwar
movements and institutions find their origins in the Bandung moment. Some,
like the Asian-African Legal Consultative Organization (AALCO), claimed
this lineage because they were established through the mechanisms of the
Conference itself.9 Others, like NAM, emerged as sequels, and still others
(such as the Tricontinental) are linked to the moment by solidarity, or like the
World Social Forum by analogy,10 or as with TWAIL out of an imaginative
act.11 Progenitors have described all these institutions and movements as heirs
to Bandung. But some of these heirs are more strangers than rival descendants,
and it is far from certain that the Bandung project is finished, as in the realms
of contemporary art and culture claiming a lineage from Bandung.
To understand Bandung as a project is to approach its narration as a series
of creative choices rather than an outcome of political contingencies. David
Kennedy redefined international law as not sovereigns with sources but
“people with projects”: “Rather than agents in structures, we might come to
see people with projects, projects of affiliation and disaffiliation, commitment
and aversion, and with wills to power and to submission.”12 Similarly, other
notions can retexture the idea of international law as a project. The philoso-
pher Peter Osborne defines “project space” as the connection between frag-
ments and ruins: ruins are the past, and fragments are the future. This
description brings to mind the incomplete condominium buildings on the
outskirts of Delhi or Cairo that are becoming ruins even as they are being
built.13 Is Bandung a fragment of a future or a ruin in reverse?14 Or is Bandung
a project in the sense mapped by Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello, as the
dominant emerging mode of managerial practice in our postcolonial and
9
Rahmat Bin Mohamad, “Bringing Together Asian-African States in Harmonizing the
International Legal Order in the Post Westphalian Era” (2009) Essays on Contemporary Issues
in International Law 7.
10
Michael Hardt, “Porto Alegre: Today’s Bandung?” (2002) 14 New Left Review 112.
11
James Thuo Gathii, “TWAIL: A Brief History of Its Origins, Its Decentralized Network, and a
Tentative Bibliography” (2011) 3 Trade, Law and Development 1, at 26.
12
David Kennedy, “The Mystery of Global Governance,” Kormendy Lecture, Ohio Northern
University, Pettit College of Law (Jan. 25. 2008).
13
The metaphor might withstand some complication: In Delhi, this is because of a credit crunch
in the construction industry; in Cairo, reportedly, houses in a state of construction (for
example, with a top floor perpetually under construction) are not subject to property tax.
14
Peter Osborne, Anywhere or Not at All: Philosophy of Contemporary Art (London: Verso Press,
2013). The major failing of his book is that it follows closely the inability to integrate recognition
of non-Western art into his analysis. Any serious account of contemporary art as a critical
category has to be post-Western, and in this sense it is perhaps necessary to think against
Osborne rather than with him. His engagement with contemporary art is limited to the Atlas
Group/Walid Raad and Amar Kanwar, both of whom are Documenta 11 artists. I thank Nick
Croggon for introducing me to this work and drawing out its implications.
diffuse times?15 In what Boltanski and Chiapello call the Projective City, the
value of works and lives is judged by virtue of activity itself. In this mode,
connections and networks sustain the impulse of activity: never to be without a
project or ideas; always to be looking forward to and preparing for a project,
along with other persons driven by the same project-based impulse.16 Kennedy
conjures a certain kind of existentialism in defining these as projects of
“affiliation and disaffiliation,” “commitment and aversion,” and “power and
submission.” All these notions of the project are philosophically dense, rooted
in romanticism, existentialism, and the social and aesthetic theories of the
West.17 Others believe this does not go far enough. Walter Mignolo suggests
that rather than pursuing such projects, we seek noncolonial options and de-
link from Western thought altogether.18 Without taking up these options,
which are more challenging than anything attempted here, the next sections
assemble alternative lineages or projects of Third World thinking between
Bandung and TWAIL.
objects, places, and projects

If we speak of the aesthetics of Bandung, we might think first of the nostalgia
filtered through archival footage: the pageantry of Bandung as the “Grand
Conference of the Darker Nations,” the repurposing of colonial architecture,
and a will to modernism, images of “dark-skinned natives” replaced every-
where with those of dark-suited nation-builders. Bandung was the Apollonian
face of developmental nationalism and a renewal of humanism. But Third
15
Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello, The New Spirit of Capitalism (London: Verso Press, 2006).
I thank John Haskell for the insight linking Kennedy’s work to that of Boltanski and
Chiapello.
16
Boltanski, New Spirit, pp. 103–105. For an application of this idea to art exhibitions, see Lucy
Steeds, “‘Magiciens de la Terre’ and the Development of Transnational Project-Based
Curating,” in Lucy Steeds et al. (eds.), Making Art Global (Part 2): Magiciens de la Terre (1989)
(London: Afterall Books, 2013), p. 35.
17
See, e.g., Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness (trans. Hazel Barnes) (New York:
Philosophical Library, 1956), p. 481:
Our particular projects, aimed at the realization in the world of a particular end, are
united in the global project which we are. But precisely because we are wholly choice
and act, these partial projects are not determined by the global project. They must
themselves be choices; and a certain margin of contingency, of unpredictability, and of
the absurd is allowed to each of them.
18
On the potential of Mignolo’s concept of de-linking in transforming international legal
discourse, see José-Manuel Barreto, “Decolonial Strategies and Dialogue in the Human Rights
Field: A Manifesto” (2012) 3 Transnational Legal Theory 1.
144 Vik Kanwar
World art practitioners who lived through postcolonial realities rarely took
recourse to these images. The potential of contemporary art practice is to
revisit Third World identity through site-specific contingencies and
solidarities.19
An Object: Bandung to Now

Consider the following work of art:
figure 8.1. The Five Principle No-s for a New Pancasila. EVA International (2014).
Courtesy of Iswanto Hartono and Raqs Media Collective.
“Five Principle No-s,” a collaborative installation by Indonesian artist

Iswanto Hartono and the Delhi-based Raqs Media Collective, was one of
five works commissioned for the Bandung Pavilion of the Shanghai Bien-
nale in 2012, and it was also exhibited in the EVA International, Ireland
Biennale of contemporary art in 2014. It comprises five phrases printed on
a gallery wall, all of which incorporate the word no: “Make no promises,”
19
Walter Mignolo, “Enacting the Archives, Decentring the Muses: The Museum of Islamic Art
in Doha and the Asian Civilizations Museum in Singapore” (Ibraaz, November 6, 2013).
Available at http://www.ibraaz.org/essays/77; “Re-emerging, Decentering, and Delinking:
Shifting the Geographies of Sensing, Believing and Knowing” (Ibraaz, May 8, 2013). Available
at http://www.ibraaz.org/essays/59.
“Take no prisoners,” “Do no harm,” “Kill no more,” and “Go no further.”

The overpowering letter O in NO is a physical, round void, served by an
infinity mirror that projects a string of blinking LED lights into an abyss.
As viewers stand reflected in the mirror, they view themselves in a vortex
resembling a science fiction wormhole, as though they were being trans-
ported to a distant place or time. Standing in the void, as one disappears
into it, the O also vanishes, transforming NO into N and an undetermined
number. The meaning of the whole piece is thus inverted, and the
text ends up reading “Make N- Promises,” “Take N- Prisoners,” “Kill
N- More.”20
The title of the work is variously “Principle” and “Principal,” and the
ambiguity may be intentional. Situated in Shanghai or Singapore (where it
was installed a second time at the Singapore Biennial 2013) or in the cities
where the artists reside (New Delhi and Jakarta), the significance of “five
principles” would not be lost.21 In these places, it is well known that, drawing
on a Buddhist tradition, the political philosophies of certain people within
and between postcolonial Asian countries have been articulated as a series
of five principles. These include Indonesia’s Pancasila (1945), Malaysia’s
Rukunegara (1969),22 and most notably the Panchsheel Principles that Nehru
included in the Treaty between India and China on the Tibet Border
(1954).23 The Panchsheel Principles repeat many of the principles in Article 2
20
Thanks to Joseph Slaughter for this observation.
21
The work was commissioned a second time at the Singapore Biennale 2013 for a program called
“If the World Changed.” It was put in proximity to Malaysian artist Zulkifli Yusoff’s
“Rukunegara 1: Belief in God,” among other works, and operated as a meta-commentary on
these neighboring works. An artist folio discussing the work can be found here: www
.singaporebiennale.org/downloads/folios/Iswanto_Hartono.pdf. The work was shown for a third
time at the thirty-sixth edition of EVA: Ireland’s Biennale (2014) under the title “5 Principle
No-s, For a New Pancasila,” for a program entitled “Agitationism.” According to the Biennial’s
curator, Bassam El Baroni, the show “attempts to grasp the sense of living under agitation while
capturing how we are slowly adapting to a different perception of the world by working through
our relationships with historical ideologies, post-colonial narratives, other forms of life (animals
for example), and speculations about the not-so-distant future.” Here, the artists are explicit that
the five principles are “how we would like to be governed, if we had to be governed.” Available
at www.eva.ie/domains/eva.ie/local/media/images/medium/EVA_International_
AGITATIONISM_Exhibition_Guide.pdf.
22
Rukunegara (National Principles) is Zulkifli Yusoff’s series of installations and paintings.
Rukunegara is derived from and inspired by the artist’s ongoing dialogue on nation building
and the making of a people. On May 13, 1969, Zulkifli examines the reactionary five guiding
principles of governance of an emerging nation struggling to mold its diverse and sometimes
dissolute ethnicities into one.
23
Agreement on Trade and Intercourse between the Tibet Region of China and India, signed at
Peking on April 29, 1954.
146 Vik Kanwar
of the United Nations Charter,24 but they are wrapped in a reference to Asian
tradition. Nehru proposed: (1) mutual respect for each other’s territorial
integrity and sovereignty, (2) mutual nonaggression, (3) mutual noninterfer-
ence in each other’s internal affairs, (4) equality and mutual benefit, and
(5) peaceful coexistence. Many of these principles have been historically or
retrospectively tied to the Bandung Conference, and Nehru’s Panchsheel
Principles were explicitly incorporated into the Final Communiqué. These
also became the political principles of the nonaligned world. According to
G. H. Jansen, “The Afro-Asian movement, and even more so its offshoot non-
alignment, and still more so the commandments of Panchsheel, all self-
consciously and deliberately produced standards of judgement and principles
of political conduct.”25
In a sense, “5 Principle No-s” is a postmodern Panchsheel. The artists do
not evoke the pageantry of Bandung. At its most generic, the work proposes
principles not dissimilar from a series of negations, such as “noninterfer-
ence” and “nonaggression.”26 There is something less than reverential about
this piece, at least as far as it relates to the Bandung Spirit. Nor are the
speakers presumptively nations or statesmen. And so, how we imagine and
reinterpret the speakers and settings behind the principles (now open to
speculation) becomes crucial to understanding their meaning and potential.
With the Panchsheel Principles, the setting was a treaty, which is similar to
a contract; in the case of a declaration, the interlocutor becomes a joint
speaker. More optimistically, these principles may not be sovereign exhort-
ations and dehortations at all27: neither a code of conduct a state imposed
on its subjects (as the Pancasila) nor principles that sovereigns agreed to
bilaterally, but constraints upon sovereigns that their subjects articulated.
Read this way, “5 Principle No-s” walks a line between cynicism over grand
statements issued from above and an idealism that may well exceed the
original. It is both site-specific (that is, it accrues meaning from its location)
24
See Articles 2 (1) and 2 (4) of the UN Charter, available at www.un.org/aboutun/charter/.
25
G. H. Jansen, Afro-Asia and Non-Alignment (London: Faber and Faber, 1966), p. 17. Yet a
decade later, applying these very criteria to the policies and conduct of their creators in Afro-
Asia, Jansen finds them hypocritical and lacking in courage.
26
Although the phrase “take no prisoners” sounds merciful on its surface, it usually refers to
taking an overly aggressive stance in something analogous to a combat situation. The phrase is
akin to “give no quarter.”
27
Hobbes in chapter 2.9 of Leviathan sets up in the tradition of rhetoric and oratory terms such as
exhortation, dehortation, counsel, and command. The language of command prefigures the
voice of the sovereign: “But where a man may lawfully command, as a father in his family, or a
leader in an army, his exhortations and dehortations are not only lawful, but also necessary and
laudable: but when they are no more counsels, but commands.”
and translocal (iterations can be made in different locations). It can provide

meta-commentary on shifting locations: in Shanghai foregrounding the rise
of China as a center within the periphery, and in Singapore a meta-
commentary on Asian principles in transition from authoritarianism. One
could imagine iterations in Delhi, Jakarta, or Bandung, or in Tibet or the
Northeastern frontiers between India and China, where the two states
bilaterally sacrificed the welfare of peoples on both sides of the border.
The notion of Panchsheel would be received differently, and an iteration of
the work would pull in the security policies of the State, and the shifting
allegiances of the those being subject to empty promises, killed, harmed,
imprisoned, and encroached upon. In the end, the implication of the work
is that principles are site-specific but also translocal, shared across historic-
ally linked geographies.
Production and Practice: Documenta to Shanghai

By the time Hartono and Raqs were commissioned for the Bandung
Pavilion, the line of descent from Bandung to the Pavilion converged
with a second set of developments, which can also be traced to 1955. The
same year as Bandung, the first edition of a perennial exhibition called
Documenta, “the 100-day museum,” was inaugurated on a separate set of
ruins in a neoclassical Museum Fridericianum, one of the few surviving
structures of the bombed-out German city of Kassel. For 100 days every
five years, it has been the most prestigious perennial event in the Euro-
pean art world. At the time of Bandung, the discourses that dominated
advanced art were the (then-conflicting) discourses of modernism and
avant-gardism, which focused almost exclusively on art from America
and Europe.28
According to Geeta Kapur, “Non-western nations, though struggling with
the processes of modernization, are excluded from modernism per se. Or they
are seen to be incidental to it.”29 Curated once every five years by an artist or
curator, Documenta remained tied to the closed and site-specific context of
postwar Europe30 until 2002, when Nigerian curator Okwui Enwezor opened
28
Hal Foster, Rosalind Krauss, Yve-Alain Boi, and Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, Art Since 1900:
Modernism, Antimodernism, Postmodernism (New York: Thames and Hudson, 2005).
29
Geeta Kapur, “Contemporary Cultural Practice: Some Polemical Categories” (1990) 18 Social
Scientist 3, at 54.
30
After Year Zero: Geographies of Collaboration since 1945, Exhibition Sept. 19–Nov. 24,
2013 Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Germany.
148 Vik Kanwar
up the exhibition to five platforms in Vienna, Berlin, New Delhi, St. Lucia,
and Lagos.31
In many ways, Documenta 11 in 2002 was the Bandung Moment of con-
temporary art. In the relatively few years since that exhibition, it is already
regularly invoked as a placeholder for the entry of the Global South into
contemporary art. It took Documenta out of Kassel and into cities near
(Vienna, Berlin) and far (New Delhi, St. Lucia, and Lagos), engaging
with topics such as creolization, truth and reconciliation, and African
urbanization.
When positioning Documenta 11 as a Bandung Moment, it is not as simple
as saying it brought the Third World to contemporary art. The case could be
made here for the São Paulo Biennial or the Havana Biennial, the latter of
which was tied explicitly to the Tricontinental Spirit with the inclusion in
1966 of Latin America into what began as an Afro-Asian solidarity movement.32
Instead, the manner in which Bandung intervened in the relations between
sovereign states – pushing toward universal membership while asserting a third
alternative to the prevailing ideological poles – is precisely how Documenta
11 intervened in the global contemporary in art.33 Prior to Documenta 11,
issues of difference had drifted from the assertion of Third World practice.
Documenta 11 sidestepped the awkwardness that prevailed over major exhib-
itions dealing with difference in recent years, all of which acted as though
Bandung never happened and, like the Third World, consisted of a vast
ethnographic expanse of expedition, collection, and comparison somewhere
south of sovereignty and east of equality.34 Documenta 11 marked and inaugur-
ated a set of commitments from 2002 to the present, as well as a transnational
and transcultural sensibility decades apart from Bandung, but folding in
31
See Okwui Enwezor, Carlos Basualdo, Ute Meta Bauer, Susanne Ghez, Sarat Maharaj, Mark
Nash, and Octavio (eds.), Zaya Documenta 11_Platform 5 (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 2002).
The Documenta 11 exhibition, organized by a seven-person team directed by Okwui Enwezor,
took place in Kassel, Germany, from June 8 to September 15, 2002.
32
Simon Njami, Lucy Durán, et al., Africa Remix: Contemporary Art of a Continent, Museum
Kunst Palast (Düsseldorf, Germany), Johannesburg Art Gallery (Johannesburg: Jacana Media,
2007).
33
The Documenta 11 exhibition took place through five platforms on four continents.
34
Engagements with the non-West simply ignored Bandung, the Third World, or that non-
Western people live in a world populated by states. This began with the controversial
“Primitivism” exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, followed by the seminal
Magiciens de la terre in 1989 at the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris. The latter improved
upon the former only insofar as it recognized living traditions of art and placed them alongside
works by contemporary artists working in the West. However, both exhibitions tended to place
non-Western works in a kind of “ethnographic present.”
NAM,35 Third World, tricontinental, as well as other notions of thirdness (the

notion of the Third World as a rejection of alternatives also prefigures “third
space”36 and “third cinema”) in the context of art.
If non-Western contemporary art did not arrive with a sense of self-assertion
that allowed for a Bandung moment prior to 2002, a lag time that would be
surprising if it were not for the insulation of avant-gardes from broader forms of
diversity and inclusion. According to Kobena Mercer,
Documenta 11 unwittingly revealed that there is still no satisfactory or widely
agreed vocabulary for dealing with “difference” in contemporary culture . . .
[t]he visual arts have been historically slower in accepting the creative
inclusion of different cultures such that “world art” still sounds odd whereas
“world music” is commonplace. Attempting to hold open a space for such
unresolved debates in the present context of the public sphere, Documenta’s
desire to redeem “difference” inevitably revealed a persistent fault line that
cuts between the huge questions of global politics and the small pleasures
offered by art.37
At Documenta 11, Enwezor again described the world as a “constellation of

public spheres.”38 This was apparent not only in the five platforms but also
from the works.39 Raqs Media Collective’s work shown at Documenta
11 expressed through an assemblage of video, text, sound, print, and signage
the way inhabitants experience space and the restrictions placed on their
movements – the fragility of a living commons. With phrases like “You are
entering a zero-tolerance zone,” “Make no trouble here,” or “Access denied.
Have you registered with the relevant authorities?” covering the streets of
35
The journal ArtMargins is looking at this; for example, art under nonaligned former
Yugoslavia.
36
Homi K. Bhaba, The Location of Culture (New York: Routledge, 1994), p. 218. According to
Bhaba, the “non-synchronous temporality of global and national cultures opens up a cultural
space – a third space – where the negotiation of incommensurable differences creates a tension
peculiar to borderline existences.”
37
Kobena Mercer, “Documenta 11,” Frieze, Issue 69 (Sept. 2002), available at www.frieze.com/
issue/article/documenta_113/.
38
Okwui Enwezor, “The black box, in Documenta 11_Platform 5: Exhibition catalogue”
(Ostfildern: Hatje Cantz, 2002), pp. 42–55.
39
Documenta 11_Platform 1, Democracy unrealized. 2002. Ostfildern-Ruit: Hatje Cantz;
Documenta 11_Platform 2, Experiments with truth: transitional justice and the processes of
truth and reconciliation. 2002. Ostfildern-Ruit: Hatje Cantz; Documenta 11_Platform 3,
Créolité and creolization. 2003. Ostfildern-Ruit: Hatje Cantz; Documenta 11_Platform 4,
Under siege: four African cities – Freetown, Johannesburg, Kinshasa, Lagos. 2002. Ostfildern-
Ruit: Hatje Cantz; Documenta 11_Platform 5: Exhibition catalogue. 2002. Ostfildern-Ruit:
Hatje Cantz.
150 Vik Kanwar
Kassel in four languages – Hindi, English, Turkish, and German – the public
spaces of disparate cities and localities were linked virtually.40
Raqs Media Collective’s work also exemplifies the spirit of Documenta 11 in
its emphasis on translocality. The Collective views its work as “nodes in an
expanding network that intersects at key points with other networks which may
have originated in other cities.” Raqs emphasizes the density and intensity of
pathways between cities and not nation-states as such: “Between Delhi and
Bangalore, between Delhi and Lahore, Delhi and Kathmandu, Delhi and
Berlin, New York, Beirut, Bandung.” Its NGO, Sarai, links up with initiatives
in São Paulo, Beirut, Bandung, Mexico City, Kolkata, and Mumbai. A show
curated by Raqs Media Collective in 2014 similarly disclosed the possibilities
of the “global contemporary” piecemeal, taking webs as a metaphor for
everything from the cosmos to our communication systems, from entrapment
to sociality, as well as actual spiderwebs set alongside maps and networks,
bondage videos, and drone strikes, while taking up the consequences of
neoliberal development: demolitions, displacement, and land grabs.41
Ten years after Documenta 11, the Shanghai Biennale adopted a variation
on the platform model with four thematic platforms (albeit within the city),
but also a number of Inter-City pavilions. Among these, the Bandung Pavilion
was commissioned as part of an intercity project, and the “5 Principle No-s”
was part of a Pavilion that playfully echoed the Conference. Before the
Biennale the organizers articulated this concept,
These works will be physically produced in Bandung in a way that mirrors
the host-guest relationship of the original conference. Hopefully, some sur-
prises for both sides will be provided, in a similar way to the debates
developed in 1955.42
At the same Pavilion, a number of artists from countries including Egypt,

Lebanon, India, Thailand, and Turkey were invited to join in Cadaver Exquis,
a video version of “Exquisite Corpse” – an unfolding video project named
after and based on the old Surrealist drawing game where artists collaborated
on a folded paper, with all but a short section of the previous work concealed.
The resulting film shown at the Bandung Pavilion, twenty minutes in length,
“begins in the city of Bandung and ends in Indonesia, closing the loop on a
40
Raqs Media Collective, “28º28N0 /77º15E::2001/2002, An installation on the coordinates of
everyday life – Delhi, 2001/2002,” Documenta 11 (2002).
41
INSERT2014, curated by Raqs Media Collective, Mati Ghar, Indira Gandhi National Centre
for the Arts (IGNCA), from January 31 to February 28, 2014, available at www.insert2014.in/wp-
content/uploads/2014/01/INSERT2014Publication_Web.pdf.
42
See http://arthubasia.org/project/9th-shanghai-biennale-bandung-pavilion.
journey through an international territory that was first marked out in 1955 in
Bandung.”43
All these maneuvers – a focus on circuits and cities and not states and
nations, translocality, and ambivalence – indicate the possibilities of a disas-
sembled aesthetic of Bandung. And yet as new aesthetic possibilities are
generated, so are political and ethical risks. Sixty years after Bandung, with
the Documenta 11 project fully implicated, the tropes of Afro-Asian solidarity
may also be enlisted by neoliberalism and even South-South neocolonialism.
This was witnessed in the now-canceled Kenyan Pavilion at the 2015 Venice
Biennale, which included fourteen Chinese artists, none of whom had ever
visited Kenya, and only one native Kenyan.44 The Pavilion’s foreign curators
and promoters cited the transnational turn and the overall theme (“All the
Word’s Futures” – again curated and formulated by Documenta’s Enwezor) as
a justification for its unrepresentative character. The resulting controversy
revealed something more about the flows of capital, reputation, and resources
along a South-South axis: For all the invocations of Bandung-era solidarity,
some Southern coordinates have emerged more powerful than others. Separ-
ately, we might observe how the Venice Biennale itself, and as a whole,
dramatizes a historical fissure: the state-sponsored Pavilions based on World’s
Fair– and Olympic–style nationalism sit uncomfortably beside translocal and
transnational sensibility that drives the main exhibition. This leads to some
uncertainty about the relationship between the two, and also indirectly meas-
ures the distance between Bandung-era pageantry and its Documenta 11
descendants.
an aesthetic of thirdness
When we survey the aesthetic dimensions of Bandung and its successor
projects over the past sixty years, a certain aesthetic is plain. The aesthetic of
the Third World and nonalignment is not simple negation, as in the
43
See “Bandung Pavilion Featured at the 9th Shanghai Biennale,” ArtHub Asia, available at
http://arthubasia.org/project/9th-shanghai-biennale-bandung-pavilion. Bandung Pavilion
curators were Defne Ayas, Charles Esche, Davide Quadrio, and Agung Hujatnikajennong.
The collaborative artists were Duto Hardono (Indonesia) with Meiro Koizumi (Japan); Iswanto
Hartono (Indonesia) with Raqs Media Collective (India); Syagini Ratna Wulan (Indonesia)
with Yason Banal (Philippines) and Wiyoga Muhardanto (Indonesia) with Arin Rungjang
(Thailand). The artists taking part in the Cadavre Exquis film were Muhammed Akbar
(Indonesia), Mounira AL-Solh (Lebanon), Mahmoud Khaled (Egypt), Didem Ozbek
(Turkey), Surasi Kusolwond (Thailand), Wang Wei (China), and Hafiz (Indonesia).
44
Serubiri Moses, “Outrage over Chinese artists chosen to represent Kenya at Venice Biennale,”
The Guardian, April 15, 2015.
152 Vik Kanwar
Panchsheel Principles or “The 5 Principle No-s.” The structure is not neg-

ation or imperative but a sense of neither/nor, or strategic in-between-ness.
This is what we can call – generalizing Leoné Anette Van Niekerk’s charac-
terization of Documenta 11 – an “aesthetic of thirdness.”45 Van Niekerk – who
in turn borrows the term from curator Philippe Vergne46 – defines thirdness as
an aesthetic orientation corresponding to “threshold consciousness as trickster
positioning”: “Such an adversarial, interstitial aesthetic shows a firm commit-
ment to the vigor of an aesthetic space not made impotent by hegemonising
forces of the art market and cultural globalization.”47
The term thirdness has no clear precedent in the longer-term context of the
Third World, but the positioning (against one and the other, and maintaining
autonomy against two alternatives)48 is the essence of nonalignment. Insofar as
the notion of the Third World is the rejection of alternatives (whether as
Alfred Sauvy’s interpellation of the Third Estate,49 Mao Tse-Tung’s Three
Worlds Theory,50 or the Non-Aligned Movement), the thirdness of the Third
World prefigures Homi K. Bhaba’s concept of third space,51 Solanas and
45
Leoné Anette Van Niekerk, “Documenta 11 as Exemplar for Transcultural Curating: A Critical
Analysis,” PhD dissertation (Visual Studies) in the Faculty of Humanities, University of
Pretoria (April 2007), at 219.
46
Philippe Vergne, “Globalization from the Rear: ‘Would You Care to Dance, Mr. Malevich?’”
in How Latitudes Become Forms: Art in a Global Age (Minneapolis: Walker Art Center), at 22.
This exhibition, curated by Vergne in the wake of Documenta 11, shares its sensibility. This is
evidenced by Raqs Media Collective’s “Temporary Autonomous Sarai (TAS),” a translocal
collaboration with Japanese architectural practice Atelier Bow-Wow.
47
Van Niekerk, “Documenta 11 as Exemplar.”
48
This separates it from the earliest known usage, by American semiotician Charles Peirce, who
says, “Thirdness is the mode of being of that which is such as it is, in bringing a second and
third into relation to each other.” Charles Sanders Peirce, “A Letter to Lady Welby,” Collected
Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce, 8 volumes, Vols. 1–6 (eds. Charles Hartshorne and Paul
Weiss), Vols. 7–8 (ed. Arthur W. Burks) (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,
1931–1958), Vol. 8, p. 328.
49
Leslie Wolf-Phillips, “Why ‘Third World’?: Origin, Definition and Usage” (1987) 9 Third
World Quarterly 4, at 1311–1327. Alfred Sauvy, in an article published in the French magazine
L’Observateur on August 14, 1952, coined the term Third World: “This third world ignored,
exploited, despised like the third estate also wants to be something.” He conveyed the concept
of political non-alignment with either the capitalist or communist bloc. Cecil Crabb, The
Elephants and the Grass: A Study of Nonalignment (New York: Frederick A. Praeger, 1965),
summarizes the basic reasons for the non-aligned stance of most Afro-Arab-Asian countries in
the following African proverb: “When two elephants fight, it is the grass that suffers.”
50
“Chairman Mao’s Theory of the Differentiation of the Three Worlds is a Major Contribution
to Marxism-Leninism.” Renmin Ribao (People’s Daily) (November 1, 1977); Reprinted in
pamphlet form in English by Foreign Languages Press, Peking, 1977.
51
Bhaba, Location of Culture, p. 218. “Non-synchronous temporality of global and national
cultures opens up a cultural space – a third space – where the negotiation of incommensurable
differences creates a tension peculiar to borderline existences.” Here, drawing upon Fredric
Getino’s third cinema,52 and Rasheed Araeen’s journal Third Text.53 But as we
have seen, the aesthetics of thirdness have transformed between the eras of
Bandung Humanism54 and Documenta 11 translocalism. As an interstitial
aesthetic, thirdness is closer to Bhaba’s hybridity55 than Mignolo’s de-linking,
but close to the latter, artists would aspire to strategies that render them
“indigestible to the system.” According to Geeta Kapur,
The term third world, full of problems, comes in handy for primarily
ideological reasons. In a sense it supersedes or even denies historical
sense in order to be polemically effective. Third world is a new world
emerging to chastise the first and the second worlds. By definition
volatile, it is possible that the third world wedges itself in the global bind
established between the first and the second worlds. But issues are
confounded when the term is used not as a simple lever but substantively,
as a concept.56
What would it look like to use the term Third World as a lever and a wedge?
Would it operate, in Bhaba’s terms, as “the inter” or “the cutting edge of
translation and negotiation, the in-between space – that carries the burden of
the meaning of culture”? Philippe Vergne, for example, adopts the third space
Jameson, Bhaba seems to mean something more than his better-known concepts of “in-
between states and moments of hybridity” (p. 208). Vergne credits Bhaba (who never actually
says “thirdness”) with conceptualizing “third space” (which is probably Fredric Jameson’s term)
as “a key element in enunciating and conceptualizing a new international culture based on
hybridity.” Apropos to the relation between Bandung and Documenta 11, this third space would
be “a space that collapses new cultural practices and historical narratives.”
52
Fernando Solanas and Octavio Getino, “Toward a Third Cinema,” Tricontinental, no. 14 (Oct.
1969), at 107–132. Translated and archived at http://documentaryisneverneutral.com/words/
camasgun.html.
53
Julian Stallabrass, Art Incorporated: The Story of Contemporary Art (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2004), p. 35. He tracks the relationship between the art world and global capital, and
notes the rise of Third World art events as an aspect of globalization, where “cultural difference
has become so readily marketable.” Critical traditions are put in a reactive mode: “Third Text,
a journal devoted to fostering and analysing Third World perspectives on art and culture, has
had to shift its primary purpose from making such art and opinion visible to exploring the
conditions of its remarkable success.”
54
Amir Mufti, “The Late Style of Bandung Humanism,” The Arts of Bandung Humanism
Conference, The Fowler Museum at UCLA, April 19, 2015. This conference broadly defined
Bandung Humanism as “forms of progressive imagination and internationalism that emerged
from the societies of the Global South.” Available at http://fowler.ucla.edu/events/arts-
bandung-humanism-conference.
55
Bhaba, Location of Culture, p. 218. According to Bhaba, the “non-synchronous temporality of
global and national cultures opens up a cultural space – a third space – where the negotiation
of incommensurable differences creates a tension peculiar to borderline existences.”
56
Kapur, “Contemporary Cultural Practice,” at 54.
154 Vik Kanwar
concept as the basis for “thirdness,”57 but also in order to invoke the title of
Leslie Adelson’s manifesto “Against Between,” to suggest the concept is too
complacent. “It is not sufficient merely to acknowledge the notion of third-
ness; one needs to make it active, to pull it toward an alternative center. If not,
thirdness might become a definition that restrains and limits new knowledge
rather than one that empowers it.”58 What remains of the Third World in the
practice of artists and scholars is thus a kind of thirdness that means alterity
and negativity, which is tethered to an understanding of Bandung as a site of
multiple concrete interventions – ruins, so to speak, on which new fragments
may be built. This potential can be seen in recent and future manifestations
of TWAIL.
the aesthetics of twail

The implications of thirdness and the nature of artistic projects come to rest
upon Third World Approaches to International Law (TWAIL). TWAIL, a
successor of Bandung, moves that project forward but also remembers the
purpose for which it set out. The origin of TWAIL remains a matter of
contention. There are two significant narratives. The first, supported by
Makau Mutua, contends that TWAIL was born with Bandung.59 The second
asserts that TWAIL is a relatively recent phenomenon that traces its origins to
around 1996, as James Gathii has documented.60 These contending temporal-
ities are generally reconciled by reference to two generations. The first
generation (TWAIL I) pursued the project from the 1950s to about the
1980s, and was an outgrowth of anticolonial solidarities. The second gener-
ation (TWAIL II) was a critical and scholarly movement, originating around
Harvard Law School and founded by diaspora scholars. The generational
account holds, “[t]he work of contemporary TWAIL scholars [TWAIL II]
builds on and develops the work done by pioneering third world jurists
57
Leslie A. Adelson, “Against between: A Manifesto,” in Salah Hassan and Iftikhar Dadi (eds.),
Unpacking Europe: Towards a Critical Reading (Rotterdam: Museum Boijmans Van
Beuningen, 2001), p. 245.
58
Philippe Vergne, “Globalization from the Rear,” at 18–27.
59
Makau W. Mutua, “What Is TWAIL?” American Society of International Law, Proceedings of
the 94th Annual Meeting, 2000, at 31–39. (“TWAIL is not a recent phenomenon. It stretches
back to the decolonization movement that swept the globe after World War II. Bandung was
the symbolic birthplace of TWAIL.”)
60
Gathii, “TWAIL: A Brief History.” Gathii also subscribes to a generational account. “It has
sought to capture a sliver of the origins of TWAIL in the contemporary period and in North
America in particular. However, TWAIL goes back decades in the scholarship of the first
generation of postcolonial scholars in Latin America, Asia, Africa and elsewhere.”
[TWAIL I].”61 The generational account misses the creative role of the second
TWAIL in constituting the earlier one, in reconstructing imaginatively a
Bandung worldview. We might conjure Jorge Luis Borges’s dictum that “every
writer creates his own precursors”62 to understand how the second invented, or
at least annexed, its precursors anachronistically.63
In conversation, B. S. Chimni, one of the founders of TWAIL II, has
described this as a self-aware and strategic choice for which he would take
credit or blame. This act of retrospective myth making is not usually com-
mented upon. An alternative to the generational account could be called
“Two Projects.” It views TWAIL as not merely a political or legal-scholarly
movement, but also an aesthetic and managerial one. As David Kennedy
noted in the keynote of the first decade of TWAIL, it was a “project” par
excellence:
I tend to think about projects like the TWAIL in several registers – as
intellectual efforts to intervene in disciplinary knowledge we have about
how our society is organized, as personal projects of identity, assertion and
community, as political efforts to write a new world into being, and insti-
tutional efforts to routinize, establish, reproduce and extend those political,
personal and intellectual projects.64
In an aesthetic sense, if TWAIL was an attempt (like Bandung) to “write a

new world into being,” it was not a triumphal project but one built on the
ruins of Bandung, with the intention of piecing it together from its frag-
ments. In this sense, TWAIL has been an act of invention – forward utopia,
backward nostalgia, forward fragment, backward ruin – all along. The
TWAIL project has been one of creativity and claiming, participating in
the production and reinvention of a discourse. Here, nonalignment is
understood as a kind of thirdness, and postnationalism is evident in a
negotiation between site-specificity and translocality. Thirdness is the ani-
mating force behind both the reconstruction of the Bandung chariot and its
charge forward.
61
Antony Anghie, “What Is Twail: Comment” (2000) 94 Proceedings of the ASIL Annual Meeting
39.
62
Jorge Luis Borges, “Kafka and His Precursors” in Other Inquisitions (Austin: University of Texas
Press 1960, trans. 1964).
63
TWAIL II – including Antony Anghie, Vasuki Nesiah, Balakrishnan Rajagopal, James Gathii,
and B. S. Chimni – paid respect and also directed their critiques to a less cohesive group of
scholars they called TWAIL I, scholars of the decolonization era, including T. O. Elias,
Georges Abi-Saab, Mohammed Bedjaoui, C. H. Alexandrowicz, and R. P. Anand.
64
David Kennedy, keynote address, The TWAIL Conference, Albany, April 2007, available at
www.law.harvard.edu/faculty/dkennedy/speeches/TwailKeynote.htm.
156 Vik Kanwar
However, as Kennedy noted, TWAIL is a managerial project:

Institutionally, what nodes and base-camps and toe-holds have TWAILers
found in the professional world – are they sustainable, reproducible? Intel-
lectually and ideologically – how is TWAIL reproduced? Can those who
have learned from TWAIL repeat the lesson – can people who have been
recruited in turn recruit?65
TWAIL is very much a product of its monetary, logistical, ontological, and
epistemological constraints, as well as the interventions made to execute its
functions as best as possible given these constraints. TWAIL should be under-
stood as a series of interventions bound in some cases by time, funding, and
space, but not reducible to any one of these. It survives in flexible networks,66
touching base through conferences, and becoming obdurate only in publica-
tions.67 Here, Kennedy slides between the notion of the project as aesthetic and
managerial, but both aspects have to do with inheritance and reproduction.68
twail and the aesthetics of thirdness

But what has TWAIL inherited and along what lines should it reproduce?
This brings in the contested aspect of TWAIL’s thirdness. According to
Kennedy, “TWAIL’s ability to reproduce itself, extend itself, renew itself, is
tied up with the reproduction of other networks and ideas and ideological
positions: with postmodernism and progressivism.”69 Chimni makes the
opposite point: “A proposed theory of resistance has to avoid the pitfalls of
liberal optimism on the one hand, and left wing pessimism on the other.”70
There is an agreement in this disagreement. In order to reproduce itself,
TWAIL can be understood as adopting a position of thirdness, thereby leaning
65
Ibid. 66
Gathii, “TWAIL: A Brief History.”
67
Any serious sociologist of knowledge would have to locate the origins of TWAIL not only in the
lineage claimed by TWAIL II scholars, but in the New Approaches to International Law
(NAIL), a project led in part by Kennedy.
68
See Adil Hassan Khan’s chapter in this volume. Khan has narrated Bandung as satire, tragedy,
and catastrophe.
69
David Kennedy, keynote address.
70
B. S. Chimni, “Third World Approaches to International Law: A Manifesto” (2006) 8
International Community Law Review, at 3–27. This is echoed in the recent Bandung
Humanisms project a collaboration between the Institute for Comparative Literature and
Society at Columbia and the Seminar in Global Critical Humanities at UCLA (“Bandung
cultural politics enacted a humanism that was radical and guiltless over its call to combat the
dehumanization of societies, since Bandung thinkers and activists felt no need to cultivate the
“anti-humanist” tendencies of the contemporary European intelligentsia, which still holds
radical thinking in a deadlock”). Available at http://icls.columbia.edu/events/page/bandung_
humanisms.
on predecessors and successors to leverage its force. Pulled in two directions,

one might view this thirdness as a specific kind of in-between-ness, or adoles-
cent identity crisis in the midst of a custody battle. But if we see what is at stake
as a false choice between unacceptable alternatives – state violence on one
side and antihumanism on the other – thirdness itself takes on an ethical
character.71 In this way the kinds of resistance born at Bandung may be
preserved and surpassed.
At least rhetorically, TWAIL I did not have to emphasize its alterity; rather,
it identified itself with the larger humanity, and its thirdness consisted mainly
in refusing to align with either side in the Cold War. Its participants shared the
activity of nation building, and fabricated its solidarities on this primary
project. Thirdness in TWAIL II is more complicated, as it claims the legacy
of Bandung humanism while wielding a self-criticality characteristic of post-
modern legal theory. It is non-Western and/or avant-garde: seldom both but
never neither. The ambivalence (encompassing both attachments and aver-
sions) of TWAIL II is not only toward its predecessors but also its contempor-
aries in critical international legal thought. But it cannot adopt the Bandung
optimism wholesale. It notes the “tendency of the post-colonial state to be
based on a false model of the unitary nation,” excluding and suppressing
voices.72 From the beginning, TWAIL II scholars have been less focused on
the possibilities of state-centered developmentalism than on its failures. But
increasingly the world they describe is also one of cities and circuits73; an
emerging generation of TWAIL scholars is beginning to foreground, in the
words of Peter Osborne, a “global constellation of spaces, of places, of non-
places, and flows.”74 It shares this with its generational counterparts in
contemporary art.
conclusion
We do not need to discard the standard TWAIL historiography of the two
generations, but instead see it as a provocation toward alternative genealogies.
71
Here TWAIL can be analogized to the Third Cinema of the 1970s, which sought an alternative
to both the production system of the Hollywood cinema as well as European auteur cinema.
A project like TWAIL participates in alternative spaces, as a self-reflexive non-Western avant-
garde opposed to dominant Western discourses, but also distinct from Western avant-gardes
(critical traditions).
72
Anghie, “What Is TWAIL.”
73
See, e.g., Luis Eslava, Local Space, Global Life: The Everyday Operation of International Law
and Development (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015).
74
Osborne, Anywhere or Not At All, p. 135.
158 Vik Kanwar
This chapter suggests less a story about generations than the conscious con-
struction of projects. The precise span of a generation varies according to
context,75 but by any definition, sixty years seems enough to mark the inaugur-
ation and completion of two generations. Here, on the occasion of the sixtieth
anniversary of Bandung but not yet twenty years since the coining of TWAIL,
it seems less interesting to call for a TWAIL III or to assess the continuing
relevance of the program initiated by TWAIL II than to rework some of the
genealogical assumptions behind TWAIL. There is more than a weak analogy
between the fabrication of a third world and other kinds of thirdness that have
been framed in artistic practice and in international law. Together these offer
suggestions and revisions for the current and future generations of TWAIL
scholars, as well as a better description of work already under way. This is not
to take refuge in or romance with culture wherever political engagement fails,
but rather to describe possibilities that expand as they more accurately
describe the motivations and modes of this dual project. TWAIL becomes
self-conscious, aware as never before of its aesthetic and managerial modes of
being. We are curating nothing so large and looming as a Bandung Moment,
Spirit, or Event, but within the contemporary understanding of the project,
moments, spirits, and events. Whatever fails as a matter of description may be
saved for the future as a possible reinscription.
75
For an interesting discussion of the “generation” as a twentieth-century construct that came to
prominence along with nostalgia and a certain kind of historical self-positioning, see
Christopher Lasch, The True and Only Heaven: Progress and Its Critics (New York:
W. W. Norton, 1991), p. 107.
part ii.
Political Solidarities and Geographical Affiliations

9
Challenging the Lifeline of Imperialism

Reassessing Afro-Asian Solidarity and Related Activism in
the Decade 1955–1965
katharine mcgregor and vannessa hearman
introduction
In his fiery opening speech to the Bandung Conference in 1955, entitled
“Let a New Asia and Africa Be Born,” President Sukarno articulated bold
dreams for the new nations that gained independence following the Second
World War. Critiquing colonialism, imperialism, and racism while charting
a new way amid the polarization of the Cold War, Sukarno suggested the
newly independent countries would constitute a new and important voice in
world politics.1 The principles agreed to at Bandung provided an important
compass not only for the elite leaders of the countries represented but also
for political activists from these countries who looked to Bandung for inspir-
ation in renegotiating entrenched global hierarchies and their place in the
world as the Cold War set in. This chapter challenges political scientist
Jamie Mackie’s argument that “the Bandung conference can best be seen
today as a fleeting moment of convergence of various trends in the post-
colonial history of the world.”2 Mackie focuses on the Conference as a
fleeting moment of consensus, but by looking beyond its impact on elite
politics, such as the Non-Aligned Movement, we can reassess the impact of
the so-called Bandung Spirit on political activists. This chapter examines
how Afro-Asian solidarity and related struggles for economic and political
autonomy connected activists across the Indian Ocean and beyond in
new ways.
In the same speech at Bandung, Sukarno proposed an alternative geo-
graphical conception of the world whereby people were connected on
1
Sukarno, “Let a New Asia and Africa Be Born,” in Herbert Feith and Lance Castles (eds.),
Indonesian Political Thinking, 1945–1965 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1970), pp. 454–460.
2
Jamie Mackie, Konfrontasi: The Indonesia-Malaysia Dispute, 1963–1966 (Kuala Lumpur and
New York: Australian Institute of International Affairs and Oxford University Press, 1974), p. 22.
161
162 Katharine McGregor and Vannessa Hearman
either side of the Straits of Gibraltar, the Mediterranean, the Suez Canal,
the Red Sea, the Indian Ocean, the South China Sea, and the Sea of Japan.
Countries positioned along these waterways comprised, in his words, the
“lifeline of imperialism,” and together they were “awakening” and resisting
imperialism in all its forms. Although the language that Sukarno and other
radical nationalists used to articulate the challenges facing the countries of
Asia and Africa and their capacity to shape their destinies seems dramatic
(and at times romantic), the emphasis on the continued Western economic
hold over these nations in the 1950s and 1960s fits with recent scholarly
analysis of the very slow decolonization processes and the economic motives
of former and new colonial powers that underpinned this.3 Furthermore,
Sukarno’s emphasis on the Indian Ocean provides an alternative geographic
conception of the world that scholars have recently found highly productive
in terms of reconceptualizing transnational connections brought about
through trade and the practice of slavery over several centuries of formal
imperialism through to more recent political connections across this zone
during the Cold War.4
The shared struggle for a more equal global order produced new solidarities
that have not yet been fully appreciated. In their study of the global color line
and concurrent efforts around the world to defend whiteness as a transnational
form of identification, Marilyn Lake and Henry Reynolds suggest that
Benedict Anderson’s emphasis on the nation as a natural unit and an
“imagined community” has paradoxically “obscured the ascendancy of trans-
national racial identifications and their potency in shaping both personal
identity and global politics.”5 Taking this point further, we wish to reassess
the impact on personal and global politics of an alternative form of identifica-
tion, that of Afro-Asian solidarity, which was in large part a reaction to the
perceived continuation of white dominance. In doing so we are conscious
of Christopher Lee’s critique of “a triumphal narrative of postcolonial
autonomy” and we follow his suggestion that we instead need to “recuperate
3
Odd Arne Westad, The Global Cold War: Third World Interventions and the Making of Our
Times (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007).
4
See, e.g., Shanti Moorthy and Jamal Ashraf (eds.), Indian Ocean Studies: Cultural, Social and
Political Perspectives (Hoboken: Routledge, 2009), and Christopher Lee, “The Indian Ocean
During the Cold War: Thinking Through a Critical Geography” (2013) 11 History Compass 7,
at 524–530.
5
Marilyn Lake and Henry Reynolds, Drawing the Global Colour Line: White Men’s Countries
and the International Challenge of Racial Equality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2008), p. 7.
Challenging the Lifeline of Imperialism 163
a more useable past by identifying the varied locations and complex, situated
meanings of ‘Afro-Asianism.’”6
One of the most significant expressions of Third World solidarity after
Bandung was the Afro-Asian Peoples’ Solidarity Organization (AAPSO),
which was inaugurated at the Afro-Asian Conference of December 1957 to
January 1958 in Cairo. The seeds of AAPSO originated in the people-to-people
nongovernmental Conference of Asian Countries held in 1955 in New Delhi,
which preceded Bandung by only a few days. At this conference, held April
6–10, 1955, 250 delegates from 16 Asian countries met to discuss peace in the
Asian region.7 Studying the issues and ideas promoted by AAPSO and affili-
ated organizations leads to reevaluating the meaning of Afro-Asian solidarity in
the decade 1955 to 1965. This chapter asks how people in this organization
interpreted the Bandung Spirit and articulated an alternative worldview
through their actions and the causes for which they campaigned.
Until now, many have dismissed AAPSO as a “very radical”8 (presumably
meaning communist) organization and studied it only through the lens of
Cold War politics – that is, the contest between the Soviet Union and China
for control of Asia and Africa.9 In response to Szonyi and Liu’s critique that
much of the historiography of the Cold War continues to focus on elites and
artificially divorces Asian experiences from other global processes under way –
such as decolonization, nation-building, revolution, and economic globaliza-
tion – this chapter examines how non-Western actors, including Asians and
Africans, responded to these simultaneous challenges.10
This chapter focuses primarily on the decade beginning 1955 because Afro-
Asian solidarity suffered serious setbacks by 1965. This is most strongly symbol-
ized by the failure to hold a second formal Asia-Africa conference. According
6
Christopher Lee, “Between a Moment and an Era and an Era: the Origins and Afterlives of
Bandung,” in Christopher Lee (ed.) Making a World after Empire: The Bandung Moment and
its Political Afterlives (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2010), pp. 3–4.
7
Asian delegates at the Stockholm Meeting for the Relaxation of International Tension in June
1954 proposed the idea for this conference. “Conference of Asian Countries” (1955) 9 Bulletin
of the World Council of Peace, at 7.
8
Jamie Mackie, Bandung: Non-Alignment and Afro-Asian Solidarity (Singapore: Editions Didier
Millet, 2005), p. 109.
9
See Charles Neuhauser, Third World Politics: China and the Afro-Asian Peoples’ Solidarity
Organisation, 1957–67 (Cambridge, MA: East Asian Research Center, Harvard University,
1968), and Darryl C. Thomas, “The Impact of the Sino-Soviet Conflict on the Afro-Asian
Peoples’ Solidarity Organization: Afro-Asianism versus Non-Alignment, 1955–1966” (1992) 11
Journal of Asian and African Affairs 2, at 167–191.
10
Michael Szonyi and Hong Liu, “New Approaches to the Study of the Cold War in Asia,” in
Szonyi and Liu (eds.), The Cold War in Asia: The Battle for Hearts and Minds (Leiden: Brill,
2010), pp. 1–11.
to Mackie, the second conference did not transpire because of “disputes,

recriminations and wars” between Asian and African countries in the 1960s,
“as the world order became more fissured and multipolar.”11 This is part of the
story, but Afro-Asian solidarity was also seriously affected by the forced removal
from power of political leaders Mehdi Ben Barka (Morocco), Felix Moumié
(Cameroon), Patrice Lumumba (Congo), Sukarno (Indonesia), and Ben
Bella (Algeria). In all cases, the leaders’ removal resulted in the rise of pro-
Western regimes.12 These men threatened the interests of colonial powers
because of their economic policies and ideologies, which favored national
independence and strict limits on foreign economic control.
the bandung conference

By 1955, when Indonesia hosted the Bandung Conference, many Asian
countries had gained independence and the Vietnamese had just defeated
the French after an eight-year war, bringing a new sense of pride to anti-
colonialists. At the same time, there were growing concerns across the coun-
tries of Asia and Africa about continuing colonialism in Africa, foreign
intervention, and the pressure to choose sides in the Cold War. The represen-
tatives from twenty-nine countries ranged ideologically from those who sup-
ported nonalignment in the Cold War (India, Burma, and Indonesia) to those
who supported Western security treaties such as the SEATO (South East
Asian Treaty Organization) agreement of 1954, which aimed at curtailing
communist influence. The Conference raised concerns in the Soviet Union
and the United States, and alarmed colonial powers the Netherlands, Britain,
and France, who feared a communist-backed “anti-white” coalition of Afro-
Asian states united by racial solidarity and anticolonialism.13
Conference delegates formulated the principles of Bandung, emphasizing
equality between nations, territorial sovereignty, nonintervention by other
nations, mutual cooperation, and peaceful conduct. For example, despite
the promises of equal rights “of nations large and small” contained in the
1945 UN Charter, this was not the practice. The UN had not recognized the
People’s Republic of China. The Democratic Republic of Vietnam declared
independence in 1945 but had had to fight against the return of French
11
Mackie, Bandung: Non-alignment and Afro-Asian Solidarity, p. 26.
12
On assassinations in the Middle East and Africa and their motives, see Victoria Brittain, “They
Had to Die: Assassination against Liberation” (2006) 28 Race and Class 1, at 60–74.
13
University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010), p. 17.
colonial powers. Despite the withdrawal of French troops in 1954, Vietnam

was forcibly divided between South Vietnam and the Democratic Republic of
Vietnam in the north. For the conference host country, Indonesia, the
continuing Dutch occupation of West Irian was one of many examples of
stalled independence struggles. The presence of foreign military bases and the
American occupation of Korea and Japan also raised concerns about territorial
sovereignty. The experience of the Second World War and the outbreak of
new wars led conference delegates to focus on the importance of peace and
halting the arms race. The Conference also emphasized mutual support and
explored possible scientific, cultural, and political cooperation. The Bandung
principles guided Afro-Asian solidarity from 1955 onward. Following Lee, one
of the most significant effects of Bandung was “the feeling of political possi-
bility represented through the first occasion of ‘Third World’ solidarity, what
was soon referred to as the ‘Bandung Spirit.’”14
the founding of afro-asian peoples’ solidarity

organization
The 1955 Non-government Conference of Asian Countries in Delhi set up
solidarity committees and expressed their support for the Bandung meeting of
Asian and African leaders. These committees focused on renewing and creat-
ing networks among African and Asian activists and movements based on the
assumption that people from this region had common problems and desires.15
In October 1957, these solidarity committees proposed a second conference
to involve African countries. They believed such a conference was needed
because of the “ominous” state of the world due to threats posed by the
manufacture and testing of nuclear weapons. Furthermore, they remained
frustrated by the inability of African and Asian peoples to enjoy the fruits of
independence because of foreign intervention. According to Ibrahim Isa, an
Indonesian delegate to the Conference, Cairo was chosen as the host city as a
sign of support for President Nasser following his bold move to nationalize the
Suez Canal on July 26, 1956, in the face of strong disagreement from Britain
and France.16 By gaining control of the canal, Nasser was able to show that
economic self-determination through nationalization was possible. His actions
became an important global precedent for other Afro-Asian leaders.
Dr. Anup Singh, a member of parliament for India’s Congress Party, stated
that Nasser had delivered “a shattering blow to imperialism” at the Suez
14
Lee, “Between a Moment,” p. 15. 15
Bulletin of the World Council of Peace, at 15.
16
Ibrahim Isa, Interview with Katharine McGregor, Amsterdam, Aug. 13, 2011.
Canal.17 Suggesting continuity between Bandung and Cairo, Singh described

how Afro-Asian solidarity committees established in each country had been
working to popularize the “Bandung Spirit.” His appeal that “the Cairo
Conference be the People’s Bandung” suggests some delegates wanted to
see a further popularization of certain ideals put forward at Bandung.
The Bandung emphasis on furthering the decolonization process con-
tinued at the Cairo conference. One of two designated speakers on colonial-
ism was Dr. Felix-Roland Moumié of the Cameroons, which was still under
UN trusteeship. Moumié was a medical doctor and president of the radical
nationalist party UPC (Union of the People of Cameroon), which advocated
an end to UN trusteeship and a reunification of the British and French
Cameroons.18 At the time he spoke to the Cairo conference, the French
had proscribed the UPC in the Cameroon from July 1955. The UPC moved
to the British Cameroon, but on May 30, 1957, the British also banned the
UPC and arrested a number of its leaders.
In this political context, in his speech Moumié congratulates Tunisia,
Morocco, Sudan, and Ghana for achieving independence after Bandung,
claiming the conference inspired hope in independence movements and lent
them “new vigour.”19 Quoting comments from colonialists such as Jules Ferry
and Montesquieu, which betray their aims of exploitation for profit, he
implores conference delegates to “condemn colonialism as a crime against
humanity” and for independent African and Asian countries to help non-
independent states to win their freedom and “above all to support in every way
the peoples of the countries taking part in their struggle for national liber-
ation.” He appeals to the delegates, stating, “This is not only a duty for them,
but also a necessity.”20 In line with Moumié’s call, pro-independence organ-
izations such as the National Liberation Front (Front Liberation Nationale,
FLN) in Algeria were later represented in the Afro-Asian Peoples’ Solidarity
Organization (AAPSO).
The second designated speaker on colonialism was Sirajuddin Abbas, an
Indonesian who later participated in many AAPSO meetings and was a leader
17
Anup Singh, “Report by Dr Anup Singh (India),” in Afro-Asian Peoples’ Solidarity Conference,
Cairo, December 26, 1957–January 1, 1958 (Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House,
1958), p. 64.
18
Meredith Terretta, “Cameroonian Nationalists Go Global: From Forest Maquis to a Pan
African Accra” (2010) 51 Journal of African History 2, at 194.
19
Felix-Roland Moumié, “Report by Dr Felix-Roland Moumié (Cameroon),” in Afro-Asian
Peoples’ Solidarity Conference, Cairo, December 26, 1957–January 1, 1958 (Moscow: Foreign
Languages Publishing House, 1958), p. 88.
20
Id., p. 100.
of the Indonesian Afro-Asian solidarity committee in Jakarta. He was a

member of the traditionalist Muslim organization PERTI (Persatuan Tarbiyah
Islamiyah) in Indonesia.21 Abbas reaffirmed Indonesia’s commitment to neu-
trality at this conference, stating that the nation opposed imperialism from
wherever it came.22
As the second speaker on colonialism, Abbas reminded delegates that
Indonesia had not forgotten the support offered from African and Asian
countries during the Indonesian struggle for independence of 1945–1949,
noting that this compelled Indonesians to support other nations in their
struggles. Abbas called for a resolution supporting many specific struggles,
including those of the peoples of Algeria, Palestine, South Arabia, Cyprus, the
Cameroons, Ifni, and Taiwan.23 He defended Indonesia’s then-recent nation-
alization of Dutch companies, stating it was intended to end Dutch economic
dominance.24 He also appealed to conference delegates on West Irian: “We
too, badly need your full support for our struggle to recover West Irian from
Dutch imperialism and thereby prevent the Dutch from entering the territor-
ial waters dividing the islands of Indonesia.”25 Although Indonesia’s claim to
West Irian is today a major source of dispute, in the 1950s Indonesian political
activists saw the Dutch claim as the continuance of Dutch colonialism and
viewed this case only from the perspective of Indonesian, not West Papuan,
self-determination.26 Conference delegates passed a resolution supporting
West Irian’s so-called return to Indonesia and recommended neighboring
countries “not allow the Netherlands to use their harbours and airports for
troops or weapons or for any purpose hostile to Indonesia.”27
21
Greg Fealy, Ijtihad Politik Ulama: Sejarah NU 1952–1967 (Jakarta: LKiS, 1998), p. 129.
22
Sirajuddin Abbas, “Report by Sirajuddin Abbas (Indonesia),” in Afro-Asian Peoples’ Solidarity
Conference, Cairo, December 26, 1957–January 1, 1958 (Moscow: Foreign Languages
Publishing House, 1958).
23
Ministry of Foreign Affairs. The Question of West Irian in the United Nations, 1954–1957
(Djakarta: Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Republic of Indonesia, 1958), pp. 297–308, 399–415.
24
Abbas, “Report,” pp. 105–106. See also Thomas Lindblad’s documentation of Dutch economic
control in Indonesia extending after Indonesian independence in 1949 in Lindblad, “The
Economic Decolonisation of Indonesia: A Bird’s-Eye View” (2011) Journal of Indonesian Social
Sciences and Humanities 4, at 11–20.
25
Abbas, “Report,” p. 107.
26
See Richard Harry Chauvel, The Land of Papua and the Indonesian State: Essays on West
Papua, Volume 1 [online], Working Paper 120 (Clayton: Centre of Southeast Asian Studies,
Monash University Press, 2003), p. 17.
27
Afro Asian Peoples’ Solidarity Organization, “Resolutions on Imperialism,” in Afro-Asian
Peoples’ Solidarity Conference, Cairo, December 26,1957–January 1, 1958, 224–231 (Moscow:
Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1958), p. 228.
Conference delegates at Cairo overall, however, paid greater attention to

the urgent situation in nearby Algeria. Algerian Aiah Hasan, who was presum-
ably a representative of the National Liberation Front (NLF), provided an
emotive report on the ongoing anticolonial war, which was already three years
in progress.28 Hasan explained the history of French settlement in Algeria,
including displacement of Algerians from communal lands, the French use of
violence against resistors, and the Algerian people’s eventual formation of the
NLF to fight for independence. He outlined French methods of extreme
brutality, including torture, indiscriminate mass killing campaigns (which he
describes as genocide), and the use of concentration camps.29 Speaking to an
Afro-Asian audience, Hasan condemns NATO support for the French and the
lack of UN response, suggesting that in this context Algerians were fighting
against not just France but a “coalition.” Connecting a string of events across
Asia and Africa, he states, “We have reached a stage when all conflicts entail
international repercussions. Algeria has already seen world peace in peril. The
Suez aggression, in which France had the largest share, is clear proof of
this.”30 In this way he suggested an alliance of former colonial powers and
their dominance of the UN.
In response to this report, conference delegates prepared a special reso-
lution on Algeria condemning the war and related French atrocities.31 They
demanded immediate recognition of Algerian independence and an end to
the use of Africans in the French Army in Algeria, calling on soldiers to refuse
to fight. The Conference encouraged delegates to spread information through
press campaigns and demonstrations to mobilize public opinion against what
they termed “the genocide” in Algeria, and to make France respect the
Geneva Conventions on the Rules of War. Committees of solidarity for
Algeria throughout Asia and Africa organized an Algeria Solidarity Day on
March 30, 1958, and events were held in Indonesia, Burma, India, Japan,
Egypt, and Vietnam.32 As the war progressed, Algeria became “the primary
symbol of Third World unity and, for many Third World Leaders, a clear sign
28
Aiah Hasan, “Report by Aiah Hasan (Algeria),” in Afro-Asian Peoples’ Solidarity Conference
Cairo, December 26, 1957–January 1, 1958(Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House,
1958), p. 108.
29
Marnia Lazreg, Torture and the Twilight of Empire (Princeton: Princeton University Press,
2008).
30
Hasan, “Report,” p. 127.
31
Afro-Asian Peoples’ Solidarity Organization, “Resolution on Algeria,” in Afro-Asian Peoples’
Solidarity Conference, Cairo, December 26, 1957–January 1, 1958(Moscow: Foreign Languages
Publishing House, 1958), pp. 234–236.
32
“Millions of Signatures, Campaigns in the Press, Meetings and Demonstrations Save Djamila
and Call for Solidarity with Algerian People” (1958) Women of the Whole World 5, at 13.
that the West was not willing to accept the full liberation of their continents
from imperial domination.”33 Looking across the countries of Asia and Africa,
AAPSO members saw the same patterns repeated, and Algeria remained a
major rallying point for AAPSO until the end of the war in 1962.
Delegates at the Cairo conference discussed not only the importance of
realizing the aims of Bandung among ordinary people and the importance of
decolonization, but also post-decolonization discontent with the lack of eco-
nomic power and the continuing dominance of colonial masters. Khaled
Mohieddin, who had participated with Nasser in the 1952 revolution against
the monarchy, spoke of new methods of coercion against newly independent
governments continuing to allow foreign capital exploitation. Mohieddin
referred to protests by Britain, France, and other Western countries at Egypt’s
nationalization of the Suez Canal company.34 Defense of Egypt’s control of
the canal, Mohieddin suggested, was a shared responsibility. Conference
delegates from Sudan, Egypt, Japan, Syria, China, and the Soviet Union
discussed a range of issues such as racial discrimination, the banning of
nuclear weapons, the promotion of economic cooperation and cultural
exchange, and the situation of women and children. Conference delegates
also agreed to more general actions concerning social development and efforts
to improve the living and working conditions and protection of rights through-
out Asian and African countries, showing the tentative steps made in these
areas at this time.
The Conference closed on January 1, 1958, and produced a document
called the Cairo Declaration,35 which reinforced a commitment to the prin-
ciples of Bandung. Delegates agreed to set up a permanent secretariat in Cairo
for the Afro-Asian Peoples’ Solidarity Organization to carry out the resolutions
of the Conference.
aapso activism related to anticolonialism

The founding of AAPSO opened new connections for emerging leaders and
political activists from Asian and African countries. For Indonesia, AAPSO
and Indonesian representation within it provided a channel for rallying
33
Westad, The Global Cold War, p. 105.
34
Khaled Mohieddin, “Report by Khaled Mohieddin (Egypt),” in Afro-Asian Peoples’ Solidarity
Conference, Cairo, December 26, 1957–January 1, 1958(Moscow: Foreign Languages
Publishing House, 1958) p. 79.
35
Afro-Asian Peoples’ Solidarity Organization, “Declaration of the Afro Asian Peoples’ Solidarity
Conference,” in Afro-Asian Peoples’ Solidarity Conference, Cairo, December 26,1957–January 1,
1958, 217–220 (Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1958).
support on the issue of West Irian. From 1960 onward, Indonesian Ibrahim Isa
served in the AAPSO permanent secretariat in Cairo.36 International peace
activists in Europe invited Indonesians to take part in the World Peace
Council. First, a local peace committee was formed, and Isa became involved
in the Indonesian Peace Committee and assumed the position of secretary.
The Indonesian Peace Committee shared its offices later with the Afro-Asian
solidarity committee, and through these links Isa began his Afro-Asian solidar-
ity work. The Indonesian AAPSO committee sent him in 1960 to represent
Indonesia at the Permanent Secretariat in Cairo.
Isa recounts that his role on the AAPSO secretariat was to assist the African
independence movements.37 He recalls visiting a number of African countries
to investigate the needs of newly decolonizing nations and those of pro-
independence organizations. Isa (and Indonesia) also saw his AAPSO role as
well positioned to build solidarity for the West Irian campaign with Arab and
African organizations.38
Following the Dutch decision in 1960 to send the aircraft carrier Karel
Doorman to West Irian, Isa convened a meeting with AAPSO and the African
Association. The AAPSO secretariat called for Egyptian solidarity to keep the
Suez Canal closed to Dutch warships heading to Indonesia.39 The campaign
against Dutch warships draws on earlier examples of the black bans placed on
reequipping Dutch warships by Indian seamen in Australia.40 To commemor-
ate Africa Day, Isa organized a large meeting at Al Azhar University in Cairo to
explain the West Irian campaign. He also held public meetings on West Irian
in nearby Arab and African countries, thus ensuring that there was a degree of
knowledge about West Irian as an example of unfinished decolonization.
Following independence at the end of June 1960, a crisis shortly developed
in the Congo, which brought AAPSO again to the center of anti-imperial
struggles. Congolese soldiers mutinied against their Belgian officers, and
shortly after the mutiny, Moises Tshombe, president of the provincial govern-
ment of Katanga, declared the secession of his oil-rich province. A UN
intervention to restore order was subsequently criticized for bias against Prime
Minister Patrice Lumumba, a popular and democratically elected politician.
36 37
Ibrahim Isa, interview. Ibid.
38
Ibrahim Isa, Bui Tanpa Jerajak Besi: Pikiran Seorang Eksil Indonesia di Luar Negeri [A Gaol
without Iron Bars: Thoughts from Abroad of an Indonesian Exile] (Jakarta: Klik Books, 2011),
p. 197.
39
Id., pp. 200–201.
40
Heather Goodall, “Shared Hopes, New Worlds: Indians, Australians, and Indonesians in the
Boycott of Dutch Shipping, 1945–1949” in Shanti Moorthy and Ashraf Jamal (eds.), Indian
Ocean Studies: Cultural, Social and Political Perspectives (Hoboken: Routledge, 2009).
Between July 1960 and June 1964, the UN Mission in the Congo (UNOC)
was one of the biggest UN peacekeeping missions, with more than 20,000
troops and logistical support from 30 countries.41 The actions of Andrew
Wellington Cordier, UN Secretary General Dag Hammarskjold’s assistant,
who filled in as his interim representative to the Congo for three weeks, were
crucial in setting the UN on a course in the Congo that aligned it closely with
U.S. interests in the Cold War in Africa.42 The United States saw Lumumba’s
government as a threat to American access to rich mineral deposits in the
Congo.43
Events in the Congo divided the world and led to distrust of the UN. By
1960, Lumumba and his allies believed the UN was violating the sovereign
government by negotiating directly with Moises Tshombe and therefore
supporting the Katanga secession. In order to address financial vulnerability
that engendered dependence on the UN, the AAPSO Beirut executive
committee meeting in November 1960 opted to set up a Solidarity Fund
committee.44 The fund received pledges of donations from China, Indonesia,
the Soviet Union, and the United Arab Republic.45 The fund was designed to
ensure a measure of autonomy for countries struggling against imperialism
because after the events in the Congo they no longer trusted the UN.
AAPSO tried to support the struggles of both the NLF in Algeria and the
Congolese National Movement against the French and the Belgians, respect-
ively. By 1960, both organizations had their own Afro-Asian Solidarity Com-
mittees that liaised with AAPSO and representatives on both the AAPSO
Executive Committee (twenty-seven members) and the Permanent Secretariat
(twelve people) based in Cairo.46 AAPSO set up the Solidarity Fund to aid
Algeria and the Congo in 1961. Ismail Touré of Guinea, Ben Barka of
41
Carole J. L. Collins, “The Cold War Comes to Africa” (1993) 47 Journal of International Affairs
1, at 244–245. Participating countries included Burma, Sri Lanka, Egypt, Ethiopia, Ghana,
India, Indonesia, Ireland, Liberia, Malaya, Mali, Morocco, Nigeria, Pakistan, Sierra Leone,
Sudan, Sweden, and Tunisia.
42
Id. at 246. Cordier occupied the role temporarily after the departure of African-American
diplomat Ralph Bunche from the position and before the arrival of Bunche’s Indian
replacement, Rajeshwar Dayal.
43
Westad, The Global Cold War, p. 137.
44
Afro-Asian Peoples’ Solidarity Organization, “Afro Asian Solidarity Fund,” in Afro-Asian
Peoples’ Solidarity Movement (Cairo: Permanent Secretariat of the Afro-Asian People’s
Solidarity Organization, 1962), pp. 111–126.
45
Id., pp. 70–71.
46
The Executive Committee included Antoine Gizenga for Congo and an unnamed NLF
representative for Algeria, and on the Permanent Secretariat, Anicet Mbiasi for Congo and
Ahmed Zemerline for Algeria. Permanent Secretariat of the Afro-Asian People’s Solidarity
Organization, Afro-Asian Peoples’ Solidarity Movement; Principles, Structure, Friendly
Morocco, and Chu Tze-Chi of China led the Fund Committee.47 The fund
was considered urgent because of the arrest of Lumumba and other polit-
icians. The AAPSO Council called on all members to assist the Congolese
people, such as by sending volunteers, collecting funds, providing support to
the legitimate government, and rallying public opinion. In addition, the
AAPSO council appealed to Afro-Asian governments and so-called peace
loving governments to give diplomatic recognition to Lumumba supporters.
To express disappointment with the UN, several countries declared their
intention to withdraw troops from peacekeeping roles. The council called
on those governments (such as Guinea, United Arab Republic, Indonesia,
Morocco, and Mali) to send those troops to aid Lumumba instead.48
Lumumba was seized and killed in September 1961 as a result of cooper-
ation between civilian leaders and the military officer and later Congolese
dictator Joseph Mobutu. African and Asian political activists in AAPSO viewed
his murder as an indictment of Western interference in the affairs of a
sovereign country and demonstrated the bias of the UN.
The Solidarity Fund received multiple requests from members for other
urgent needs. These included requests for printing materials and equipment;
scholarships for and training of technicians; donations for medical treatment,
food, clothes, and medicine; judicial assistance for organizations or persons on
trial for participating in national liberation movements.49 Applications for
funds soon outweighed the amount available for distribution, and financial
constraints overshadowed the operations of AAPSO, despite the fact that
several conferences were held in different parts of the world. It remained
largely a shoestring operation driven by spirit.
AAPSO held its main conferences in Cairo in 1958; in Conakry, Guinea, in
1960; and in Moshi, Tanganyika, in 1963. Affiliate organizations to AAPSO
were rapidly founded. These included the Afro-Asian Writers’ Bureau,
founded in 1959 in Cairo and based in Ceylon (now Sri Lanka), one of the
aims of which was to promote and preserve local cultures. The Afro-Asian
Jurists’ Association was based in Conakry, Guinea. The Afro-Asian Journalists’
Association was formed in 1963, based in Jakarta, and sought to create inde-
pendent news sources. A women’s section was also set up, first meeting in
Cairo in January 1961. There is no space in this chapter to detail the activities
Organizations (Cairo: Permanent Secretariat of the Afro-Asian People’s Solidarity

Organization, 1962), pp. 104–105.
47
Id., pp. 113–114, 128–132.
48
Afro-Asian Peoples’ Solidarity Movement, pp. 138–139, and James Mayall, Africa: The Cold War
and After (London: Elek Books, 1971), p. 123.
49
Afro-Asian Peoples’ Solidarity Movement, pp. 117–118.
of these affiliates, which deserve more scholarly attention, but they tried to
challenge the dominance of world powers in many aspects of life.
changing attitudes to afro-asian solidarity at a

state level
The world was changing by 1960, and pressures arose that inhibited holding a
repeat of the Bandung Conference. Armed conflicts developed between India
and China, and Pakistan and India, that flew in the face of Bandung prin-
ciples like peaceful settlement of conflicts. The Sino-Soviet split, the founding
of the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) in Belgrade in 1961, and Sukarno’s
formulation of the New Emerging Forces (versus the Old Forces; NEFOS/
OLDEFO) undermined the premise of Afro-Asian solidarity.50 The founding
of NAM challenged the supremacy of Afro-Asian solidarity by incorporating
countries in Latin America, the Caribbean, and Europe around goals that
seemed at first quite similar to those agreed to in the Bandung principles.51
Some countries, such as Pakistan, did not share Indonesia’s radical views in
excluding Malaysia from the Afro-Asia umbrella, or in its critical attitudes to
the United Nations.
As Indonesia moved toward Sukarno’s Guided Democracy from 1959 –
with a restriction in press freedom, a lack of democratic elections, and
suspension of parliament – the emphasis on individual rights as contained
in the UN Charter became a challenge. Attitudes hardened in Indonesia
against Western countries as a result of the battle to win West Irian from the
Dutch. Sukarno was also opposed to the creation of Malaysia, accusing the
British of creating a puppet state on its borders.52 Indonesia called on Afro-
Asian solidarity in winning over world opinion to its side, but it was not
always successful. Foreign Minister Joseph Leimena, former chairperson of
the Bandung Conference Ali Sastroamidjojo, and Secretary General of the
Asia Africa Conference Roeslan Abdulgani argued that a second Afro-Asian
50
According to Sukarno, NEFOS included “all the forces in the world, all the forces in mankind,
which are fighting for the establishment of a new world, a new world without imperialism, a
new world without colonialism, a new world without capitalism, a new world without
exploitation de l’homme par l’homme, a new world without exploitation de nation par nation.”
Sukarno, President of the Republic of Indonesia, in Executive Command for the
Commemoration of Ten Years of the First Afro-Asian Conference, 119.
51
Milos Dromnjak, The Policy and Movement of Non-Alignment 1961–1979: A Survey of
Participants and Activities (Belgrade: Jugoslovenska Stvarnost, 1979), p. 29.
52
Mackie, Konfrontasi.
conference could safeguard and further the legacy of Bandung and reduce
conflict.53
Delegates at the Conference in 1955 initially emphasized winning inde-
pendence as a key goal for Afro-Asian solidarity. Discussion shifted to empha-
sizing that formal independence did not go far enough in fulfilling the needs
of the people. Indonesian representatives at the fifth anniversary stated that
Afro-Asian solidarity should continue beyond independence. Former Secre-
tary General of the Bandung Conference Roeslan Abdulgani went further and
articulated that the spirit of Afro-Asian solidarity was about decolonization in
the short term and socialism in the long run.54 These more radical ideas were
not universally accepted. Indian ambassador J. N. Khosla saw Bandung more
as a repository of moral power, with the purpose of cooling down international
tensions rather than arguing for ideological agreement.55 Disagreements on
how much emphasis to give to combating imperialism and neocolonialism
exposed some of the limitations of the Afro-Asian “alliance.”
In April 1965, there was much fanfare in Indonesia surrounding the cele-
brations of the tenth anniversary of Bandung, including cultural perform-
ances, sports events, a film festival, and a range of exhibitions.56 Sukarno
discussed the dangers of neocolonialism, imperialism, and the broadening of
the Afro-Asian alliance to include Latin America following the Cuban revolu-
tion and evidence of its leftist orientation.57 Afro-Asian solidarity had been re-
energized by preparations for the second Asia-Africa conference in Algeria,
planned to take place in June 1965. The Organization of African Unity chose
Algeria to host the conference because it had been such a focus for Afro-Asian
solidarity during the Algerian independence war.
Indonesia continued to participate at both state and nonstate levels in many
Afro-Asian solidarity initiatives, but the army’s unseating of Sukarno in
1966 radically changed Indonesia’s international outlook and alliances. The
last AAPSO conference in which Indonesians participated before the
upheaval in Indonesia was in May 1965 in Winneba, Ghana. In his opening
address, Ghanaian President Kwame Nkrumah continued to try to find
sources of unity between Africans, Asians, and the people of Latin America,
53
See Departemen Penerangan Republik Indonesia, Pidato-Pidato Peringatan Ulang Tahun ke-
V Konperensi Asia-Afrika: tahun 1960 [Speeches for the Commemoration of the Fifth Year
since the Asia Africa Conference: 1960] (Djakarta: Departemen Penerangan R.I., 1960),
pp. 7–18.
54 55
Id., p. 18. Id., p. 21.
56
See Executive Command for the Commemoration of Ten Years of the First Afro-Asian
Conference, pp. 11–12.
57
Sukarno, “After Ten Years, Still Onward, Never Retreat,” pp. 32–38.
emphasizing their shared struggled against neocolonialism, which aimed to

“inhibit or slow down the economic development of the ex-colonies so that
they will remain colonies in everything but name.”58 At the same time, however,
he critiqued the “distressing conflict between Indonesia and Malaysia,” describ-
ing it as a “great source of embarrassment to all Afro-Asians and a threat to
Afro-Asian solidarity” and calling for Sukarno and Malaysian Prime Minister
Tunku Abdul Rahman to negotiate.59 He also criticized India and Pakistan for
their border dispute, calling for resolution, and referred to these examples of
disunity as retarding the struggle against imperialism.60 Despite these indict-
ments, the Conference passed a resolution supporting Indonesia’s position on
Malaysia, thus showing Indonesia’s strength within AAPSO.
The second African-Asian conference, scheduled for June 1965 in Algeria,
was never held, as the government of Ben Bella fell as a result of a military
coup led by Houari Boumedienne in June 1965. In Indonesia, the military’s
seizure of power by the end of 1965, the crushing of the Indonesian Com-
munist Party, and the end of the Sukarno era similarly closed the chapter on
Afro-Asian solidarity and an emphasis on anti-imperialism for Indonesia.
Those governments that had been the most active supporters of Afro-Asian
solidarity suffered similar defeats. Ghanaian President Kwame Nkrumah fell
victim to a coup in 1965.
conclusion
AAPSO has continued to operate from a base in Cairo since the mid-1960s,
but its focus changed because of the fractures outlined here. From 1955 to
1965, postcolonial solidarity across the countries of Asia and Africa was at its
strongest. Christopher Lee argues that Afro-Asian solidarity is “an ill-defined
term that has signalled both a cold war ideology of diplomatic solidarity as well
as a more general phenomenon of intercontinental exchange and inter-racial
connection.”61 Through the examples from AAPSO this chapter has sought to
capture more of the complexity of this solidarity by looking at the dynamics
within third world activism. Through the common experiences of overcoming
colonialism, nonstate actors engaged in advocacy based on shared concerns
about peace and economic and diplomatic equality with other nations.
Despite fractures across Afro-Asian alliances, the Bandung Spirit continued
to influence and inspire a range of political movements into the late 1960s and
beyond. At the level of people’s movements, the Bandung principles of
58
Nkrumah, “Inaugural Address given by Dr Kwame Nkrumah,” at 24. 59
Id. at 28.
60
Id. at 30. 61
Lee, “Between a Moment,” pp. 3–4.
equality between nations, nonintervention, and peaceful conduct resonated

strongly throughout global anti–Vietnam War activism. At the state level the
principle of equality among nations and the emphasis on the need for a
new international economic order also underpinned the Non-Aligned
Movement.62
62
Helen E. S. Nesaduarai, “Bandung and the Political Economy of North-South Relations:
Sowing the Seeds for Re-visioning International Society,” in See Seng Tan and Amitav
Acharya (eds.), Bandung Revisited: The Legacy of the 1955 Asian-African Conference for
International Order (Singapore: NUS Press, 2008), pp. 71–74, 77–80.
10
Bandung, China, and the Making of World Order

in East Asia
chen yifeng
introduction
The Bandung Conference had a lasting political and normative influence on
the world order as the newly independent states sought solidarity and worked
to articulate an alternative to colonial exploitation and the rivalries of super-
powers. This general assertion does not deny the nuanced complexity of the
actual conference,1 but any narrative of history is bound to be an evaluative
exercise, and is often dictated by the future outlook we are ready to put into
effect.
This chapter approaches the Bandung Conference from a regional perspec-
tive and, in particular, explores the way the Conference shaped the national
identity of China vis-à-vis its surroundings and its impact on the emerging
Asian regional order. Bandung is known for inaugurating China’s independ-
ent diplomacy and for its intimate connections with Asian and African states.
While the African-China connection after Bandung has received relatively
more exposure,2 China’s relation with Asia itself deserves close scrutiny. From
the regional experience, the Bandung Conference is noted also for providing
“important foundations for Asian regional order.”3 This chapter sets the
Conference in the context of Asian regionalism.
1
Some have criticized this general judgment for creating a myth of Bandung. See, e.g., Roland
Burke, “Afro-Asian Alignment: Charles Malik and the Cold War at Bandung,” in Antonia
Finnane and Derek McDougall (eds.), Bandung 1955: Little Histories (Caulfield: Monash
2
For the Africa-China connection, see several of the chapters in Christopher J. Lee (ed.),
Making a World after Empire: The Bandung Moment and Its Political Alternative (Athens:
Ohio University Press, 2010); Yufeng Mao, “When Zhou Enlai Met Gamal Abdel Nasser: Sino-
Egyptian Relations and the Bandung Conference,” in Finnane, Bandung 1955, pp. 89–108.
3
Amitav Acharya and See Seng Tan, “The Normative Relevance of the Bandung Conference
for Contemporary Asian and International Order,” in See Seng Tan and Amitav Acharya (eds.),
177
178 Chen Yifeng
The research is based on various materials, including recently declassi-

fied China’s diplomatic archives, official documents, writings and
speeches of state leaders, personal memoirs, and relevant literature. The
chapter starts with an introduction to the social background in Asia and
China at the time of the Bandung Conference, then highlights the
conference’s political imprints on China’s state building and analyzes its
sense of Afro-Asian solidarity. The chapter concludes by illuminating
future Asian regionalism and China’s possible contribution in light of
the Bandung Spirit.
the background
Most Western countries viewed the establishment of the People’s Republic of
China on October 1, 1949, as a victory of communism, and the nationalist
elements in China’s revolution were somewhat underscored. After suffering
from colonial exploitation and under the reign of unequal treaties for more
than a century, the first priority of the Chinese government of the People’s
Republic was to eliminate and repeal the remaining political, economic, and
cultural influence of colonial powers in China.4 Meanwhile, China pro-
claimed its commitment to supporting world peace and international cooper-
ation among friendly nations.5
Yet China was not an exception to the dichotomy of the Cold War logic.
The United States’ confrontation and containment policy against China was
intensified by the American military intervention in the Taiwan Strait in
June 1950. This was continued by direct hostility between the two countries
in the Korean War from October 1950 until the Armistice Agreement,
which was signed on July 27, 1953. The unfavorable international environ-
ment China met upon its independence compelled it to side with the
Bandung Revisited: The Legacy of the 1955 Asian-African Conference for International Order
(Singapore: NUS Press, 2008), p. 2.
4
See Zhou Enlai, “Guidelines and Tasks of Our Diplomacy (April 30, 1952),” in An Anthology
of Zhou Enlai on Foreign Affairs (Beijing: Central Party Literature Press, 1990), p. 50. Mao
Zedong referred to this as “cleaning up the house before hosting guests.” The Common
Program of the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference (the de facto constitution),
adopted on September 29, 1949, in an unequivocal tone, affirms China’s resolve to “abolish all
the prerogatives of imperialist countries in China.”
5
See Article 54, “Common Program of the Chinese People’s Political Consultative
Conference,” adopted by the first plenary meeting of the Chinese People’s Political
Consultative Conference on September 29, 1949.
Bandung, China, and the Making of World Order in East Asia 179
communist camp, even though the nation had never really been comfort-
able with communism.6
China’s exclusion from the UN system further fortified its isolation. The
United States insisted on its nonrecognition policy on China,7 and pressed
this on its allies and at the UN. China’s demand for representation at the
UN met with persistent resistance from the United States and its allies,
which dominated the UN General Assembly of 1950s. In 1951, the UN
General Assembly adopted Resolution 498, condemning China’s involve-
ment in the Korean War as aggression.8 This biased characterization fully
alienated China from its association with the UN and underlined China’s
interpretation of the UN as an instrument of the imperialistic policy of the
United States.9
At the time, Asia also faced uncertainty about its future path. One option
was to divide Asia by forming alliances with superpowers on the basis of
submission and dependence, turning the region into a space of rivalries
between the two superpowers. This was evidenced by military pacts concluded
between the United States and its allies in Asia, including a security treaty with
Japan on September 8, 1951, and a mutual defense treaty with the Philippines
on August 30, 1951. Furthermore, there was a U.S. initiative to establish the
Southeast Asia Treaty Organization (SEATO) as a critical strategy to contain
China and communism in general. SEATO was an expression of Cold War
logic and its particular geography.10 The formal establishment of SEATO took
place in Bangkok on February 23–25, 1955, shortly before the Bandung
6
The conclusion of the Sino-Soviet Treaty of Friendship, Alliance and Mutual Assistance on
February 14, 1950, was more of a reflection of China’s deep concern about its security and
outside isolation, and much less than a voluntary union with the Soviet Union on an
ideological basis. The policy of “leaning on one side” was the only pragmatic option left to
China, as referred to by Mao Zedong in “Uniting with Those Nations and Peoples Who Treat
Us as Equal (June 30, 1949),” in An Anthology of Mao Zedong on Foreign Affairs (Beijing:
Central Party Literature Press, 1994), p. 93.
7
For an exposition of the U.S. considerations on the nonrecognition policy, see “State
Department Memorandum, Circulated to Overseas Missions, on Question of Recognition of
the PRC (August 12, 1958),” in Roderick MacFarquhar, Sino-American Relations, 1949–1971
(New York: Praeger Publisher, 1972), pp. 144–153.
8
A/Res/498 (V), Feb. 1, 1951.
9
See “Statement of Zhou Enlai on Approving the Convocation of the Foreign Ministers’
Meeting of Five Powers (October 8, 1953),” Bureau of Archives of the Ministry of Foreign
Affairs of the People’s Republic of China (ed.), Selective Collections of Diplomatic Archives of
the People’s Republic of China, Volume One: The 1954 Geneva Conference (Beijing: World
Affairs Press, 2006), p. 3.
10
Only two of the eight members, the Philippines and Thailand, were Southeast Asian countries;
the remaining were the United States, the United Kingdom, Australia, France, New Zealand,
and Pakistan.
180 Chen Yifeng
Conference.11 Zhou Enlai expressed the Chinese view that SEATO was not
created for defense purposes, but rather to enlarge colonial wars in Asia, build
new colonial empires, and continue the slavery of Asian people.12 At the same
time, the United States also concluded a mutual defense treaty with Taiwan
on December 2, 1954, in order to obstruct and deter China’s efforts to take over
Taiwan. The Taiwan crisis continued to develop until the Bandung
Conference.
The other possible path was “Asia for the Asians,” based on the principles of
equality, self-determination, and cooperation. The five principles of peaceful
coexistence jointly advocated by Zhou Enlai, Jawaharlal Nehru of India, and
U Nu of Burma represented this alternative. The five principles of peaceful
coexistence – mutual respect for each other’s territorial integrity and sover-
eignty, mutual nonaggression, mutual noninterference in each other’s
internal affairs, equality and cooperation for mutual benefit, and peaceful
coexistence – were codified in the preamble to the Agreement on Trade and
Intercourse between Tibet Region of China and India, signed in Peking on
April 29, 1954.13
Subsequently, China issued joint declarations with India and Burma
respectively, on June 28 and 29, 1954, in which the five principles were
formally acknowledged as governing their mutual relations and their
relationships with other Asian countries as well as any other nations.14
The five principles represent an endogenous vision of a new world order
and an alternative Asian style of diplomacy. The idea of peace underlying
the five principles is based on legal principles instead of military alliance,
on equality instead of submission, on sovereignty instead of hegemony.
The parties had grown weary of the diplomatic policies of military
coercion, containment, and confrontation under the superpowers in the
Cold War. From the Chinese perspective, most of the fruit of the
11
Nehru criticized the formation of SEATO. See Christopher Waters, “Lost Opportunity:
Australia and the Bandung Conference,” in Finnane, Bandung 1955, pp. 78–79.
12
Zhou Enlai, “Speech at the Geneva Conference Concerning Issues of Indochina (May 12,
1954),” in An Anthology of Zhou Enlai, p. 69.
13
The text of the agreement in Hindi, Chinese, and English is available in the United Nations
Treaty Series, Volume 299, pp. 57–81. The five principles, with slight terminological difference,
first appeared in a talk Zhou Enlai gave in Beijing to the Indian Government Delegation,
which came to negotiate issues concerning Indian interest in Tibetan area on December 31,
1953. The terms used are “mutual respect for each other’s territorial sovereignty” and “equality
and reciprocity.” Zhou Enlai, “The Five Principles of Peaceful Coexistence (December 31,
1953),” in An Anthology of Zhou Enlai, p. 63.
14
See Selective Collections, Volume One, p. 207.
Bandung Conference had its seeds in the five principles of peaceful

coexistence.
china’s preparation for bandung

In the Final Communiqué of the preparatory conference at Bogor on Decem-
ber 29, 1954, China was one of the twenty-five countries invited to Bandung.15
The formal invitation dated January 15, 1955, and undersigned by the Prime
Minister of Indonesia Ali Sastroamidjojo on behalf of the five sponsoring
countries arrived at the Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs on January 27.16
An explanatory memorandum was enclosed to explain the purposes of the
Conference.
In his letter of acceptance dated February 10, Zhou Enlai praised the Confer-
ence for being the “first of its kind in the history convened to promote goodwill
and co-operation among the countries of Asia and Africa.” He specifically
emphasized the geopolitical implications of the Conference that “the convoca-
tion of this Conference . . . reflects the ever stronger desire of the Asian and
African countries to take their destiny into their own hands and to enter, on
equal footing, into friendly co-operation with other countries of the world.”17
The Chinese government conducted various preparatory works and policy
assessments. On January 16, the Department of Asian Affairs under the
Ministry of Foreign Affairs submitted to Zhou Enlai a preliminary plan for
attending Bandung that fully anticipated its historic significance.18 This
15
There were differing opinions among the five sponsoring countries regarding the invitation of
China to Bandung at the preparatory conference in Bogor in December 1954. Concerns were
raised about China’s communist ideology and the fact that many other countries had not
recognized the nation. The issue was settled at the insistence of U Nu and Nehru. See
“Ministry of Foreign Affairs’ Telegram to Huang Zheng concerning the Chinese Attitude
towards Participating in the Asian-African Conference (December 9, 1954),” in the Bureau of
Archives of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the People’s Republic of China (ed.), Selective
Collections of Diplomatic Archives of the People’s Republic of China, Volume Two:
Participation of the Chinese Delegation in the 1955 Asian-African Conference (Beijing: World
Affairs Press, 2007), p. 13. Nevertheless, China stressed that it would attend only without the
participation of the Kuomintang government. See Mao Zedong, “The Five Principles,”
pp. 183–184.
16
For the invitation letter and the memorandum, see Selective Collections, Volume Two,
pp. 17–19.
17
See “Chou En-Lai’s Telegram to Ali Sastroamidjojo, Prime Minister of the Republic of
Indonesia, Concerning China’s Acceptance of the Invitation to Attend the Asian-African
Conference,” in China and the Asian-African Conference (Documents) (Beijing: Foreign
Language Press, 1955), pp. 65–66.
18
Zhang Wei, “Looking into New China’s Preparation for the Bandung Conference From the
Declassified Archives” (2005) 5 Hundred Year Tide 65.
182 Chen Yifeng
preliminary plan saw the Conference as an opportunity for developing friendly

relationships among Afro-Asian countries, easing international tensions, and
strengthening regional peace.
The Ministry of Foreign Affairs finalized a much more elaborated plan on
April 1 and submitted it to the Politburo of the Communist Party of China for
deliberation on April 4. The Politburo held a meeting on April 5 during which
the plan was discussed and approved with only minor changes. The plan
provided a comprehensive exposition of China’s policy toward the Bandung
Conference and identified twelve general issues on which the Chinese pos-
itions were elaborated.
First, China envisaged the Bandung Conference as instrumental in
strengthening the peace-loving force of the world. China arrived at Bandung
with an aim to foster bilateral relationships with other participating countries
and to break down the Western isolation and containment policy.
Second, the conference was seen as an opportunity for countries to seek
peace and neutrality and to break from Cold War logic. China aimed to
promote world and regional peace with other peace-loving countries. During
the deliberation of the Politburo it was specifically added that China’s purpose
at Bandung was to pursue a convention of peace or a declaration on main-
taining world peace.
Third, a prominent aim for China was seeking broader acceptance of the
five principles of peaceful coexistence among Afro-Asian countries. China
asserted that durable world peace could be achieved only by faithful adher-
ence to the five principles.
Fourth, China expressed firm opposition to any forms of colonialism and
racism. Keeping in mind threats from the United States, China also charac-
terized hegemonic actions such as forming military alliances, establishing
overseas military bases, and enforcing unilateral embargos as colonial actions.
China also upheld the equality of races and objected to racial discrimination
or racial superiority.
Fifth, China believed that international trade, as well as technical and
economic cooperation, should be conducted on the basis of the principle of
equality and mutual benefit, and should contribute to the independent
economic development of all countries. China objected to the practice of
unilateral embargos or imposition of political conditions to economic assist-
ance, as it was a victim of the embargo policy that the United States and its
allies actively enforced against China.19
19
The UN General Assembly approved measures of arm embargo on China during the Korean
War. See A/Res/500(V), May 18, 1951.
Sixth, China took a conciliatory attitude toward the UN, recognizing that
many conference participants were UN members. China thus upheld the
UN Charter and opposed any violation of it, including the deprivation of
the legitimate representation of People’s Republic of China in the UN
system.
Seventh, China proposed that a standing organ of the Bandung Conference
should be established and that the Conference could be organized every other
year, with the next session in India.
In addition to these common issues, China also did policy preparation on
anticipated issues like Taiwan and the charge of communist subversion.
zhou enlai at bandung

Chinese Premier and Foreign Minister Zhou Enlai led the Chinese delega-
tion. China sent twenty-five official delegates, including Vice–Prime Minister
Chen Yi and a few other senior officials, and fifteen journalists.20 During his
two-week trip, Zhou Enlai had a short trip to Burma on his way to Rangoon,
and he made a formal visit to Jakarta after the Conference. Zhou Enlai’s
contribution to the success of Bandung is well documented and acknow-
ledged in personal and academic accounts.21 Most of his performance was
in accordance with the approved plan. However, he also made some specific
contributions.
First, Zhou Enlai sought to ground solidarity among the Afro-Asian coun-
tries around their collective sufferings from colonial exploitation and their
joint pursuit for world peace. He asserted that their common desires were “to
oppose racial discrimination and to demand fundamental human rights, to
oppose colonialism and to demand for national independence, and to firmly
20
Eight Chinese perished in the crash of Kashmir Princess into the South China Sea following a
bomb explosion on April 11, 1955. The later declassified information confirms that the
assassination was targeted at Zhou Enlai.
21
See, e.g., some Chinese accounts, including Zhang Yan (ed.), Bandung Spirit Shining the
Ground: In Memory of the 50th Anniversary of the Asian-African Conference (Beijing: World
Affairs Press, 2005); Xia Zhongcheng, The Spirit of Asia-Africa: A Solidary and Cooperative
Asian-African Conference (Beijing: World Affairs Press, 1998); Chen Dunde, A New Era: Zhou
Enlai to Bandung (Beijing: China Youth Press, 2013). Zhou Enlai’s performance at the
conference was well covered in English-language press. See, e.g., Ronald C. Keith, The
Diplomacy of Zhou Enlai (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1989), pp. 81–88; A. Doak Barnett,
“Chou En-lai at Bandung: Chinese Communist diplomacy at the Asian-African Conference”
American Universities Field Staff (1955), pp. 1–15; A. Doak Barnett, “Asia and Africa in session:
Random notes on the Asian-African Conference” American Universities Field Staff (1955),
pp. 1–36.
184 Chen Yifeng
defend their territorial integrity and sovereignty.”22 He maintained that in

order to realize these goals, the countries had to implement the five principles
of peaceful coexistence. He noted that, politically speaking, the five principles
confirmed and reinforced the political situation of decolonization and
national independence, and that sovereign equality, noninterference, and
nonaggression were the very pillars of the regional and world peace.
Zhou Enlai’s endorsement for fundamental human rights is noteworthy. In
his speech, he proclaimed, “People irrespective of race or colour shall enjoy
the fundamental human rights and not be subjected to any maltreatment and
discrimination.”23 In this context, the notion of fundamental human rights
referred mostly to colonized people and meant to challenge racism and
colonialism. In the discussion at the political committee, Lebanon, Iraq,
Turkey, Iran, and Pakistan wanted the Conference to make a full endorse-
ment of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. However, China pre-
ferred to refrain from any express recognition or commitment to resolutions of
any UN organs, given its lack of representation in the UN.24 In addition, the
same organ in its Resolution 498 condemned China’s “aggression” during the
Korean War. Thus, China’s objection to the reference to the Universal
Declaration of Human Rights was based on its uneasy relation to the UN,
and not because it opposed the idea of human rights. In his report to the
Standing Committee of the National People’s Congress, Zhou Enlai affirmed
China’s respect for fundamental human rights and for the purposes and
principles of the UN Charter.25 They eventually reached a compromise:
The Conference declared its “full support to the fundamental principles of
the UN Charter” while taking “note of the Universal Declaration of Human
Rights.” China was satisfied, as the term “take note of” did not commit China
to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.26
22
“Main Speech by Premier Chou En-lai, Head of the Delegation of the People’s Republic of
China, Distributed at the Plenary Session of the Asian-African Conference (April 19, 1955),” in
China and the Asian-African Conference, p. 15. See also Selective Collections, Volume Two,
p. 54.
23
“Main Speech by Premier Chou En-lai,” p. 14.
24
Some have misinterpreted Zhou Enlai’s position as opposition to human rights itself. See
University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010), pp. 20–25.
25
“Premier Chou En-lai Report on the Asian-African Conference Made at the meeting of the
Standing Committee of the National People’s Congress (May 13, 1955),” in China and the
Asian-African Conference, pp. 41–42.
26
See “Zhou Enlai’s Telegram to the Central Committee of the CPC and Mao Zedong
concerning the Process of Discussion on Political Issues (April 30, 1955)” and “Speech by Zhou
Enlai at the Meeting of Asian-African Conference Political Committee (April 23, 1955),” in
Selective Collections, Volume Two, p. 88.
Second, Zhou Enlai gave high priority to the economic development

and cooperation among Afro-Asian countries. On the one hand, the
political dimension of economic development was fully exposed by
emphasizing the importance of equality and mutual benefit in economic
cooperation. In his words, “the cooperation among us the Asia-African
countries should be based on equality and mutual benefit, with no
conditions for privilege attached.”27 In this way, Zhou Enlai emphasized
that cooperation should not create any dominance-dependence structure
or relationships. This laid the basis for incarnation of eight principles
guiding China’s foreign assistance in 1964.28 Again in his words, “the
trade relations and economic cooperation between us should have for its
purpose the promotion of the independent economic development in
each country, and not to convert any country into a sole producer of
raw materials or a market for consumer goods.”29 On the other hand,
Zhou called on strengthening economic and cultural cooperation among
Afro-Asian countries, including providing mutual technical assistance and
developing regional trade.
Outside the formal proceedings, Zhou Enlai had also extensive exchanges
with participating countries to explore trade possibilities, which yielded
fruitful outcomes. For example, it was agreed that Egypt would send trade
delegations to China in May or June and the two countries would conclude
an intergovernmental trade agreement.30 The Minister of Industry and
Commerce of Egypt visited China in August 1955, with a trade agreement
concluded. Official representative of commerce was instituted in early
1956 on both sides, a prelude for the formal establishment of diplomatic
relations on May 16, 1956.31 Tentative agreements were also reached with
Syria, Indonesia, Ceylon (now Sri Lanka), India, Pakistan, and Burma (now
Myanmar) to further enhance bilateral trade.32 Starting from the Bandung
Conference, China’s international trade and economic ties with Afro-Asian
countries were much increased.
Third, throughout the Conference Zhou Enlai adopted a conciliatory yet
principled approach. His constructive style played a mediatory role that was
27
28
Zhou Enlai, “Eight Principles in Foreign Economic and Technical Assistance (January 15,
1964),” in An Anthology of Zhou Enlai, pp. 388–389.
29
30
“Zhou Enlai Report to the Central Committee,” p. 93.
31
Pei Jianzhang (ed.), History of Foreign Relations of the People’s Republic of China (Volume
One) 1949–1956 (Beijing: World Affairs Press, 1994), pp. 278–279.
32
“Zhou Enlai Report to the Central Committee,” p. 93.
186 Chen Yifeng
key in bridging several difficult differences among the participants.33 He

famously spoke of a philosophy of “seeking common ground among us, while
reserving our difference . . .. The Chinese Delegation has come here to seek
unity and not to quarrel . . . to seek common ground and not to create
divergence.”34 This attitude was fundamentally based on the sense of solidarity
and mutual respect among the Afro-Asian countries, regardless of differences
of opinions, ideologies, and political systems, or levels of economic develop-
ment. This explained Zhou Enlai’s modest and constructive, rather than
confrontational, approach whenever differences of opinions arose during the
Conference.
There were a number of telling examples. The accusation of Soviet com-
munism as neocolonialism was made by Iraq, Iran, the Philippines, Turkey,
and Pakistan in the plenary meeting, and Ceylon (now Sri Lanka) made a
similar charge at the political committee.35 Zhou Enlai tried to avoid the
ideological debates on communism, which he felt would lead nowhere but
confrontation and futility. He refrained from debating communism at a
general level or defending the Soviet Union, but instead provincialized the
issue by simply stating China’s own perspective – that in relation to China,
communism was a free choice of Chinese people on the path toward national
independence.36 Zhou also addressed the accusation of overseas Chinese
conducting subversive activities in Southeast Asian countries. After ensuring
the non-involvement of the Chinese government, he expressed China’s
readiness to “solve the problem of dual nationality of overseas Chinese with
the governments of the countries concerned.”37 In the process of drafting the
Final Communiqué, when some pro-Western countries expressed skepticism
regarding the concept of peaceful coexistence, Zhou Enlai again exhibited
his flexibility and reasonableness by conceding to replace it with “live
together in peace,” a term from the UN Charter that appeared more
neutral.38
33
Zhou Enlai’s conciliatory role is highly appreciated among Bandung historiographies. For
example, it is acknowledged that “he probably made the greatest contribution of all the
participants to the ultimate success of the deliberation, helping to bridge the gaps between the
non-aligned and pro-Western groups.” Jamie Mackie, “The Bandung Conference and Afro-
Asian Solidarity: Indonesian Aspects,” in Finnane, Bandung 1955, p. 16.
34
“Supplementary Speech by Premier Chou En-lai at the Plenary Session of the Asian-African
Conference (April 19, 1955),” in China and the Asian-African Conference, p. 21.
35
See Roselan Abdulgani, The Bandung Connection: The Asia-Africa Conference in Bandung in
1955, trans. Molly Bondan (Singapore: Gunung Agung, 1981), pp. 99–101, 115–120.
36
See “Zhou Enlai’s Telegram to the Central Committee,” pp. 87–90.
37
“Supplementary Speech,” p. 25. 38
“Speech by Zhou Enlai (April 23, 1955),” pp. 76–77.
bandung as the constitution of afro-asian unity

The Bandung Conference concluded with the publication of its Final Com-
muniqué on April 24, 1955. The Conference was a success on many fronts,
including contributing to world peace; easing the Cold War confrontation;
addressing decolonization; and furthering the third world movement, the
nonalignment movement, Afro-Asian solidarity, and Asian regionalism.
Bandung formed and enacted the Afro-Asian unity. “[T]he first intercontin-
ental conference of coloured peoples in the history of mankind”39 was neither
a routine diplomatic event nor a purely ceremonial one. It consolidated a
sense of solidarity and unity, cultivated a feeling of mutual relatedness and
belonging, and marked the recognition of common responsibility toward the
community and humanity in general. The bondage among the people tran-
scended and overcame various historical, cultural, racial, religious, linguistic,
political, and economic differences among the Asian and African countries
and held them together.
The deliberation and adoption of the Final Communiqué, an enshrine-
ment of the common understanding the countries reached by consensus, can
be understood as an exercise of the original constitution making of the
emergent Afro-Asian unity.40 Neither the soft-law nature of the Final Com-
muniqué41 nor the lack of institutionalization can undermine the constitu-
tional meaning of the Conference: the shared values and enduring spirit
constituted and sustained a community, not the institutions.42 In this sense
it is not an exaggeration to characterize the Bandung Principles as the de facto
constitution of Afro-Asian unity.
The constitutional aspect of Bandung also manifests in its normative
dimension. The Declaration on the Promotion of World Peace and Cooper-
ation sets out ten principles by which all states abide in their mutual relation-
ships. These principles form the sources of political legitimacy for ordering
and structuring international society. The Bandung Conference thus
39
See “Speech by President Soekarno at the Opening of the Asian-African Conference (April 18,
1955),” reprinted in George McTurnan Kahin, Asian-African Conference: Bandung, Indonesia,
April 1955 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1956), pp. 39–51.
40
For a contrary opinion that downplays the value of formal resolutions of the conference and
focuses instead on its educational value, see Kahin, Asian-African Conference, pp. 35–36.
41
“The Bandung consensus constituted more a hold and a guide rather than a formal
agreement.” Abdulgani, The Bandung Connection, p. 164.
42
For example, Martti Koskenniemi warned against overemphasis on institutionalism by
proposing “constitutionalism as mindset.” See Koskenniemi, “Constitutionalism as Mindset:
Reflections on Kantian Themes About International Law and Globalization” (2007) 8
Theoretical Enquires in Law, at 9–36.
188 Chen Yifeng
formulated an alternative normative and ethical system of diplomacy against

which colonial and hegemonic acts could be checked.43 The Conference
presents the vision of a world order built on the basis of Afro-Asian unity and
the ten principles of Bandung. The principles also have an external aspect that
invites the Western powers to likewise submit themselves.
In this sense, the formulation of the ten principles of Bandung was more
than the localization of universal norms within a regional context.44 Termino-
logical similarities may give the misleading impression that the Bandung
principles do not go beyond those embodied in the UN Charter; however,
the constitutional meaning of the Bandung principles should not be under-
estimated. The UN Charter was drafted before most Asian and African
countries gained national independence, and by the time of the Conference
a substantial amount of Asian and African countries were blocked from
admission to the UN because of Cold War antagonism. This imbued the
Bandung principles with a distinctive significance and relevance to the devel-
opment of a postcolonial world order45:
Bandung also led to the redefinition of the relationship between the West
and the rest, or the post-colonial nations of Asia and Africa. The old frame-
work, marked by hierarchy and dependence, gave way to expectations of
equality and interdependence in multilateral diplomacy.46
The constitutional nature of the Bandung Principles is demonstrated by their

enduring relevance over time.
From the perspective of China, the Bandung Conference offers a tangible
third way out of the Cold War paradigm, which dictated that one country’s
simultaneous security and insecurity hinge on its alliance with either of the two
superpowers. Even before China formally split with the Soviet Union in 1960,
it was vigilant regarding the chauvinism of the Soviet Union and the way it
treated some Eastern European countries. At the same time, China was weary
of the military confrontation with the United States, not least in the Taiwan
Strait. The Bandung logic offered China hopes of promoting peace based on
43
For example, the involvement of external powers in Asia was much more constrained post
Bandung. After the Bandung conference, SEATO never enlarged its membership, and it was
finally dissolved in 1979.
44
Acharya, “The Normative Relevance,” p. 4.
45
Arguably the reaffirmation of those UN principles could be interpreted as a reflection of the
exclusion of Asian and African states and their disappointment regarding how superpowers
manipulated the operation of UN organs. See Kweku Ampiah, The Political and Moral
Imperatives of the Bandung Conference of 1955: The Reactions of the US, UK and Japan
(Folkstone: Global Oriental, 2007), p. 147.
46
mutual recognition and building trust instead of forming military alliances.

From Bandung onward, with its strengthened ties to Asian and African coun-
tries, China also gradually developed its independent foreign policy.
For China, the Bandung Principles are seen as a continuation of its com-
mitment to coexistence. In the opinion of Zhou Enlai, “the Declaration on the
Promotion of World Peace and Co-operation adopted by the Asian-African
Conference fully embodied the five principles of peaceful coexistence jointly
advocated by China, India and Burma.”47 The Conference also provided an
opportune occasion for China to commit itself to the aims and principles of
UN, which was otherwise impossible because of its exclusion. Moreover,
Bandung promoted an Asian type of diplomatic style that emphasized the
relevance of goodwill, trust building, personal exchanges, direct negotiation,
understanding, sympathy and empathy, and consensus in decision-making.
the enduring legacy of bandung for china

The Bandung Conference also induced China to consolidate itself toward a
territorial nation-state along with a marked Afro-Asian identity. The global
colonialism of European powers was legally constructed on denying the
sovereignty of colonial peoples on the grounds of lack of Western-style polit-
ical institutions.48 The violent incorporation of China into the Western system
of capitalism and colonialism from the 1840s onward compelled China to
reinvent itself from a political and cultural empire into a nation-state, with its
political organization reconstituted on the basis of awaking nationalism and
democracy instead of Confucianism and allegiance to emperor.49 By the time
of the founding of the People’s Republic in 1949, China had firmly grounded
itself on a nation-state conception, both internally and externally.
A prominent issue testing China’s nation-state outlook was its relation
with Chinese citizens living in other Asian countries. By 1955, an estimated
12 million Chinese resided in Southeast Asia, and the majority were born
locally.50 Many held dual nationalities of Chinese and the country of
47
“Premier Chou En-lai Report on the Asian-African Conference,” pp. 40–41.
48
See generally Antony Anghie, Imperialism, Sovereignty and the Making of International Law
49
Up to the mid-nineteenth century, the Chinese Empire exhibited “a spirit of culturalism,” and
its boundaries were limited only by social rather geographical factors, marked by “a
characteristic absence of national sentiment in its modern meaning.” Li Zhaojie, “Traditional
Chinese World Order” (2002) 1 Chinese Journal of International Law 20, at 29–30.
50
Zhou Enlai, Report on the Work of the Government (September 23, 1954) (Beijing: People’s
Publishing House, 1954).
190 Chen Yifeng
residence.51 There was concern regarding their political allegiance and their
connections to China, which – from the perspective of those Southeast Asian
countries – would empower China to intervene in their domestic affairs.
Zhou Enlai and Sunario, the Indonesian minister of foreign affairs, signed a
treaty aimed at resolving the dual nationalities issue on April 22, 1955, during
the Bandung Conference. According to the treaty, the Chinese in Indonesia
were obligated to opt for either a Chinese nationality or an Indonesian one
within two years, which meant automatically relinquishing the other.52
Chinese nationals who resided in Indonesia were required to abide by local
laws and customs and not to become involved in Indonesian political activ-
ities. The Chinese government was looking to eliminate Southeast Asian
concern about China’s subversive influence and to alleviate discrimination
against Chinese citizens.53 As the Joint Communiqué of the two governments
confirmed, the treaty was entered into in accordance with the principles of
equality, mutual benefit, and noninterference in each other’s internal affairs.54
In his speech at the signature ceremony, Zhou Enlai encouraged the nation-
alized Chinese to advance their sense of allegiance to their country of
nationality.55 Zhou further characterized the treaty with Indonesia as a good
model for China to settle the dual nationality issue with other Southeast Asian
countries.56 Before and after Bandung, China also communicated with
Burma about Chinese of dual nationalities. Although they reached no formal
agreement, they established an understanding that China would adhere to the
one-nationality principle in its relationship with Burma.57 China took the
same position with Thailand.58
51
Holding dual nationalities was permissible according to the Law of Nationality enacted by the
Legislative Yuan of the Republic of China in 1928, and the overseas Chinese were given lenient
conditions to restore their Chinese nationality. See Xie Zhengmin, The Legislative History of
the Republic of China, Volume One (Beijing: China University of Political Science and Law
Press, 2000), pp. 504–506.
52
See Articles 1, 5, and 7, Agreement on the Issue of Dual Nationality between the Republic of
Indonesia and the People’s Republic of China, signed on April 22, 1955.
53
Zhou Enlai, Report on the Work.
54
“Communiqué of the Government of the People’s Republic of China and the Government of
the Republic of Indonesia on the Negotiation of Dual Nationality (April 22, 1955),” in Selective
Collections, Volume Two, p. 68.
55
“Speech by Zhou Enlai at the Signing Ceremony on Issue of Dual Nationality between the
Government of the People’s Republic of China and the Government of the Republic of
Indonesia (April 22, 1955),” in Selective Collections, Volume Two, pp. 63–64.
56
“Premier Chou En-lai Report on the Asian-African Conference,” p. 51.
57
Mao Zedong, “We should Enhance Mutual Understanding during Cooperation (December 1,
1954),” in An Anthology of Mao Zedong, pp. 184–185.
58
Mao Zedong, “Our wish is to build Friendship between China and Thailand (December 21,
1955),” in An Anthology of Mao Zedong, pp. 228–230.
By the time of concluding the Sino-Indonesia Treaty on Dual Nation-

alities, the People’s Republic of China had not enacted any laws on
nationality. Thus the treaty had a preemptive effect on China’s adoption
of the one-nationality policy,59 formally pronounced in the Law of Nation-
ality approved by the National People’s Congress on September 10, 1980.
China had to cut off its political connection with the nonnational Chi-
nese and decide not to act as their sovereign, regardless of their cultural
affiliation and genealogical relatedness. The possibility for China to
remain a cultural state was ruled out by the rising nationalism in
Southeastern Asia.
Another outstanding issue that stood in way of the consolidation of the
Chinese state was the ambiguity of its territorial boundaries with neighbors,
none of which was settled by the founding of the People’s Republic. Historic-
ally, the geography of China was reduced and revised by continuous colonial
intrusions. The demarcation of the territorial boundaries was often compli-
cated by how much weight and effects were to be given to the colonial
injustice of the past, especially treaties and agreements that colonial powers
forced on China.
In early 1956, shortly after Bandung, China and Burma conducted direct
negotiations on boundary delineation, in accordance with the five principles
of peaceful coexistence, with an aim toward reaching an equitable and
reasonable solution.60 They dealt with historical legacies, including treaties
between the British Empire and China, by taking into account the actual
conditions and the new political situation. China concluded its first boundary
treaty with Burma in 1960, and both countries accumulated sufficient trust
and friendship to negotiate the boundaries in a mutually understanding and
sympathetic manner. Subsequently, boundaries were settled with Nepal in
1961, with Pakistan and Mongolia in 1962, and with Afghanistan in 1963. The
length of these settled boundaries amounts to more than 10,000 kilometers,
accounting for more than half of China’s land boundaries.61 This helped
China stabilize border peace and ensured friendly cooperation with those
neighboring countries.
Along with China’s nation-state consolidation, the Conference also had a
lasting influence on the construction of China’s self-identity as a member of
59
Articles 3, 8, and 9, Law of Nationality of People’s Republic of China, promulgated and
effective on September 10, 1980.
60
See Zhou Enlai, “Report Concerning the Boundary Issue between Burma and China (July 7,
1957),” in An Anthology of Zhou Enlai, pp. 230–238.
61
Duang Jielong, International Law Practice and Cases of China (Beijing: Law Press, 2011),
p. 165.
192 Chen Yifeng
the Afro-Asian unity. While Bandung is acknowledged to have introduced the

People’s Republic of China to the Asian and African community,62 it is
equally true that the Conference introduced an Afro-Asian idea into China’s
self-understanding. The Conference acquainted China with many unfamiliar
Afro-Asian countries and introduced the Asian and African community into
China’s diplomatic landscape.
China’s connection with Asian and African countries was rapidly developed
and strengthened after Bandung. Largely because of Zhou Enlai’s construct-
ive approach and conciliatory style at the Conference, many Asian and African
countries started to approach China.63 Before Bandung, China had developed
diplomatic relations with only six Asian and African countries. After Bandung,
from 1955 to 1959, China established diplomatic relations with another twelve
nations, including Nepal on August 1, 1955, Egypt on May 3, 1956, Syria on
August 1, 1956, Ceylon (now Sri Lanka) on February 7, 1957, and Cambodia
on July 18, 1958. By July 1966, China had established diplomatic relations with
thirty-two Asian and African countries.64
The Bandung Conference developed a Chinese conception of the world in
which China saw itself as a member of the Afro-Asian unity.65 This sense of
relatedness greatly affected how China conceived of and conducted its rela-
tionship with Asian and African countries, and the way China constructed and
exercised its international power. China’s association with the Afro-Asian
group was deeply rooted in the faith of a nonhierarchical, non-Western-
dominated world order in which China was ready to contribute as a construct-
ive member.
the continued relevance of bandung: a renewed

asian regionalism
The idea of Asia or Asianism is largely a political construction. It was not until
the late nineteenth century that the term Asia “came to represent a specific
geopolitical space bound by such commonalities as a shared history, close
cultural links, a long record of diplomatic relations, trade exchanges, and the
62
63
See Abdulgani, The Bandung Connection, p. 152.
64
See Huang Hua, Experience and Insights: Huang Hua’s Memoir (Beijing: World Affairs Press,
2007), p. 114.
65
It is observed that “a distinctively Chinese preoccupation with Bandung relates to the
conference’s historical role in facilitating the PRC’s relations with ‘Yafei’ – the combined
nations of Asia and Africa.” Antonia Finnane, “Zhou Enlai in Bandung: Film as history in the
People’s Republic of China,” in Finnane, Bandung 1955, p. 111.
notion of a ‘common destiny’” in response to Western colonialism.66 Some

intellectuals in China and Japan started to call for the solidarity of Asian
peoples to resist European invasion. The Japanese later seized and misused
the concept of Asianism when Japan turned into a colonial power and
aggressively expanded. For example, the Japanese occupation of Southeast
Asian countries after 1940 was carried out under the banner of the Greater
East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere.67
The most significant Asian Regionalism was the Association of the
South-East Asian Nations (ASEAN), established by Indonesia, Malaysia,
the Philippines, Singapore, and Thailand in 1967. The anticommunism
sentiment behind ASEAN’s establishment was soon overtaken by the
reorientation on economic development and social cooperation.68 This
regional approach deviates from earlier regional arrangements such as
SEATO, which was an ideologically driven, hegemonic pursuit. The idea
that Asians should decide Asian affairs highlighted the emphasis on
regional autonomy and solidarity. The five countries emphasized in the
Declaration of Bangkok that foreign bases were not to “be used directly or
indirectly to subvert the national independence and freedom of States in
the area.”69
The success of ASEAN owes much to the valuable legacies of Bandung, at
which all the initiating countries except Singapore participated. At the outset,
the Conference brought together Asian countries and related them by a
regional solidarity on anticolonialism and self-determination, thus reinvigor-
ating the reemergence of Asianism on a renewed basis.70 In his opening
speech, Indonesian President Sukarno advocated “the affairs of Asia [to be]
the concern of the Asian peoples themselves.”71 The personal experiences of
those who attended the Conference testified to the eminent presence of the
66
Sven Saaler and Christopher W. A. Szpilman, “Introduction: The Emergence of Pan-Asiansim
as an Ideal of Asian Identity and Solidarity, 1850–2008,” in Sven Saaler and Christopher W. A.
Szpilman (eds.), Pan-Asianism: A Documentary History, Volume 1: 1850–1920 (Lanham:
Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2011), p. 2.
67
See Clive Christie, Ideology and Revolution in Southeast Asia 1900–1980: Political Ideas of the
Anti-Colonial Era (London: Routledge, 2001), pp. 73–83. On the concept, see Sven Saaler,
“Matsuoka Yosuke and the Greater East Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere, 1941,” in Saaler, Pan-
Asianism, pp. 223–227.
68
Sheldon Simon, “ASEAN and Multilateralism: The Long, Bumpy Road to Community”
(2008) 30 Contemporary Southeast Asia 264, at 268.
69
Preamble, The ASEAN Declaration (Bangkok Declaration), August 8, 1967.
70
See Wang Yi, “China’s New Asianism for the Twenty-First Century” (2006) Foreign Affairs
Review 89, pp. 6–10, trans. Torsten Weber, in Saaler, Pan-Asianism, pp. 361–370.
71
See “Speech by President Soekarno at the Opening of the Asian-African Conference (April 18,
1955),” reprinted in Kahin, Asian-African Conference, pp. 39–51.
194 Chen Yifeng
element of Asianism.72 More important, Bandung lent to ASEAN countries a

workable, normative system of international relations. This point was unam-
biguously spelled out in the Treaty of Amity and Cooperation in Southeast
Asia of 1976, where the core principles of Bandung were incorporated and
reaffirmed as fundamental principles guiding the contracting parties in their
mutual relations73: “the regionalism that subsequently took root, for instance,
in Southeast Asia – as embodied in the Association of Southeast Asian Nations
(ASEAN) – clearly benefited from the normative legacy of Bandung.”74
Moreover, the ASEAN countries inherited some highly valuable features from
the organizational style of the Conference, notably preferring informality over
the binding documents, emphasis on the sovereign equality, insistence on
decision-making consensus, and so on.75 This approach ensured a smooth
deepening and broadening of cooperation among the ASEAN countries by
gradually overcoming various differences through trust building and friendly
negotiation.
China has been actively engaged with ASEAN countries in various forms of
cooperation since 1991 as part of its good neighborliness policy.76 China
normalized its diplomatic relations with Malaysia in 1974 and with the
Philippines and Thailand in 1975. With the diplomatic relations established
with Singapore in 1990, from 1991 China started dialogue with ASEAN
countries at the level of foreign minister. In 2003, China formally acceded
to the Treaty of Amity and Cooperation in Southeast Asia at the consent of all
ASEAN countries, and a strategic partnership between China and ASEAN
was announced. In 2010, the ASEAN-China Free Trade Area was established:
“China and ASEAN have quadrupled their trade from US$105.9 billion in
2004 to US$443.6 billion in 2013. And the two-way accumulative investment
has topped US$120 billion.”77
72
Richard Wright, The Color Curtain: A Report on the Bandung Conference (Cleveland: The
World Publishing Company, 1956), p. 161.
73
Article 2. 74
75
See Rodolfo C. Severino, Southeast Asia in Search of an ASEAN Community: Insights from the
Former ASEAN Secretary-General (Singapore: Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, 2006),
p. 35. From a Western point of view, the Asian way raises doubts. See, e.g., Peter Malanczuk,
“Association of Southeast Asian Nation (ASEAN),” in Max Planck Encyclopedia of Public
International Law, available at www.empil.com.
76
See generally Xue Hanqin, “Chinese Contemporary Perspective on International Law:
History, Culture and International Law” (2011) 355 Recueil des Cours, at 202–213.
77
See “Zhang Gaoli’s speech at China-ASEAN Expo, Business and Investment Summit
(September 16, 2014),” available at http://news.xinhuanet.com/english/china/2014-09/17/c_
133648055.htm.
Western powers viewed the economic rise of China suspiciously, expressing

concern about losing their grip on the world order. Developing countries also
wondered whether China would turn into a hegemonic power. In the Asian
region, parties warned that China’s economic integration in East Asia would
create “a Sino-centric regional order based on a return to the ‘benign’ tributary
system of the past.”78 For some, China is now restoring a hierarchical order in
East Asia.79
Today, uncertainty hangs over Asia. The conflicting and overlapping claims
of sovereignty over various islands and rocks in the South China Sea has raised
tensions in the region. The shaping of the Asian regional order is further
complicated by the rebalancing policy of the United States in the Asia-Pacific
region. Many doubts and concerns are raised regarding the future of the Asian
regional order. Will it be a peaceful, cooperative, and stable one based on the
Bandung Principles, or a confrontational, hostile, and turbulent one dictated
by geopolitics?
Wang Yi, then–Chinese Ambassador to Japan and current Chinese Minis-
ter of Foreign Affairs, presented a Chinese vision of Asianism in 2006,
proposing that the new Asianism should be a cooperative, open, and harmoni-
ous.80 His reflection on the architect of future Asia regional order is not based
on China being a nonhegemonic power. Rather, it calls for China to act as a
constructive force conducive to the peace and prosperity of Asia.
Constructing a just regional order requires political wisdom and commit-
ment of all Asian countries. It should transcend from the parochialism of
nationalism in Asia and stress the spirit of solidarity, trust, and cooperation. For
that purpose, the Bandung Conference is a highly relevant starting point.
78
79
See, e.g., a recent interpretation of China’s involvement with the Shanghai Cooperation
Organisation in light of the Grossraum theory. Michael Salter and Yinan Yin, “Analysing
Regionalism Within International Law and Relations: The Shanghai Cooperation
Organisation as a Grossraum?” (2014) 13 Chinese Journal of International Law 819.
80
See Yi, “China’s New Asianism,” pp. 361–370.
11
Decolonization as a Cold War Imperative

Bandung and the Soviets
boris n. mamlyuk
The Conference is agreed: (a) in declaring that colonialism in all its manifestations is
an evil which should speedily be brought to an end.1
– Final Communiqué
Yesterday upon the stair
I met a man who wasn’t there
He wasn’t there again today
I wish, I wish he’d go away
– Antigonish, Hughes Mearns (1899)
introduction
Several chapters in this volume attest to the enduring complexity of Bandung
as symbolic artifact, exercise in lawmaking, and political act. Bandung was not
simply a spontaneous eruption of political will during a particularly tense
moment after the Second World War. The first half of the twentieth century
furnishes us with multiple antecedents to Bandung. The most notable and
consequential was the Bolshevik Revolution. This chapter explores the con-
nection between Soviet efforts to aid decolonization and Bandung. For close
to forty years prior to the conference, the Soviet mindset would suggest that
the Soviet Union bore the heaviest burdens in aid of oppressed people
everywhere. If so, why did the Soviet Union’s tremendous theoretical and
material efforts toward decolonization fail to galvanize the participants at
Bandung toward an even more forceful repudiation of the evils of
1
Final Communiqué of the Asian-African Conference of Bandung (Apr. 24, 1955), Art. D(1)(A);
The Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Republic of Indonesia (ed.). Asia-Africa Speak from Bandung
(Djakarta: 1955), pp. 161–169.
196
Decolonization as a Cold War Imperative 197
colonialism? Why was the Soviet Union sidelined at Bandung? What were
Soviet commentators saying from the sidelines?
bandung as soviet international law

Let us first contextualize Bandung from the perspective of a Soviet inter-
national lawyer, or Homo sovieticus – that is, a politically active Soviet citizen
or co-partisan. Homo sovieticus is by no means limited to a strictly ethnona-
tional conception of a Russian Soviet individual acting in the service of the
Soviet state. The Soviet Union had many new sympathizers and partisans
during this time, including one of the principal architects of Bandung, India’s
Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru.
From the standpoint of this hypothetical Soviet observer, not only was
Bandung made possible by the historical occurrence of the Bolshevik Revolu-
tion; it was also the epitome of what could be styled a Soviet approach to
international law – a Romantic, humanistic, moral expression of dissatisfac-
tion with the inequitable distribution of material resources on Earth, formally
calling for action but showing disdain for formal constraints in relation to
ambiguously defined class interests.
Long before Bandung, leading Soviet international law figures worked to
theorize, concretize, and propagate a set of international legal principles that
directly challenged colonialism’s immediate and ulterior forms. What went
wrong? If Soviet critiques of Western or capitalist exploitative practices con-
tributed to rising self-awareness among the world’s colonized peoples, leading
them to unite as proletarians against imperialism (understood as the highest
stage of capitalism), where did the Soviet experiment falter? How did the
Soviet state, arising from a Bolshevik-led revolutionary movement explicitly
self-defined in opposition to imperialism, become an imperialist actor in its
own right? What can the strange legacy of Soviet imperialism teach contem-
porary students of encounters in which imperial powers sincerely profess anti-
imperial or anticolonial principles while simultaneously advancing imperial
projects? And how does international law help frame these questions?
Speaking in the broadest terms of Soviet international law, Bandung (or a
precursor to Bandung) suggests an inquiry into the dual role that Soviet
international legal doctrine played: enabling colonial independence move-
ments toward statehood and recognition while simultaneously constraining
self-determination movements within its own, vast territory. This argument
could be developed in at least four ways: (1) by exploring realist justifications
for exploitative Soviet state practice despite high-sounding anticolonialist
rhetoric; (2) by harnessing critical approaches suggesting the indeterminacy
198 Boris N. Mamlyuk
of international legal argument more generally without Soviet/Western dis-

tinction; (3) by reopening settled historical narratives (e.g., exclusion of Soviets
from Bandung) through new empirical or hypothetical research; and (4) by
tracing the evolution of Soviet anticolonialist discourse through the writings of
leading theorists to illuminate the constraints and anxieties affecting these
analysts and shaping their work on particular emancipatory projects. The key
intellectual payoff of any of these approaches is the light shed on one of the
most neglected, yet policy-central, subdisciplines of international law.
Such exercises are risky. In the contemporary moment, when Russian
aggression or economic expansion is frequently mislabeled “Soviet,”2 any
attempt to explore fractures in Soviet modes of argumentation on decoloniza-
tion may appear revisionist or trivial,3 akin to an aesthetic study of the
monumentalism of Werner March’s 1936 Olympiastadion in Berlin as a proxy
for Nazi ideology. Suddenly, domestic Soviet relations (like the 1954 transfer
of Crimea from the RSFSR to the Ukrainian SSR) must be reexamined in the
framework of colonial politics. Rather than teaching how to engage with
torturous historical issues like Nazism or Sovietism, dominant general histor-
ies of international law tend to treat Soviet approaches to international law as
anomalous – as aberrant deviations from the ceaseless teleological develop-
ment of liberal international law doctrines and institutions.4 More recent
attempts to rethink Soviet approaches to international law vis-à-vis Western
international law frame the Soviet experience either as a civilizational dia-
logue with Europe5 or as an integral part of a longer historical narrative dating
2
Anders Åslund, “Sergey Glazyev and the Revival of Soviet Economics” (2013) 29 Post-Soviet
Affairs 375.
3
William Partlett, “Reclassifying Russian Law: Mechanisms, Outcomes, and Solutions for an
Overly Politicized Field” (2008) 2 Columbia Journal of Eastern European Law 1.
4
Canonical treatises and textbooks (see Crawford on Brownlie) elide the concept of “socialist
international law” or distinct Soviet approaches to international law, instead absorbing Soviet
law into the teleologies of international law pursued by leading Western international lawyers
(see Koskenniemi 2004 on Morgenthau) or (relatedly) framing Soviet approaches as
encounters with universal international law understood as Western international law (see
Fassbender et al.). See, e.g., Bardo Fassbender, Anne Peters, Simone Peter, Daniel Högger
(eds.), The Oxford Handbook of the History of International Law (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2012); Alexander Orakhelashvili (ed.), Research Handbook on the Theory and History of
International Law (Cheltenham: Edward Elgar, 2011). See, e.g., James Crawford, Brownlie’s
Principles of Public International Law (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012); Lori Damrosch,
Louis Henkin, Sean Murphy, Hans Smit, International Law: Cases and Materials, 5th ed. (St.
Paul: West, 2013); Martti Koskenniemi, The Gentle Civilizer of Nations: The Rise and Fall of
International Law 1870–1960 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001).
5
Lauri Mälksoo, “The History of International Legal Theory in Russia: A Civilizational
Dialogue with Europe” (2008) 19 European Journal of International Law, at 211–232; Lauri
Mälksoo, Russian Approaches to International Law (London: Oxford University Press, 2015).
back to Russia’s imperial era.6 The history of international law in the twentieth
century lacks anything even approaching adequate accounting of Soviet
doctrinal innovations.7 Understanding those innovations and their failings will
prove critical in the twenty-first century.
interwar soviet international law and colonialism

The writings of early Soviet international lawyers Evgeny Korovin (1892–1964)
and Evgeny Pashukanis (1891–1937) are central to understanding how Ban-
dung echoed early decolonization efforts. An exploration of their work mani-
fests several important themes in Soviet thought of the time: (1) the centrality
of political action, as opposed to legal maneuvering, in achieving meaningful
change; (2) privileging of domestic political consolidation over global revolu-
tionary struggle; (3) resilience of Russo-centrism in Soviet foreign relations,
and the prevalence of Russo-imperialism over genuine internationalism in
near-abroad relations; (4) increasing comfort with crude instrumentalist
rationales versus principled argumentation; and (5) despite zealous defense
of formalism in particular contexts (e.g., treaty law, institutions, and territorial
integrity), the emergence of a substantive ambivalence toward legal formalism
generally.
While Lenin often addressed central topics such as self-determination,
sovereignty, nonintervention, and international economic law,8 the work of
developing an operational Soviet theory of international law fell to young
scholars working in the budding Soviet Institute of State and Law, particularly
Evgeny Korovin and Evgeny Pashukanis,9 both in their mid-twenties at the
time of the Bolshevik Revolution. These theorists’ work is remarkable for a
6
See, e.g., Peter Holquist, “The Dilemmas of an Official with Progressive Views-Baron Boris
Nolde” (2007) Baltic Yearbook of International Law; Austin Jersild, Orientalism and Empire:
North Caucasus Mountain Peoples and the Georgian Frontier, 1845–1917 (Montreal: McGill-
Queens University Press, 2003).
7
John Quigley, Soviet Legal Innovations and the Law of the Western World (London:
Cambridge University Press, 2007), Part III.
8
Lenin on International Politics and International Law (Moscow: MGIMO, 1958); see also
V. I. Lenin, Questions of National Policy (Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House,
1959). In 1970, the Soviet Union issued a volume of Lenin’s contributions to international law.
See G. I. Tunkin and V. F. Fedorov (eds.), V. I. Lenin and Contemporary International Law
(Moscow: Znanie, 1970).
9
Scott Newton, Law and the Making of the Soviet World: The Red Demiurge (London:
Routledge, 2014); R. St. J. Macdonald, “Rummaging in the Ruins, Soviet International Law
and Policy in the Early Years: Is Anything Left?,” in Karel Wellens (ed.), International Law:
Theory and Practice: Essays in Honour of Eric Suy (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff Publishers,
1998), p. 69.
number of reasons, three of which should suffice to establish their authorita-

tiveness vis-à-vis their contemporaries, and their relevance to the present
study.10
First, occupying high-level institutional positions in a time of tremendous
institutional upheaval, they acted as doyens for the field within Russia, had
access to significant research resources and funding, and set research agendas
for scores of students under their direct supervision.11 During the interwar
period, Pashukanis rose to become the leading Soviet legal theorist, holding
prominent institutional posts in the Communist Academy and what would
become the Institute of State and Law within the Soviet (later Russian)
Academy of Sciences.12 Korovin’s prominent roles included those of secretary
of the central committee of the Russian branch of the ICRC (1918–1927) and
Soviet delegate in various high-level diplomatic missions.13 Second, both
Korovin and Pashukanis were extremely prolific and their works were widely
disseminated in their original Russian and in translations. Third, as arguably
the two leading Soviet international law scholars, their collaboration in the
service of Soviet state-building efforts warrants reading their works jointly.14
Considered together, their work suggests certain shared sensibilities and anx-
ieties suffusing interwar Soviet perceptions of colonialism;15 these concerns
continued to influence Soviet theory and practice well past the Second World
War, and, arguably, to this day.
It is not surprising that interwar Soviet international lawyers would write
against empire and place Soviet international law in frank opposition to an
international legal order seen as exploitative, imperialist, and nominally
10
Piers Bierne (ed.), Revolution in Law: Contributions to the Development of Soviet Legal Theory
(Avmonk, Quebec: M.E. Sharpe, 1990).
11
William E. Butler, Russia and Law of Nations in Historical Perspective (London: Wildy,
Simmonds & Hill, 2008), p. 372.
12
Michael David-Fox, “Symbiosis to Synthesis: The Communist Academy and the
Bolshevization of the Russian Academy of Sciences, 1918–1929” (1998) 46 Jahrbücher für
Geschichte Osteuropas 2, at 219–243.
13
“Коровин, Евгений Александрович,” in Дипломатический словарь, под ред.
А. А. Громыко, А. Г. Ковалева, П. П. Севостьянова, С. Л. Тихвинского в 3-х томах
(М., «Наука», 1985–1986) [“Korovin, Evgeny Aleksandrovich,” in Diplomatic Dictionary
(Gromyko, Kovaleva, Sevostyanova, Tikhvinskii, eds., 3 vol., Moscow: Nauka, 1985–1986)],
available at: http://enc-dic.com/diplomat/Korovin-Evgenij-Aleksandrovich-570.html.
14
William E. Butler, Russia and Law of Nations in Historical Perspective (London: Wildy,
Simmonds & Hill, 2008), p. 375. (“The [1936 Pashukanis-based, Korovin-compiled] syllabus
was approved by the international law section of the Communist Academy of Soviet
Construction and Law.”)
15
Korovin and Pashukanis were not the only two Soviet international lawyers writing within the
Interwar period. Michael Head, “The Passionate Legal Debates of the Early Years of the
Russian Revolution” (2001) 14 Canadian Journal of Law and Jurisprudence 1, at 26–27.
progressive while reprising familiar patterns of European colonial expansion.

In a 1927 article on the “Main Tendencies of Contemporary International
Colonial Law,” Korovin squarely attacked bourgeois international law for
promoting colonialism while camouflaging its exploitative basis in “neutral”
legal forms.16 For Korovin and Pashukanis, international law was the hand-
maiden of empire, promoting dispossession not only through the use of
doctrines and regimes like unequal treaties or the League of Nations mandate
system but also by reifying particular modes of Western legal formalism, which
many early Soviet jurists saw as nothing more than a medium for commodity
exchange.17
Much of Korovin and Pashukanis’s work remains untranslated and unpub-
lished. So, following the structure of Korovin’s 1927 article affords us a glimpse
into a particular style of critique in this period. This article was but one of
many publications in which Korovin critiqued particular aspects of colonial
legality. Korovin had previously exposed the League of Nations mandate
system as a pretext for continuing colonial practices.18 The 1927 article,
however, went further than his earlier work in its systematic treatment of
colonialism through international law.19
Following a broad critique of bourgeois international law for failing even to
acknowledge international colonial law as a field of study, Korovin immediately
defined the moral terms of the debate: the injustice of international law’s
complicity in colonialism. Surveying the sheer brutality inherent in some of its
most lethal doctrines, like annexation, and the depredations of the “knights of
colonial adventurism trade capitalism,” Pizarro and Cortez,20 Korovin argued
that the legal doctrine of annexation facilitated and rationalized the genocide of
indigenous populations. Korovin offered various “historical materialist” or “polit-
ical economic” explanations for the evolution of colonial forms. Thus, we learn:
With the growth of “culture,” murder was replaced by servitude, as colonial
masters realized it was more efficient to force the indigenous populations to
16
E.A. Korovin, “Main Tendencies of Contemporary International Colonial Law” (1927), 26
Soviet Law 2, at 1.
17
E. B. Pashukanis, General Theory of Law and Marxism, 4th ed. (Moscow: Public Communist
Academy, 1928).
18
E. A. Korovin, International Law in the Transition Period (Moscow: Institute of Soviet Law,
1924), p. 38; E. A. Korovin, International Conventions and Acts of New Era (Moscow: State
Publisher, 1925); E. A. Korovin, Contemporary Public International Law (Moscow: State
Publisher, 1926); Korovin, International Law, p. 43.
19
Korovin also critiqued Russian imperialism, which he considered indistinguishable in form
and practice from European imperial practices. International Law, p. 43.
20
Id. at 4.
toil for them as slaves than to kill them [much like the transformation of rules
of war from permitting the killing of war prisoners, to their use as laborers, to
the eventual permission of sale and exchange of prisoners].21
When Korovin asserts that religious or humanitarian justifications – like the

spreading of Christianity or a more inchoate “civilizing mission”22 – typically
mask the real, economic reasons for colonial expansion, his materialist
account of colonialism betrays a certain lack of analytical rigor, but this is
more than offset by the remarkable moral clarity of his view of colonialism’s
ghastly violence and malevolence.
Korovin was especially suspicious23 of seemingly neutral legal mechanisms
such as occupation, purchase, treaties, protectorates, and rent.24 Thus, he
pointed out the colonial practice of forming international conventions with
purportedly independent nations with the express intent of subsequently
revoking these conventions. Such maneuvers typically invoked as pretext a
violation by the weaker state forcing the stronger state to invoke remedial
mechanisms pursuant to the earlier treaty (e.g., France in Madagascar, 1885).25
In the nineteenth-century colonial context, Korovin discussed the “individual-
istic principle” by which each colonial power sought to create its own excep-
tional legal regime and negotiated with other colonial powers only when
necessary to protect reciprocal rights (as with the Austro-Anglo-Italian agree-
ment of 1887). Similarly, Korovin unpacked the “unequal treaties” with China
and the capitulation regimes with Turkey, Persia, and other “Eastern” states.
To Korovin, the more interesting and challenging era of colonialism was
the twentieth century, which he further periodizes into pre–First World War
colonialism and League of Nations colonialism.26 Rule by a decreasing
number of colonial powers over ever-larger colonial territories required rapid
development of innovative legal forms to transfer title and effective control
over colonies and to allow the penetration of one state’s financial capital into
21
Id. at 5.
22
See also Martti Koskenniemi, The Gentle Civilizer of Nations: The Rise and Fall of
International Law 1870–1960 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004).
23
See, e.g., Korovin, Contemporary Public, pp. 39–46 (discussing protectorates and mandates,
“the beloved weapons of imperial expansion in colonial and semi-colonial states”).
24
Korovin, International Colonial, p. 7 (listing as examples Imperial Russia’s rent of Port Arthur
and Talienvan [Dalny] from China in 1898, and England’s rent of part of Sudan and Congo in
1894). For this chapter of Russia’s history, see the section on the Russo-Japanese war in Grigory
Aleksinsky, Modern Russia (London: T. F. Unwin, Ltd., 1913), pp. 235–237.
25
Id. at 5–6. Edward Hertslet, The Map of Africa by Treaty: Great Britain & France to Zanzibar,
No. 166 (17 December 1885) (1894).
26
See Research Handbook, p. 379; Matthew Craven, Malgosia Fitzmaurice, and Maria Vogiatzi
(eds.), Time, History and International Law (Martinus Nijhoff: Leiden, 2007).
the territorial possessions of another. Prewar forms to accomplish this included

peaceful penetration (pénétration pacifique), spheres of influence, open doors
(U.S. policy in China; Germany in Africa), and the norm of “freedom of
action” (Franco-German agreement of 1911), each sufficiently opaque to allow
experimentation, and always accompanied by the threat of force.
Next, Korovin presents a number of historical examples that demonstrate
the continuities and evolution of old forms of international colonial law in the
League’s mandate system. As one case study, he analyzed the Anglo-Turkish
conflict (1925) over Mosul (Iraq). Whereas in the nineteenth century England
would simply have acquired the oil fields by annexation, in the twentieth,
control over Iraqi oil required, on England’s part, four additional legal steps:
(1) participation in the creation of an Iraqi government; (2) acquisition of a
mandate over it; (3) transformation of Iraq into a so-called independent state
friendly with England; and (4) active support for Iraq in its dispute with
Turkey over Mosul.27 Thus, an “independent Iraq” served as a bridge to the
Mosul oil fields. Korovin observes the same international law maneuvers
occurring in the protectorates of Egypt (England) and Morocco (France).
Early Soviet international lawyers had no shortage of historical examples to
illustrate the inconsistency, brutality, and hypocrisy of the mandate system. Nor,
in Korovin’s view, did the capitalists lack for legal forms that could serve as
concrete instruments of control. Thus, Italy could argue for a mandate over
Abyssinia (a League member) because of the “weakness and inability of the
Abyssinian government to fulfill its obligations under international law,”28 while
Germany sought to reestablish control over its old colonies through private-
public mixed corporations proposed by German bankers and extensively dis-
cussed at the “colonial week” in Hamburg in August 1926.29 To Korovin, these
new forms would be identical to King Leopold’s personal rule over the Belgian
Congo; the only difference was that they would be administered ever more
efficiently via improved technologies and means of production.
For Korovin, nonetheless, despite its successes at co-opting legal and moral
arguments, the colonial system was in crisis, collapsing under its own contra-
dictions. He saw three main challenges to its integrity. First, colonial rule’s
violence and ruthless exploitation would precipitate armed revolt. In true
Bolshevik fashion, he hoped and agitated for colonized peoples to rise in arms
against their rulers. Second, Korovin sought to expose the philanthropic
argument for the mandate system – that European states stood for culture,
civilization, and humanity – as shams. Korovin was especially mindful about
27 28 29
Korovin, International Colonial Law, p. 12. Id. Id. at 14.
the rapid evolution of colonial forms into seemingly neutral ones. Quoting
Plekhanov, he writes: “The more evident this ideology’s lies become, then the
more idealist and moral the language of its class will be.”30 Third, Korovin
found support for the inevitability of colonialism’s collapse even in the work of
several bourgeois theorists who were beginning to discern an irreconcilable
conflict between the internationalist aims of the mandate system and the
narrow national-capitalist interests of the mandate powers. Britain’s experi-
ments in Palestine and the resulting outcry from other European states exem-
plified the latter type of conflict, arising in the very conscience of the
colonialist.31
Thus, Soviet jurists did not merely oppose international legal norms and
institutions that aided or disguised colonialism. Equally important, Soviet
jurists refused to articulate their opposition to colonialism in strictly legal
terms.32 In other words, colonialism for Korovin and Pashukanis was not illegal
per se, as a violation of inchoate international legal rights to self-determination.
Rather, it was wrong, exploitative, and historically contingent, violating gen-
eral rights (purposefully undefined) to self-determination. Moreover, exposing
the inherently exploitative nature of the underlying legal regimes was intended
as a battle cry to the oppressed nations. As colonized peoples undertook
national liberation movements, Korovin made clear as early as 1925 that the
Soviet Union intended to play a leading role in the disruption of the colonial
system and the emancipation of oppressed nations, both through the work of
the Comintern and by directly supporting indigenous liberation movements.33
Third, in a paradigmatic example of unreflectively anti-formalist formalism,
Korovin grounded his defense of arguably colonial Soviet practices by refer-
ence to strictly formal guarantees of sovereignty and sovereign equality, such as
Soviet constitutional guarantees to secession.
early soviet international law in the

service of colonialism
Korovin ended his 1927 article on international colonial law by restating that
the Soviet Union would play a leading role in ending global colonialism.34
30 31
Id. at 15. Id. at 17.
32
Aside from Korovin and Pashukanis, see, e.g., S. Raevich, “Bourgeois Democracy and
Colonial Law” (1930) 7 Sov. Gos. i Revolutsia Prava 123; D. Levin, “Review: S.F. Kechikyan,
Defense of National Minorities under International Law” (1931) 1 Sov. Gos. i Revolutsia
Prava 169, 170; A. Kilinsky, “Forced Labor in the Colonies and the ILO” (1931) 3 Sov. Gos. i
Revolutsia Prava 135.
33 34
Id. at 19. Id. at 19.
After outlining the history of the mandate system, Korovin flatly concludes,
“the mandate system acts as a combined form (individual and collective) of
colonial rulership.”35
Perhaps anticipating the inevitable tu quoque argument asserting continu-
ities between Russian Imperial practices and Soviet policies in such regions as
the Caucasus36 or Central Asia, Korovin advances formal arguments for why
the Soviet Union was incapable of being conceived as a colonial/imperial
power. First, the Soviet Union was unequivocally against colonial law, starting
from its own constitutional and economic structure and ending with its
political agenda and methods, all of which prevented it from carrying out
a colonial agenda in any of its variations. Second, Soviet treaty practice
evidenced contempt and intolerance for international colonial forms. As
evidence for this, Korovin offered the rejection of the principles of capitula-
tion (Russo-Turkish agreement of 1921); elimination of consular jurisdiction
and return of concessions (Russo-Persian agreement of 1921); agreements for
provision of material aid without compensation (Russo-Afghan agreement of
1921); economic cooperation agreements (Soviet-Chinese agreement of 1925);
and the abolition of extraterritorial jurisdiction (Russo-Mongolian agreement
of 1921).37
The Soviets were extremely self-conscious about perceptions of Soviet
neocolonial rule because many early Soviet networks of power distribution
(organization of Communist Party apparatus across an immense territory;
coordination of vast, centralized law enforcement apparatus; the Comintern;
early Soviet political arrangements in the Caucasus) actually resembled colo-
nial administrative structures. This anxiety suffused Soviet discourse on doc-
trines like self-determination: Soviet scholars repeatedly emphasized the need
for even-handed critiques of the former Czarist Empire alongside European
colonial powers, based on new socialist conceptions of self-determination.38
With respect to self-determination, if not to colonialism as an overarching
legal regime per se, Soviet jurists were willing to turn the mirror inward.
Externally, of course, Soviet actions were naturally interpreted as expansion-
ism behind the fig leaf of a benevolent anticolonialism.39
Predictably, early Soviet discourse on self-determination almost always
involved critiques aimed outward and remarkably flexible justifications of
35 36 37
Id. at 12. Jersild, Orientalism and Empire. Id. at 18.
38
Bill Bowring, “Positivism versus Self-Determination: The Contradictions of Soviet
International Law,” in Susan Marks (ed.), International Law on the Left (New York:
Cambridge University Press, 2008), pp. 133, 142.
39
See, e.g., Roy Allison, The Soviet Union and the Strategy of Non-Alignment in the Third World
(New York: Cambridge University Press, 1988).
Soviet territorial integrity with regard to internal secessionist claims. Soviet

jurists expressly rejected purely formalistic accounts of self-determination and
consistently denied a purely legal basis for this right. Korovin connected this to
the Soviet conception of tactical/instrumentalist deployment of international
legal doctrines, stressing a Soviet conception of “self-determination . . . con-
ceived not in formal-theoretical terms (i.e., mere right to conduct a vote), but
with substantive guarantees.”40 In other words, the Soviet conception of self-
determination was not solely legal; self-determination rights were recognized
as legal rights for various tactical and strategic reasons. In the words of
Korovin, the principles of sovereignty and underlying right to self-
determination, aside from being “objectively fair,” were necessary to the real
interests of a socialist Russia.41 Recognizing the sovereignty and self-
determination rights of other nations mattered precisely for this instrumental
reason.42 By advancing legal arguments for self-determination while critiquing
the internal logic of self-determination in bourgeois legal practice, the Soviets
could deploy “anti-formalist formalism” offensively as an emancipatory tactic.
As class-based rights, for example, self-determination could be advanced in
defense of class struggles that did not fall along traditional ethnonational lines,
or within particular uti possidetis juris boundaries.
Even as they advocated anti-formal instrumentalist conceptions of self-
determination, early Soviet jurists also displayed adeptness with formal legal
arguments used defensively. Korovin even argued in defense of classical
(strict) sovereignty, as against the limited conceptions of sovereignty then
advocated by Wilson, because the formal concreteness “could serve as a legal
shield against the incursions of capitalist states supported by shifting concep-
tions of law.”43 But in domestic legal literature, the legal basis and form of
such rights were severely criticized. Korovin was explicit that the seemingly
contradictory position was a tactical move to gain relative strength in the
hegemonic, self-interested international order.44 In 1934, writing for an Anglo-
phone audience in the Iowa Law Review, Korovin again repeats that sover-
eignty and self-determination are legal rights.45 But a legal right was the floor,
not the theoretical ceiling; nor did the legal right necessarily constrain polit-
ical freedom of action. In his Essays (1935), Pashukanis repeated this position,
stating flatly that sovereignty was not a socialist principle, but one that the
Soviet Union would support as it helped mobilize oppressed nations in a
40 41 42 43
Korovin, International Law, p. 36. Id. at 43. Ibid. Id. at 44.
44
Id. at 45–46.
45
See E. A. Korovin, “The Problems of the International Recognition of the Union of Socialist
Soviet Republics in Practice” (1933–1934) 19 Iowa Law Review 259.
common fight against imperialism and acted as an important slogan for

national-liberation movements.46
Two further considerations in the formation of the Soviet position on self-
determination deserve mention. First, it is important to understand that Soviet
theory of self-determination was shaped first and foremost by the Soviet state’s
own struggle to obtain a modus vivendi with the West from as early as 1919.47
The economic accommodation sought by Soviet diplomats was seen as a life-
or-death issue; the recognition politics of the early 1920s were existential issues
for the socialist cause – and not for Russia alone. Thus, for example, Korovin
saw the 1921 financial-economic conference organized in Brussels by one of
the technical committees of the League to work out a world economic order as
a potential long-term threat against the Soviet Union. The conference’s rec-
ommendations were fourfold: (1) the adoption of liberalism versus state inter-
ventionism or state socialism; (2) reduction of spending on social programs;
(3) budgetary transparency; and (4) the creation of an international lending
organization capable of acting as a lender of last resort to national banks as well
as overseeing the worldwide production and distribution of raw goods.48
Although these recommendations were geared toward European states rebuild-
ing from the rubble of the First World War, Soviet writers were alarmed at the
possible framing of an international customary right to economic liberalism
that could then be wielded against the Soviet Union. Thus, Soviet jurists
aggressively employed an expansive theory of self-determination to protect
countries’ domestic rights to economic self-determination.49 Second, consist-
ent with Korovin’s and Pashukanis’s transition theories of international law, the
legal right to self-determination, like all other international law constructs, was
meant as an interim measure lasting only until “nationally independent and
nationally uniform states” progressed through the necessary levels of develop-
ment to capitalism, bourgeois transformation, and revolution.50
The contradictions between Soviet anticolonial doctrine and Soviet inter-
national legal practice became acute with the forced disappearance of the
transition theory, Soviet accession to the League of Nations (1934), and the
subsequent promulgation of the Soviet “stability of laws” and coexistence
doctrines (1936–1938).51 Upon joining the League of Nations in 1934, foreign
46
L. Ratner, “International Law in Marxist Light” (1935) 6 Soviet State 128, at 132.
47
Korovin, International Law, p. 47.
48
Id. at 51, 57 (discussing the inevitability of relations between the Soviet state and the West/
Europe during the transition period).
49
Id. at 51. 50
See generally Korovin, International Law; Bowring, “Positivism,” at 142.
51
Eugene Korovin, “Book Review: The Soviet Union and International Law” (1936) 49 Harvard
Law Review 1392, 1393.
commissar Litvinov reiterated that the colonial system of the League “meets
only with repulsion and resistance from the USSR.”52 But it is clear that
fascism’s immediate threat to the Soviet Union had shifted the Soviet focus
from the liberation of colonized peoples to the survival of the Soviet state itself.
The theoretical contradictions occasioned by Soviet accession to the League
were defused by appeals to the greater countervailing interest in achieving
collective security and maintaining peace. Whereas Korovin had written an
insightful and passionate critique of the League of Nations mandate system
just eight years prior, his scholarship after 1935 contained little of the revolu-
tionary fervor of the 1920s. Writing in 1936, Korovin shifted to an offensive
(affirmative) use of international law arguments for the purpose of addressing
the Japanese threat.53 Even so, he stressed that Japan’s actions in Manchuria,
while “violating international law,” were wrong because they represented
imperial aggression and war – legal concepts, but also political and historical
ones.54 Analogously, Pashukanis’s 1935 treatment of the League of Nations
mandate system is limited to a cursory one-page overview with a conclusory
charge that the mandate system represented the age-old system of colonial
annexation.55 As a legal-theoretical issue, the colonialism question laid largely
dormant through the Second World War, stirring occasionally thereafter in
relation to projects like Bandung, particular national liberation struggles, until
reawakening alongside Khrushchev’s more forceful campaign against coloni-
alism in 1960.56
To critique early Soviet international lawyers for incoherence or duplicity
on questions of self-determination and colonialism would overlook the larger
menace faced by the Soviet Union and the world in the form of rising fascist
movements. Such critique would also miss the essence of early Soviet inter-
national law. To Korovin and Pashukanis, self-determination and duties to
intervene and aid liberation struggles were secondary to the duty of exploited
masses to throw off their shackles and revolt. In fact, and in remarkable
parallels to the Soviet engagement with Bandung, early Soviet jurists placed
no hope in the international legal process or in the dispersion of legal rights as
an actual guarantee of self-determination. Their experience convinced them
of the importance of working with and within certain international institutions
to obtain material benefits to strengthen the Soviet state and the cause of
52
E. Pashukanis, Essays on International Law (State Publ. Soviet Jurisprudence, 1935), p. 98.
53
E. A. Korovin, Japan and International Law (Moscow: State Socio-Economic Publisher, 1936).
54 55
Id. at 4. Pashukanis, Essays on International Law, p. 97.
56
Bowring, “Positivism,” at 157–158; William E. Butler, “Book Review: Bernard A. Ramundo,
Peaceful Coexistence: International Law in the Building of Communism” (1969) 83 Harvard
Law Review 483, 485.
worldwide socialism. They recognized the utility (or, more accurately, inevit-
ability) of working within existing international legal vehicles, and offered to
defend (in international law) the rights of all working masses (along class and
national liberation lines). But they harbored no illusions about international
law’s emancipatory potential. Emancipation could come only in the form of
education and revolution. International law could be used to secure the fruits
of revolution (via recognition of the revolutionary state), but these were
provisional and precariously weak protections, vulnerable to destruction at a
moment’s notice by a militarily more powerful state.
soviet participation at the bandung conference

How to explain the contradiction between the revolutionary fervor of early
Soviet international legal thought and the tepid outcomes at Bandung?
The obvious answer, of course, is the Second World War. The Soviet war
experience confirmed many of the suspicions and fears Soviet theorists had
articulated in the 1920s and 1930s. The German repudiation of the Molotov-
Ribbentrop Pact exposed, yet again, the fragility of positive international law
commitments between nominally equal sovereigns and laid bare the claim
that positive treaty-based guarantees could assure security. The conduct of the
war – its unfathomable brutality, the long Allied delay in opening up the
Western front – also heightened Soviet suspicions regarding the Allies’ com-
mitment to meaningful global security frameworks. The start of the Cold War
also seemed to corroborate many of Korovin’s and Pashukanis’s original
intuitions on how international law could be used by capitalist states and
socialist states to achieve common objectives, while mutually assuring so-
called legal operating space in a form of transitory accommodation, until
the demise of one or the other order. Or, as Umut Özsu puts it,
If the logic of the dominant Cold War vision of a stratified international order
had purchase in the “First World,” it also found support among policymakers
in the “second” and “Third Worlds,” who adopted it even as they sought to
alter the power dynamics that made it possible.57
Given that the participants at Bandung explicitly sought to open a space for
policy dialogue between, or aside from, the two Cold War camps, it is not
surprising that Soviet participation was limited. It would be a mistake, how-
ever, to think that the United States and the Soviet Union stood by as neutral
57
Umut Özsu, “The Politics of ‘Multipolarity,’” (2013) 107 Proceedings of the Americal Society of
observers, particularly in light of prior efforts by both powers to curry favor with
newly independent states through bilateral diplomatic/developmental efforts
and UN institutional maneuvers.
As early as 1950 at the UN, for example, the United States proposed the
Uniting for Peace (UFP) initiative permitting General Assembly members to
circumvent a Security Council deadlock by authorizing Member States to
take collective action, including the use of force, in order to maintain or
restore international peace and security.58 Regardless of its legality under the
UN Charter, the political effect of the UFP was that the United States and the
Soviet Union had powerful incentives to maintain better relations with all
UNGA members, regardless of the underlying strategic importance of the
given UNGA Member State. Moreover, in light of majoritarian voting pro-
cedures at the UNGA, the UFP paradoxically may have spurred subsequent
U.S. and Soviet support for decolonization and national liberation struggles by
incentivizing “Assembly-packing” – recognition of states in order to skew not
just the global geopolitical contest but the political balance within the UN
itself.59
Both the United States and the Soviet Union used all available means to
gain leverage against one another, including co-opting the Bandung process
or appropriating its core normative recommendations. The United States
expended significant institutional and diplomatic resources to emphasize the
communist threat to the delegations invited to Bandung.60 This included
distributing intelligence on communist intentions, working with media organ-
izations, and even supporting the participation of U.S. Representative Adam
Clayton Powell, Jr. (D-NY) at the Conference – efforts carried out via spon-
sorship of U.S. journalistic outlets rather than by direct U.S. government
activity.61
58
UNGA Resolution 377(V) (1950); Boris N. Mamlyuk, “Uniting for ‘Peace’ in the Second Cold
War: A Response to Larry Johnson,” American Journal of International Law Unbound (July 21,
2014), available at www.asil.org/blogs/uniting-%E2%80%9Cpeace%E2%80%9D-second-cold-
war-response-larry-johnson. The Acheson Plan, named after U.S. Secretary of State Dean
Acheson, arose in direct response to the early U.S.-Soviet stalemates at the UNSC over the
Korean War. For further background on the Acheson Plan and the passage of UNGA
Resolution 377(A) (1950), see Christian Tomuschat, “Introductory Note: Uniting for Peace,
General Assembly Resolution 377 (V)” (2008) UN Audiovisual Library of International Law,
available at: http://legal.un.org/avl/ha/ufp/ufp.html.
59
Final Communiqué, Art. F(1).
60
Jason C. Parker, “Small Victory, Missed Chance: The Eisenhower Administration, the
Bandung Conference and the Turning of the Cold War,” in Kathryn C. Statler and Andrew L.
Johns (eds.), The Eisenhower Administration, the Third World, and the Globalization of the
Cold War (New York: Rowman and Littlefield, 2006), pp. 153–174.
61
Id.
In a parallel effort, the Soviet ambassador to Indonesia mobilized a task

force to assess the upcoming Bandung forum to allow the Kremlin to formu-
late its position. In a posthumously published memoir, Yuri Sholmov
(1927–2007), who served in the Soviet diplomatic staff in Indonesia from
1954 to 1959 and later as general consul in Surabaya from 1962 to 1963, recalled
that the entire Soviet diplomatic corps in Indonesia, from Ambassador Zhukov
down to the dragoman, were tasked with using personal contacts, open-source
materials, and scholarly resources to analyze the impending proceedings.62
The Soviets were particularly interested in learning the history of the Asian-
African movement. They determined that the idea to join with other colonial
people in a common decolonization struggle arose in the 1920s among
Indonesian students in The Netherlands, uniting as nationalist intellectuals
into Perhimpunan Indonesia.63 Chief among the organizers were Ali Sastroa-
midjojo (who would serve as the eighth and tenth prime minister of Indo-
nesia), Mohammad Hatta (third prime minister of Indonesia), and Iwa
Koesoemasoemantri.64 According to Soviet diplomats, the Perhimpunan Indo-
nesia leadership represented Indonesia at the 1927 Brussels meeting of the
League against Imperialism (a Comintern front organization), where they
likely met Nehru.65
Notwithstanding the prima facie compatibility of Sukarno’s national liber-
ation struggle, the intellectual provenance of Bandung, and Soviet positions
on decolonization, some among the Soviet leadership viewed Bandung with
suspicion. Presenting at a 2000 conference on Bandung at the Institute of
Oriental Studies in Moscow, one senior professor at Russia’s Diplomatic
Academy (under the auspices of the Foreign Ministry) recalled that certain
Politburo members were convinced Bandung would evolve into a forum for
anti-Soviet propaganda, and that the Soviet Foreign Ministry managed to
assuage those fears.66 Reasons for this suspicion could include Soviet growing
pains in their new, global superpower role. Thus, while the Soviet Union
62
Юрий Алексеевич Шолмов, Россия–Индонезия. Годы сближения и тесного
сотрудничества (1945–1965) (Москва: ИВ РАН, 2009) [Yuri Alekseevich Sholmov, Russia-
Indonesia. Years of Rapprochement and Close Cooperation (1945–1965)] (Moscow: Institute of
Oriental Studies, 2009).
63
Юрий Алексеевич Шолмов, “Советское посольство в Индонезии в дни Бандунгской
конференции” (2000), Institute of Oriental Studies, Russian Academy of Sciences, available at:
http://maast.freeservers.com/. [Yuri Alekseevich Sholmov, “Soviet Embassy in Indonesia in the
Days of the Bandung Conference” (2000), Institute of Oriental Studies, Russian Academy of
Sciences, available at: http://maast.freeservers.com/.]
64 65
Id. Id.
66
В.И. Печкуров, “Тезисы выступления” (24 мая 2000 г.) (2000), Institute of Oriental
Studies, Russian Academy of Sciences, available at: http://maast.freeservers.com/. [V.I.
dedicated great efforts toward decolonization and in defense of self-

determination (including its sovereign right to follow its own model of
development), the Soviet state also had to expand and project its force to
sustain its superpower status in opposition to the West. Suspicions might also
have been informed by a particular Russo-Soviet sense of cultural superiority
and reciprocal feelings of mistrust and resentment on behalf of subjugated
peoples, which frequently arose in bilateral development assistance schemes
between the Soviet Union and some of the states that participated at Ban-
dung.67 Or, the suspicion could have reflected deep-seated misunderstanding
between the (nominally) ideologically aligned and strategically linked powers
of China and the Soviet Union, whose relationship was showing signs of
strain.68
Nonetheless, despite suspicions in some quarters toward the Soviet foreign
policy elite, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs eagerly advocated for Soviet
engagement with the work of the conference, going so far as to issue a special,
anticipatory public pronouncement wishing the conference success.69 The
Soviet Ministry of Foreign Affairs also arranged for well-wishing telegrams
from the Presidiums of the Supreme Soviets of the Soviet Union, Uzbekistan,
Turkmenistan, Kyrgyzstan, and Tajikistan to be sent to Bandung and read
aloud at the start of the proceedings.70 Moreover, as Yuri Sholmov, former
Soviet consul to Indonesia recalls, “[t]he Soviet ambassador was invited to the
conference as an honored guest. His accompanying dragoman was presented
as press-attaché, who received corresponding accreditation.”71 The Ministry of
Foreign Affairs awarded commendations for the service of embassy staff in
Indonesia (and doubtless other diplomatic postings) in the run-up to the
Bandung Conference.72
Yet from the standpoint of newly independent states (many of which were
still waging bloody wars for independence), the position of the Soviet Ministry
of Foreign Affairs, including dispatching a high-level ambassador with an
entourage of international correspondents, a dragoman who would go on to
Pechkurov, “Presentation Theses” (24 May 2000), Institute of Oriental Studies, Russian
Academy of Sciences, available at: http://maast.freeservers.com/.]
67
Austin Jersild, “The Soviet State as Imperial Scavenger: ‘Catch Up and Surpass’ in the
Transnational Socialist Bloc, 1950–1960” (2011) 116 American Historical Review 109.
68
Austin Jersild, The Sino-Soviet Alliance: An International History (Chapel Hill: University of
North Carolina Press, 2014).
69
Юрий Алексеевич Шолмов, “Советское посольство в Индонезии в дни Бандунгской
конференции” (2000), Institute of Oriental Studies. [Yuri Alekseevich Sholmov, “Soviet
Embassy in Indonesia in the Days of the Bandung Conference” (2000), Institute of Oriental
Studies, Russian Academy of Sciences, available at: http://maast.freeservers.com/.]
70 71 72
Id. Id. Id.
be accredited as a press-attaché, and the awarding of commendations (whether

known or suspected by the Bandung participants), must have seemed rather
colonial – if not overtly so (in that the Soviet Union placed no known
demands on participants at the Conference), certainly in the Soviets’ under-
lying sensibility and presentation. Moreover, given the political capital
invested in supporting Bandung, and later appropriating its key achieve-
ments,73 the Soviet Union paradoxically became one of the states most
supportive of similar forums,74 even as the institutional effort was showing
signs of deterioration. As ostensible Marxists, the Soviets should have under-
stood that this type of appropriation would inspire resistance.
conclusion
Last night I saw upon the stair
A little man who wasn’t there
He wasn’t there again today
Oh, how I wish he’d go away . . .
– Antigonish, Hughes Mearns (1899)
If the paramount questions at Bandung concerned the evils of colonialism,

Bandung participants should have seen in the Soviet Union a welcome friend.
In hindsight, we can deduce numerous explanations for the Soviet absence,
including various political and economic constraints that shaped Soviet inter-
national legal and policy positions in the interwar and immediate post–
Second World War period. Aside from the existential questions of statehood
and self-determination, more focused battles for institutional primacy also
bring the failure of domestic and global Sovietism into sharper relief. Funda-
mentally, the Soviet diplomatic recollections of Bandung call into question
the extent to which the leaders of various blocs (including the Soviet bloc
itself) represented their putative political constituencies. For if the Bolshevik
Revolution was hatched in cafés in London and Geneva, and the direct
73
Г. В. Шармазанашвили, “Ненападение - принцип охраны мира и международной
безопасности В резолюции, принятой 29 странами Азии и Африки на Бандунг,” 6
Sovetskoe Gos i Pravo (1956); Давид Бенционович Левин, Основные проблемы
современного международного права (1958). [G. V. Sharmazanashvili, “Non-aggression –
principle of global defense and international [collective] security in resolution, adopted by
29 Asian and African states at Bandung,” 6 Soviet State and Law (1956); David Bencionovich
Levin, Foundational Problems of Contemporary International Law (Moscow: State Juridical
Publisher, 1958)].
74
L. F. Pahomova, “The ‘Spirit of Bandung’ and Third World States” (2000), Institute of Oriental
Studies, Russian Academy of Sciences, available at: http://maast.freeservers.com/.
precursor to Bandung, according to Soviet intelligence, was a series of late-

night Southeast-Asian nationalist gatherings at Leiden University, how respon-
sive were those transformative leaders to the will of the people in whose name
they convened and governed?
What emerges more generally is that the story of the Soviet absence from
Bandung is also, through today, a kind of nuanced presence story. Like the
“man who wasn’t there” of Hughes Mearns’s famous poem, the Soviet Union’s
nonparticipation at the Bandung Conference seems to be a glaring omission
in light of the Soviets’ strong rhetorical, intellectual, and international legal
commitment to decolonization reaching back almost to the Bolshevik Revo-
lution itself. Understanding this missed or clandestine encounter can shed
light on the mismatch between the Soviet state’s emancipatory ideology and
mythology on the one hand and the tepid reception accorded to Soviet
political overtures by many colonial liberation movements on the other.
The episode still has something to tell us about contemporary Russian ambi-
tions – and political realities – relating to the Global South.
12
Central Asia as an Object of Orientalist Narratives in the

Age of Bandung
akbar rasulov
introduction
What was Central Asia’s relationship to Bandung? The easiest way to begin
answering this question would probably be to turn to the Bandung Confer-
ence itself, examine the various paper trails left in its wake, consult its record of
proceedings, sift through the personal archives left behind by its participants.
But the easiest way is not always the best way.
On the surface of it, Central Asia does not seem to have anything to do with
Bandung. It does not feature anywhere in the Bandung archive. It is not
mentioned in its official record of proceedings or the background travaux. No
Central Asian delegations attended the Conference or contributed to the
development of its final communique. The “Central Asian question” was never
entered on the Conference agenda. Being a part of the Soviet Union, the region
was not even meant to be included within the Conference’s geopolitical remit.1
And yet the presence of Central Asia in the Bandung universe is quite
undeniable. It may not have left any immediately recognizable traces on its
surface, but there is no doubt that Central Asia provided one of Bandung’s most
important ideological points of reference. For while they may have disagreed
with one another on many individual points of strategy and principle, a large part
of what brought the Bandung states together in one single space was their
1
The Soviet Union sought, unsuccessfully, to be represented at the Bandung Conference and follow-
up initiatives. On China’s progressively hostile attitude toward the Soviet Union in the context of
their competing visions for the latter’s potential role in the Afro-Asian solidarity movement, see
Robert Legvold, Soviet Policy in West Africa (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1970),
pp. 80–85. See, however, also Alfred Low, The Sino-Soviet Dispute: An Analysis of the Polemics
(Rutherford [N.J.]: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1976), pp. 64–68 (“Even the Bandung
Conference in 1955 did not appear to disturb the basic relationship of the USSR and the [PRC] as
comrades and allies, though China’s sudden rise to diplomatic eminence and her apparent claim to
leadership in Asia and Africa must have produced angry shock waves in the USSR.”).
215
216 Akbar Rasulov
common interest in exploring the notion of socialism as a developmental model.

Central Asia’s complex set of experiences on this front made it an obvious, if also
highly ambivalent, anchoring point for much of the resulting discussion.
For some, Central Asia’s record of success under Soviet rule served as a
perfect illustration of the inherent effectiveness of Soviet-style economic
policies. For others, it provided the proof that “Muslim societies can do
development too” and that “socialism with an Asian face” was not only
conceivable in theory but could also be achieved without running the risk
of Maoist-style excesses.2 However one came to the Bandung enterprise, from
whichever angle one looked at it, the idea of Central Asia was never far from
one’s mind in the Bandung universe. The tricky part here, however, is that
what that idea was commonly taken to stand for would hardly be recognized as
something familiar by most Central Asians at the time.
the contingency of central asia

In the contemporary global consciousness the idea of Central Asia is most
commonly associated today with three basic themes: Islamic fundamentalism,
political authoritarianism, and oil. It has not always been this way. As recently as
the mid-twentieth century, most foreign scholarship about Central Asia had “all
but ignored [any] religious issues,”3 and the concept of the region’s considerable
oil resources did not appear on the international radar until well into the 1990s.
Still, one only needs to look at the titles of some of the most popular recent
publications on Central Asia to get a sense of just how deeply ingrained this
pattern of associations has become.4 But what, if anything, does any of this tell
us about the actual meaning of “Central Asia”?
Today the category is used mostly to describe the former Soviet republics of
Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan.5 The
2
The view that Soviet Central Asia’s commitment to building socialism had always been
accompanied by a more or less conscious intention to give that socialism a recognisably Muslim/
Asian face was shared rather widely during the Cold War period. See, e.g., Alexandre Bennigsen
and S. Enders Wimbush, Muslim National Communism in the Soviet Union (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1979), p. 124 (positing the importance of “socialism with a tubeteika
[national Uzbek hat]” theme already in the early years of the Soviet experiment in the region).
3
Will Myer, Islam and Colonialism: Western Perspectives on Soviet Asia (London:
RoutledgeCurzon, 2002), p. 101.
4
Ahmed Rashid, Taliban: Militant Islam, Oil and Fundamentalism in Central Asia (New
Haven: Yale University Press, 2001); Rob Johnson, Oil, Islam and Conflict: Central Asia since
1945 (London: Reaktion Books, 2007); David Lewis, The Temptations of Tyranny in Central
Asia (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008); Wojciech Ostrowski, Politics and Oil in
Kazakhstan (London: Routledge, 2011); Martha Brill Olcott, In the Whirlwind of Jihad
(Washington, D.C.: Carnegie Endowment for Int’l Peace 2012).
5
See, e.g., Alexander Cooley, Great Games, Local Rules (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012),
p. 4; Eric Sievers, The Post-Soviet Decline of Central Asia (London: Routledge, 2003), p. 207, n. 1.
Central Asia as an Object of Orientalist Narratives 217
term itself seems fairly stable: dozens of documents, articles, and books are
published every year about “Central Asia.” Its geographical etymology,
however, is a ruse.6 Outside the plane of Western scholarly discourses, there
has never existed such a thing as a distinctly Central Asian cultural, geo-
graphic, or political space, let alone a distinctly Central Asian ideological
project. There was certainly nothing of the kind when Alisher Nawaii first
began to discard Farsi in favor of Turki (old Uzbek) as the language of
choice for Central Asian classical poetry; nor when Munis Khorazmi started
compiling Firdavs-ul-iqbol, the literary chronicle of Khorezm’s history.7 Nor
could one find any signs of centralasianism during the period when Tamer-
lane’s armies marched on Isfahan and Ankara; nor when Shaybani Khan’s
army drove out Tamerlane’s descendants, the soon-to-be great Mughals,
from Samarkand and into India.8 Indeed, as far as the history of the region’s
indigenous cultural dynamics is concerned, the one category that seems to
have never been part of any local lived cultural-ideological realities is that
which corresponds to the present-day conception of Central Asia.9 And so
the speculations inevitably start: if it has no traceable indigenous roots or
precursors, where does the idea of Central Asia come from? If it is an
“invented tradition,”10 who was it invented by and to what end?
In the two centuries preceding the Russian arrival in the region, the territory
presently regarded as Central Asia would have been typically viewed by its
inhabitants as divided between two fundamentally distinct cultural-political
domains: that populated by the sedentary peoples of the Bukharan Emirate
and the Khivan and Kokand Khanates and that controlled by the nomadic
Turkic tribes (Dasht-i-Kipchak).11 After the first half-century of Russian rule,
6
Outside the UN reporting system, one would be hard-pressed to identify any context in which
the term “Western Asia” is used today with any degree of consistency. See United Nations
Statistics Division, http://millenniumindicators.un.org/unsd/methods/m49/m49regin.htm.
7
See G. A. Rasulova, Istoriia Uzbekskoi Klassicheskoi Literatury (Tashkent: Shark, 2nd ed.,
2004), pp. 66, 138.
8
See R. G. Mukminova, “The Timurid States in the Fifteenth and Sixteenth Centuries,” in
M. S. Asimov and C. E. Bosworth (eds.), History of Civilizations of Central Asia, Vol. IV (Paris:
UNESCO, 1998), p. 347; R. G. Mukminova, “The Shaybanids,” in Chahryar Adle et al. (eds.),
History of Civilizations of Central Asia, Vol. V (Paris: UNESCO, 2003), p. 33.
9
Cf. Sally Cummings, Understanding Central Asia: Politics and Contested Transformations
(London: Routledge, 2012), p. 31.
10
See Eric Hobsbawm, “Introduction: Inventing Traditions,” in Eric Hobsbawm and Terence
Ranger (eds.), The Invention of Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), p. 1.
11
As traditionally defined, Dasht-i-Kipchak included the “steppes extending East and North of the
Sea of Aral, a part of modern Siberia, the land North of the Caspian, and both sides of the
Lower Volga.” F. H. Skrine and E. D. Ross, The Heart of Asia: A History of Russian Turkestan
and the Central Asian Khanates from the Earliest Times (London: Methuen & Co., 1899),
p. 182. For further background on this period, see also Adle, History of Civilizations of Central
Asia.
218 Akbar Rasulov
the dominant trend of identitarian practices assumed a notably different

configuration: on top of the old dichotomies between the sedentary and the
nomadic “countries” and between the Persophones and the Turkic speakers,
there emerged now a whole new range of cultural and geopolitical divisions
brought on by the Russian Revolution. By the early 1920s, Moscow’s efforts
had seen the region divided into four discrete geopolitical units: the two
Moscow-controlled ASSRs (Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republics) – the
Turkestan ASSR, which after the 1924 natsional’noe razmezhevanie was mostly
absorbed into the newly formed Uzbekistan, and the Kirghiz ASSR – and the
two formally independent Moscow-unaffiliated states – the Bukharan People’s
Soviet Republic (BPSR) and the Khorezmian People’s Soviet Republic
(KPSR).12 By the 1930s, that structure changed once again: the BPSR was
absorbed into Uzbekistan, with its southern Persophone regions later carved
out into a separate ASSR (future Tajikistan); the Turkestan ASSR and the
KPSR were redistributed between Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan; and the
Kirghiz ASSR was renamed Kazakhstan. A decade later the new formal
configuration that developed out of this period saw the region divided into
four federal-level republics of Soviet “Middle Asia” (Sredniaia Aziya) – the
Kirghiz SSR, the Tajik SSR, the Turkmen SSR, and the Uzbek SSR – with
the Kazakh SSR now being formally excluded from the sredneaziatskii region
as a standalone SSR.13
What sort of identitarian shifts may have accompanied these transform-
ations in the region’s collective consciousness is hard to surmise. What is clear
however is that at no point during this period did anything approaching the
contemporary category of Central Asia make even a fleeting appearance
within the region’s internal ideological-identitarian landscape. Unlike South
America, which in the wake of its colonial and postcolonial struggles in the
late nineteenth century had had its moment of latinamericanismo, Central
Asia never experienced any kind of regionally focused ideological
“awakening.” Even at the height of the tsarist oppression, the majority of
anticolonial and oppositional political movements articulated their politics
either in terms of pan-Islamic or pan-Turkist identitarian projects.14
12
See Kh. Sh. Inoyatov et al. (eds.), Istoriia Bukharskoi Narodnoi Sovetskoi Respubliki (Tashkent:
Fan, 1976); Kh. Sh. Inoyatov et al. (eds.), Istoriia Khorezmskoi Narodnoi Sovetskoi Respubliki
(Tashkent: Fan, 1976).
13
For further background, see Arne Haugen, The Establishment of National Republics in Soviet
Central Asia (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003); O. I. Chistiakov, Istoriia Otechestvennogo
Gosudarstva i Prava, Vol. II (2007), pp. 175–178.
14
For further background on the Jadid movement, see Adeeb Khalid, The Politics of Muslim
Cultural Reform: Jadidism in Central Asia (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998).
To suggest, against this background, that the concept of Central Asia is an

essentially foreign imposition15 and a “highly contingent construct”16 seems
like stating the obvious. There is no objective “content” of any kind behind
the label, no in-built meaning, no fixed essence. Beyond the manifestly
arbitrary linguistic convention, which has limited its usage to the five-strong
regional grouping comprised of the former Soviet Eastern republics, the term
“Central Asia” has no stable conceptual definition. What lies behind it is just
an empty field of speculative projection, a fluid stream of imagination, myths,
fantasies, and desires. The only question that remains to answer at this point is:
Which particular myths, fantasies, and desires were injected into this stream at
the time of the Bandung Conference?
central asia’s place in soviet foreign policy in the 1950s

The remarkable record of economic development achieved in Central Asia in
the period from the late-1920s to the mid-1960s remains today largely unknown
among the students of postcolonial history and thirld-worldist movements.
And yet its centrality to the unfolding of the great ideological struggles of the
early Cold War period can hardly be denied.
The collapse of the Stalinist regime in the mid-1950s signaled the start of a
radical new era in Soviet domestic politics and marked a new chapter in the
evolution of Soviet socialism as a doctrine of foreign policy.
The opening notes, admittedly, did not sound very cheerful: by the end of
the 1950s, the earlier Soviet-Yugoslav split that temporarily took Belgrade out
of Moscow’s effective zone of influence was superseded by an even more
troubling rift with China.17 With the intensification of the Cold War arms
race, such a multiplication of internal divisions within the global socialist
camp was hardly a welcome development.
The rapid disintegration of the old European empires complicated the
situation further. On the one hand, it seemed clear that the process of
decolonization was guaranteed to benefit the cause of global socialism, if only
because it considerably weakened the positions of the Western bloc. At the
15
See Myer, Islam and Colonialism, p. 1 (noting that it was in the non-Russian West that the
tradition of referring to “the USSR’s Asian territories outside Siberia” as Central Asia finds its
root). See also ibid., p. 19 (“the 1950s can be said to represent the birth of modern Central Asian
studies”). For further background on the various taxonomic transformations (and the
accompanying terminological changes) in the Western discourses about Central Asia, see
Cummings, Understanding Central Asia, pp. 11–15.
16
Cummings, Understanding Central Asia, p. 31.
17
Robert Legvold, Soviet Policy in West Africa (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1970), p. 62.
220 Akbar Rasulov
same time, the deepening doctrinal dispute with China also meant that
Moscow no longer now enjoyed an unchallenged monopoly within the
international socialist movement, not least when it came to the determination
of its relationship with the newly liberated regions of Asia and Africa.18 Add to
this the fact of the unexpected ‘betrayal’ by London and Washington, who
only a few years after celebrating the allies common victory over fascism
“treacherously” decided to drag Moscow into a new, disastrously expensive
global conflict – and the sheer enormity of the unprecedented challenges
confronting the Soviet Union at the start of the Krushchev era becomes
abundantly clear. For the first time in its history, the Soviet Union experi-
enced the need to develop a detailed foreign policy doctrine that would be
able simultaneously to acknowledge a realist-style idea of the international
balance of power and to retain at the same time some form of commitment to
the traditional Marxist goal of striving for a worldwide socialist revolution.
The solution the Khrushchev government found to this challenge was as
ingenious as anything one could imagine: in lieu of the old Trotskyite thesis of
the “permanent revolution,” the main guiding principle at the heart of the
new Soviet foreign policy doctrine from the mid-1950s onward became the
idea of reconceptualizing the entire process of international politics as a form
of commercial entrepreneurship. The road to the Soviet victory in the Cold
War, it was decided, was to start with a mass-scale global marketing campaign.
Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes provided the blueprint for how this campaign was to
be conducted when targeting First World audiences. In 1954, a group of Bolshoi
dancers were sent on their first month-long tour of Britain.19 A year later, David
Oistrakh delivered the first foreign premiere of the Shostakovich violin concerto
to a rapturous reception at Carnegie Hall.20 November 1959 saw the same feat
repeated by Mstislav Rostropovich, who led the first U.S. performance of the
Shostakovich cello concerto, having premiered it in Moscow less than a month
earlier.21 In the summer of 1957, the largest-to-date World Festival of Youth and
Students was brought to Moscow to publicize the remarkable achievements of
Soviet culture, art, and socioeconomic development.22 The same autumn the
18
Ibid., 62–63.
19
See Larraine Nicholas, “Fellow Travellers: Dance and British Cold War Politics in the Early
1950s” (2002) 19 Dance Research 83.
20
“Liner Notes,” Shostakovich: Violin Concerto, Violin Concerto, Op. 99 (David Oistrakh; New
York Philharmonic, Mitropoulos Dir.), Columbia, ML5077, 1956.
21
“Liner Notes,” Shostakovich: Cello Concerto, Op. 107 (Mstislav Rostropovich; Philadelphia
Orchestra, Ormandy Dir.), Columbia, MS6124, 1960.
22
On the significance of this event in the context of the Khrushchevite ideological offensive, see
Margaret Peacock, “The Perils of Building Cold War Consensus at the 1957 Moscow World
Festival of Youth and Students” (2012) 12 Cold War History 515.
first human-made satellite was launched into the orbit from western Kazakhstan,
its official name coming from the Old Russian word for fellow-traveler (sput-
nik).23 Between classical music, space exploration, and ballet exports, the
Khrushchev regime gradually discovered the first building blocks of its great
marketing strategy. When its formulation was finally completed several years
later, its most important component, however, turned out to have nothing to do
with music or high culture. Rather, it was the idea of postcolonial development on
which the Soviet government placed its main bet, and the chief marketing
exhibit it chose to use in this context were its five Central Asian republics.
the narrative constructions of central asia in soviet and

western discourses
The gamble was calculated perfectly. Having achieved a pattern of sustained
growth throughout the 1930s, and then successfully rebuilt its economy after
the colossal devastation it suffered during the Second World War throughout
the late 1940s and 1950s, the Soviet Union of the early Khrushchev era was all
but assured to capture the imagination of anyone interested in the subject of
development economics, all the more so if one came to it from the back-
ground of anticolonial struggles.
To [the] newly independent countries [of Asia and Africa] the Soviet experi-
ence [seemed especially attractive]. The gist of the Soviet “message” [was] that
a developing country can convert itself reasonably rapidly into a developed
industrial one . . . with minimal dependence on Western capital, little or no
abatement of political hostility to the West, without the introduction of a
fully-fledged capitalist system, and with concomitant advancement of educa-
tion and the social services.24
Officially, the most important part of this “message” was the thesis that “the
Soviet Union . . . achieved what most Asian and African countries aspire[d] to
without becoming reliant on a private business sector.”25 In practice, though,
what helped it to be delivered most effectively was the fact that the Soviet
developmental model had quite evidently proved its effectiveness not only in
European Russia but also in the distinctly non-European region of
Central Asia.
23
On the significance of this episode and the background to the political implications of the
U.S.-Soviet space race in the early Cold War period, see Matthew Brzezinski, Red Moon
Rising: Sputnik and the Hidden Rivalries That Ignited the Space Age (New York: Times Books,
2007).
24
Geoffrey Jukes, The Soviet Union in Asia (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1973), p. 64.
25
Ibid.
222 Akbar Rasulov
Brutally conquered and ruthlessly exploited for its unique geopolitical and
economic potential by the tsarist Russia,26 Central Asia boasted a history of
colonial trauma that was all but guaranteed to resonate with the shared collective
experiences of the newly decolonized Asian and African states. It was not a part of
Europe and it was inhabited by a population that by any standard of appreciation
looked completely different from the rest of the USSR. What is more:
It was . . . the only non-European area of the USSR to have had a sophisti-
cated urban civilisation prior to absorption in the Russian sphere that could
be set against that of Russia.27
To be sure, the colonial settlement process started in the late nineteenth

century by the tsarist government28 accelerated during the Soviet rule:
according to the 1959 census, the Slav population in Central Asia outnum-
bered the largest of the “native” ethnic groups (Uzbeks) by a factor of almost
4 to 3.29 Nevertheless, compared to the rest of the USSR, Central Asia still
remained recognizably nonwhite, non-Slavic, and non-Christian. And yet its
economy continued to grow at a neck-breaking speed.
Populated primarily by Turkic-speaking Muslims, devoid of any local trad-
itions of Marxist politics or European-style cultural secularism, Central Asia’s
continuing developmental success, in the eyes of any attentive onlooker,
seemed to demonstrate not only that the Soviet socialist model did not have
any in-built Eurocentric bias (unlike, say, those promoted by the UK or the
US), but that a socialist developmental miracle could also be achieved under
the exact same starting conditions that were typically characteristic of ex-
European colonies elsewhere.
While at the end of the tsarist period Central Asian industrial capacity had
been virtually nonexistent, by the late 1950s the regional infrastructure
included numerous hydroelectric plants, large textile mills, factories
26
On Russia’s conquest and rule of Central Asia, see Alexander Morrison, Russian Rule in
Samarkand 1868–1910 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008); Daniel Brower, Turkestan and
the Fate of the Russian Empire (London: Routledge, 2003); Khalid, The Politics of Muslim
Cultural Reform, pp. 45–79; Seymour Becker, “The Russian Conquest of Central Asia and
Kazakhstan: Motives, Methods, Consequences,” in Hafeez Malik (ed.), Central Asia: Its
Strategic Importance and Future Prospects (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1994); George
Demko, The Russian Colonization of Kazakhstan (1896–1916) (Bloomington: Indiana
University, 1969); Kh. Z. Ziyayev et al. (eds.), Istoriya Uzbekskoy SSR, Vol. II (1968), pp. 9–121;
N. A. Khalfin, Prisoedinenie Sredney Azii k Rossii (Moskva: Nauka, 1965). See also Alexander
Morrison, “Killing the Cotton Canard and Getting Rid of the Great Game: Rewriting the
Russian Conquest of Central Asia, 1814–1895” (2014) 33 Central Asian Survey 131.
27
Myer, Islam and Colonialism, 1–2.
28
For further background, see Demko, The Russian Colonization of Kazakhstan.
29
Geoffrey Wheeler, Racial Problems in Soviet Muslim Asia (London: Oxford University Press,
2nd ed., 1962), p. 29.
producing agricultural machinery, chemical plants, oil refineries – even an

aircraft-building factory in Tashkent. Thousands of miles of roads and railway
communications had been laid, airports built, canals irrigated. In the Kyrgyz
SSR alone, between 1913 and 1950, the total level of industrial output had
increased by a factor of 21.3; the same ratio for large-scale industrial production
had risen by a factor of 354!30
Naturally, economic growth was not the only part of the story: across the
region general literacy rates rose from approximately 2 percent in 1917 to well
over 50 percent by 1959. By the early 1970s, Central Asia enjoyed nearly universal
literacy rates.31 Importantly, literacy rates for women were as high as they were for
men.32 An equally impressive record was also accumulated in the field of public
health: while at the end of the tsarist period the ratio of medical doctors per
capita in Central Asia remained at an abysmal 1:20,000, by 1960 in Tajikistan it
was 11:10,000, while in Turkmenistan, the respective figure was 17:10,000 – a rate
not equalled at the time even in Britain and France.33 However one looked at it,
the introduction of Soviet-style socialism into Central Asia clearly seemed to
have enabled the region to break out of all those “interlocking vicious circles”
that plagued traditional development projects elsewhere.34
Broadcast across all newly decolonized countries, this message traveled
especially well in Asia, particularly in regions with sizeable Muslim popula-
tions. Considering the wide-scale retreat suffered by Western powers in the
Middle East around the same time, this fact immediately attracted the atten-
tion of Western observers. Geoffrey Wheeler, a retired British intelligence
officer, captured the tone of the ensuing reactions particularly well:
There is another innovation in the methods which the Soviet Government is
using to implement its policy towards Asian countries. This is the greatly
increased use of the eastern, and largely Muslim, republics of the USSR as a
shop window with which to impress the outside eastern world with Soviet
achievements in areas which have many affinities with under-developed
countries in the Middle East and South Asia. . . . [H]ardly a day goes by
[without] some delegation from the Arab countries, from Pakistan and from
Indonesia, [being] present in Central Asia . . . These delegations are com-
posed of journalists, authors, agriculturalists, and technicians, from every
30
S. T. Tavyshaliev, Kirgiziia v Period Zaversheniia Stroitel’stva Sotsializma (1965), p. 29.
31
Sievers, The Post-Soviet Decline of Central Asia, p. 53.
32
See Geoffrey Wheeler and David Footman, “Medical Services in Central Asia and Kazakhstan:
Part I” (1963) 11(1) Central Asian Review 30, 37; Alex Stringer, “Soviet Development in Central
Asia,” in Tom Everett-Heath (ed.), Central Asia: Aspects of Transition (London: RoutledgeCurzon,
2003), p. 156.
33
Ibid., 157.
34
Alec Nove, The Soviet Economy: An Introduction (New York: F. A. Praeger, 3rd ed., 1968), p. 343.
224 Akbar Rasulov
field, in fact, in which there is some impressive Soviet achievement to be

shown. And it would be foolish to suppose that the delegations are not
impressed. . . . [Against] the western emphasis on military force [which] has
played no small part in antagonising the Middle East[,] the Russians [have
shown] skill and aplomb . . . over and over again . . . They can show the East
some tangible proof of the material benefits which derive from Soviet methods
and . . . say “Here are Muslims with very much the same standard of culture as
yourselves. What were they a few years ago? Look what they are now.”35
Notice the openly contemptuous undertones: What is Central Asia other than
a “shop window” created by Moscow to impress the gullible Muslim
foreigners?
Notice also the strange combination of indignation and anxiety: whatever
might be the actual truth behind all those claims about unprecedented
developmental successes achieved in the region, it is the sheer Machiavellian
deviousness with which “the Russians” manipulate the story of these successes
and use their Muslim subjects as part of their ideological games that is the
most scandalous element in this situation.
And it is this deviousness, of course, more than anything else, that ultim-
ately deserved the West’s attention in Central Asia. For, indeed, whatever
Central Asian developmental successes may mean to the Central Asians
themselves, what stands behind them is quite obviously
Russia’s new drive to set herself up as the cultural mentor of the East. [This
drive] is only just beginning but two important landmarks have already
emerged – the All-Union Congress of Orientalists of 1957 and the Congress
of African and Asian Writers of 1958. Both these congresses were held in
Tashkent and were accompanied by carefully organized publicity.36
Anxieties about Moscow’s newly discovered talent for converting the inert
material that was its Central Asian populations to its nefarious ideological ends
certainly did not remain the sole preserve of retired British intelligence
officers. Indeed, before too long it would become a standard line in the newly
created field of Sovietology37 that the most important thing one had to know
about the five Central Asian republics was how useful they had proved to their
35
Geoffrey Wheeler, “Russia and the Middle East” (1957) 44 Journal of Royal Central Asian
Society 193, 198 (italics added).
36
Geoffrey Wheeler, Racial Problems in Soviet Muslim Asia, p. 59.
37
The Theme of Soviet Machiavellianism remained a standard feature in Western discourses
about Central Asia well into the 1980s. For a typical illustration, see Chantal Lemercier-
Quelquejay, “The USSR And The Middle East” (1982) 1(1) Central Asian Survey 43.
Moscow masters in their dark arts of wooing and impressing gullible Muslim
foreigners:
Let us not, out of complacency or smugness or any feeling of “cultural” or
“technical” superiority, underestimate the impact that these developments
in Soviet Central Asia are having on Asia at large. Since making this trip . . .
I have visited the Middle East, Africa, India, Pakistan, Nepal and
Afghanistan. Already the impact of the new Soviet Central Asia . . . is making
itself very much felt in those vital peripheral areas. In some places . . . it is
quite remarkable how many people one meets who have been taken – and
I say this without disrespect – on the Red Cook’s Tour of Tashkent cotton
mills and the opera house and to see the irrigation system in Tadjikistan and
so on. It is significant how impressed these people have been . . . Asian ears,
eyes and minds and hearts are certainly far more attuned [now] to the message
from Tashkent than perhaps we are ready to admit.38
The usefulness of Central Asia to Moscow’s designs was not limited to hosting
foreign delegations. The idea that the Soviet Union used its southern repub-
lics as a shop window39 was only one of the several themes in the newly
emerging Western discourse about Central Asia. Another theme revolved
around the idea of an alleged pro-Central Asian affirmative action program
in Soviet Foreign Service:
the Soviet leadership . . . intend[s] . . . to develop a unique and inexhaustible
supply of Soviet Muslim experts, linguists, propagandists, and political and
technical cadres for supporting Soviet initiatives in Middle Eastern countries.
[The reason for this is that t]hese cadres would appear more as “one of us,” as
Muslims, than [is]possible for similarly trained Russian cadres.40
The fact that the dominant theme in the history of the Soviet Foreign Service was
rather that of massive discrimination against ethnic Central Asians was, of course,
conveniently ignored. What mattered for the Western eyes, rather, was the idea
that Central Asia’s convenient inertness, even at the level of its national intelli-
gentsia and local governing elites, formed a central element in Moscow’s
ideological offensive in the Third World. The only reason a Soviet diplomatic
mission would ever include a Tajik or an Uzbek specialist, went the common
assumption, was because of their nonwhite skin color or the obvious “Asianness”
of their names – not the financial and technical aid the USSR provided to them.
38
Eric Downton, “Soviet Central Asia” (1955) 42 Journal of Royal Central Asian Society 128, 130
(italics added).
39
Lemercier-Quelquejay, “The USSR And The Middle East,” 47.
40
Ibid., at 48 (italics added).
226 Akbar Rasulov
The narrative about Moscow’s cynical deployment of its Central Asians also
played another role. It was used to buttress the idea that Soviet socialism had little
purchase outside the traditional heartlands of Eastern European Marxism. The
Arabs, the argument went, for all their distrust of free-market individualism, were
not buying the godless Soviet model which is why Moscow, in order to boost its
cultural credentials, had to rely so much on its Central Asian puppets:
Except in rare instances, Marxism as such did not prove to be a useful vehicle
for furthering Soviet influence among Arabs and others Muslims. [As a result
of this] Soviet Muslims found themselves [increasingly] drawn into Soviet
operations in the Middle East. . . . Educated Uzbeks, Tajiks and others were
recruited into the Soviet foreign service and began appearing in Soviet
embassies abroad, in military and economic aid missions and even occasion-
ally among KGB teams in the Third World[,] since [their inclusion] was
[expected] to serve overall Soviet foreign policy aims.41
The same logic apparently explained the formation of Soviet diplomatic and
trading missions in non-Muslim countries too.42 The first official contact
between the USSR and the new government of Congo, a typical claim would
go, “was provided by [a] delegation” whose main defining feature came from
the fact that it was built around a visibly Central Asian figure: “the leader of
the delegation [was] M. R. Rachmatov, vice-president of the presidium of the
supreme soviet of Tadzhikistan.”43
The affirmative action program adopted by the Soviet foreign service was
only one side of the larger plan by which the Soviets were meant to “make
judicious use of ‘their’ Asians” in their dealings with the Third World.44
Moscow, it was repeatedly stressed, also actively practiced its dark arts of
“cultural diplomacy” by deploying high-ranking Central Asian Muslim clerics
alongside the regular diplomatic corps to serve as the de facto propagandists
for the Soviet regime.
[By] present[ing] the USSR as a better partner than the West for the world of
Islam, [these clerics help Moscow] penetrate the conservative, pro-Western
states, such as Saudi Arabia, Morocco, Jordan, and Egypt, which are other-
wise closed to the Soviets. . . . Soviet religious leaders are constantly touring
the Muslim countries . . . and seldom miss an Islamic conference or inter-
national gathering. [T]heir praise of the Soviet government . . . may appear to
41
Paul Henze, “The Central Asian Muslims and Their Brethren Abroad – Marxist Solidarity or
Muslim Brotherhood?” (1984) 3(3) Central Asian Survey 51, 56–58.
42
Jukes, The Soviet Union in Asia, p. 64.
43
Christopher Stevens, The Soviet Union and Black Africa (London: Macmillan, 1976), p. 12.
44
Jukes, The Soviet Union in Asia, p. 64.
be no less crude than that of the official . . . Agitprop. But regurgitated by

authentic ulamas, it is infinitely more effective.45
Notice the recurring narrative pattern: whatever aspect of Central Asia’s

“contribution” to international affairs one looks at, there is no scope left for
any concept of agency or merit for “Moscow’s East.” The only way in which
Central Asia is ever made present in the Western discourse is in the form of an
inanimate platform or an enabling condition: a background stage for Moscow
to stage its ostentatious shows on, an ideological resource for its Machiavellian
politics, a handy tool, a practical proof of its deviousness and ingenuity.
conclusion
What was the basic content encoded into the concept of Central Asia in the
age of Bandung? What did the idea of Central Asia represent to the two main
Cold War antagonists? One saw in it the promise of a great historic redemp-
tion, the key to winning “the peoples of the Muslim East” over to the cause of
Soviet socialism. The other viewed it as a living proof of why the Great Game
could never be stopped and Dulles’s “domino theory” had to be taken as
seriously as one could only imagine.
One sought to convert it into a case-study that gave flesh to the newly
concocted, export-ready fantasy of “socialism with an Asian face”: a shiny
utopia that promised to its intended target audiences in the Third World a
road map to economic growth and mass literacy without any of the Maoist
China’s excesses. The other sought to use the idea of Central Asia as a
starting platform from which to relaunch the old tradition of depicting Asia
as one monolithic bloc and to explore, in the same context, the possibility of
adapting the classical Orientalist apparatus to the new Cold War context.
After all, was the communist East not East all the same? The simultaneous
advancement of both of these objectives was achieved by marrying the story
about listless Asian puppets who allowed their countries to be turned into
Potemkinite traps with the discourse of “communist peril” and devious
Russian Machiavellianism.
Half a century later, this two-pronged project of Central Asia’s mass-scale
orientalization is still going strong. Moscow’s tradition of using the region as
the proving ground for testing Russia’s alternative visions of modernity may
have receded in recent years. But all this has done for the Russian production
of “Central Asia” is that it has just shifted the broader discursive-ideological
45
Lemercier-Quelquejay, “The USSR And The Middle East,” at 48–49.
228 Akbar Rasulov
matrix surrounding it closer to those traditionally used in the West.46 They

may still only write about Central Asia in Russian, but increasingly now
whenever Russian-based commentators today discourse about Central Asia,
they do so by drawing on the same set of representational devices as their
Western-based colleagues. The only notable difference is that for the most part
they tend to use them a lot less masterfully.47
A similar pattern of ideological regression can be observed in the West too.
Whatever place might have been assigned to the idea of Central Asia in Western
popular imagination, the process of ideological decolonialism has certainly not
yet reached it. Indeed, one might argue, the movement of history has actually
been reversed on this front. With only a handful of exceptions,48 the great majority
of Western writings about Central Asia today appear to be animated by a combin-
ation of tropes, desires, and fantasies that seem to be more representative of the
old-school late nineteenth-century Orientalism that Edward Said wrote about,
rather than the mid-twentieth-century Orientalism of the Sovietological variety.49
The fact that this state of affairs can be openly acknowledged and recog-
nized offers, of course, no practical consolation to those who find themselves
on the receiving end of these orientalizing narratives. But it hints at least at
some kind of a hope.
Every act of liberation requires that the oppressed subjects first become
conscious of the basic fact of their oppression.50 The ability to recognize the
orientalizing production of Central Asia and all the sinister consequences that
this leads to is premised on the acquisition of the respective analytical and
conceptual apparatuses. Given the pioneering contribution made to the
development of these apparatuses by the Bandung generation, perhaps it is
here then that the ultimate answer to the question of Bandung’s legacy’s
meaning for Central Asia today needs to be sought.
From the point of view of critical international law theory, the important
legacy of the Bandung conference undoubtedly has been the impact it had on
46
On the durability of the Orientalist sensibility in the Russian discourses about Central Asia, see
Bakhtiyar Babajanov, “How Will We Appear in the Eyes of Inovertsy and Inorodtsy? Nikolai
Ostroumov on the Image and Function of Russian Power” (2014) 33 Central Asian Survey 270;
Adeeb Khalid, “Russian History and the Debate about Orientalism” (2000) 1 Kritika 691.
47
Cf. Morrison, Killing the Cotton Canard, 132: “[M]uch modern Russian writing on the history
of [Central Asia’s] conquest has regressed into unapologetic jingoism . . . with celebrations of
Russian victories in the region which are often indistinguishable from the triumphalism of the
tsarist period.”
48
See Morrison, Russian Rule in Samarkand; Brower, Turkestan and the Fate of the Russian
Empire; Khalid, The Politics of Muslim Cultural Reform.
49
See, e.g., supra n.4.
50
Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man (New York: Routledge, 2002 [1964]), p. 9.
the previously prevalent theories of colonialism, both those rooted in the old
liberal tradition that construed colonialism as a form of benevolent inter-
national “guardianship” and its Marxist-Leninist counterpart that sought to
reduce it to the geopolitical emanation of the predatory logic of capitalist
exploitation. Every notable contribution made by the post-Bandung gener-
ation of Third World international law scholars can be traced, more or less
directly, to their predecessors’ decisive rejection of both of these models.
On its surface, the theory of colonialism that grew out of the Bandung
Conference seemed to share a lot with the traditional Marxist-Leninist
approach. Like the latter, it derived from an anticolonialist sensibility and a
refusal to separate the question of colonialism’s economic foundations from its
political forms and legal instruments. Like the latter, it expressed skepticism
toward the benevolent-guardianship thesis and insisted on understanding
colonialism as an international crime. In terms of its basic theoretical organ-
ization, however, it represented an entirely different ideological worldview.
Both in its approach to history and in its overall philosophy of politics, the
Bandung theory of colonialism marked a radical departure from the classical
tenets of Marxism-Leninism. In lieu of the latter’s firmly classocentric
approach, it sought to put in place a more complex and eclectic analytical
framework that at times accorded less importance to the questions of the
global division of labor and economic exploitation than to what the Marxist-
Leninist approach would have traditionally categorized as purely cultural
forces and phenomena.
For most ideologists of the Bandung project, the essence of colonialism’s
greatest crime lay as much in its contribution to the proliferation of the
discourses of racial supremacism and the idea of the “white man’s burden” –
the thesis “that certain territories and people [actually] require and beseech
domination”51 – as in its facilitation of the various invasions, oppression, and
dispossession that it inspired and legitimized. What precisely may have been
the underlying connections between the former and the latter elements for the
most part had been left unaddressed. But one inevitable consequence of this
regime of theoretical eclecticism was the tremendous impetus it provided to
the soon-to-be-inaugurated concepts of neocolonialism and internal
colonialism.
The workings of this process, in retrospect, seemed to resemble the oper-
ation of what the Russian literary theorist Viktor Shkovsky called the uncle-
nephew principle. In literary genealogy, argued Shklovsky, the lineage of a
51
Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism (New York: Knopf, 1993), p. 9.
230 Akbar Rasulov
tradition is never direct: “[T]he legacy that is passed from one generation to
the next moves not from father to son, but from uncle to nephew.”52 By all
logic, given their fundamentally economistic logics, the concepts of neocolo-
nialism and internal colonialism should have been developed by the inheritors
of the Marxist-Leninist orthodoxy: it seemed so fitting and “neat,” both in
theoretical and ideological terms. The fact that it took the Bandungian
“deviation” for the necessary critical shifts to occur raises an interesting
conundrum: What were the causal dynamics that enabled this turn of events?
What was the structural connection that linked the Bandung enterprise with
the articulation of these new critical concepts? Why did the intellectual
breakthrough they brought to the discourse on colonialism take place in that
particular theoretical milieu? None of these questions lends itself to a simple
answer. My own sense, however, is that it all had something to do with
Bandung’s essentially open-textured ideological climate, or what, to extend
Shklovsky’s metaphor, one might call the liberating effect of not being bound
by any code of filial loyalty.
Freed from the burden of having to stay within the strict boundaries set by
any group of “founding fathers,” the Bandung generation enjoyed a kind of
imaginational freedom their Soviet and Eastern European contemporaries
could never afford. The price they paid for this freedom was the inevitable
slip into pervasive self-contradictoriness: the intellectual flexibility that comes
on the tails of theoretical openness always brings along a certain measure of
cacophony. But sometimes it is precisely out of such cacophonies that the
most ingenious visions emerge.
By partially displacing the traditional vocabulary of Marxist political econ-
omy in favor of culture-centric readings of the colonial enterprise, the Ban-
dung generation managed to process the rapidly shifting geopolitical realities
of the time in a way that seemed both more inventive and more insightful than
anything achieved under the conditions of classical Marxist-Leninist diamat.
Nowhere was this fact made more visible than when it came to registering the
mechanics of the new forms of international domination and exploitation.
At the center of the new theory developed by the Bandung generation lay a
very simple but powerful idea: there had emerged in recent times a funda-
mentally new form of governance, one whose operative dynamics became so
ideologically refined and juridically sophisticated that its essentially colonialist
character could no longer be detected through the traditional means of
theoretical examination. The only way to uncover this elusive colonialist
52
Viktor Shklovsky, Theory of Prose (Elmwood Park, IL: Dalkey Archive Press, trans. by Benjamin
Sher; 1990), p. 190.
kernel now was to go intellectually eclectic: to suspend the old rigid

approaches in favor of a more impressionistic and loose model that mobilized
a diverse range of critical arguments and perspectives. Most of what is filed
today under the rubric of postcolonial studies still unfolds in the shadow of this
great analytical “loosening.” If the Bandung Conference had left behind it no
other traces, this fact alone would have been enough to earn it a central place
in the history of twentieth-century political thought – even more so if one
looks at it from the point of view not only of the Third World peoples but also
the citizens of what used to be called the Second World.
For, indeed, one of the most important, if also entirely underappreciated,
legacies of the Bandung project was the great historical possibility it created –
for the latter as much as for the former – of finally being able to begin a serious
conversation about the USSR’s own ambivalent relationship with the idea of
colonialism. For just as it would have been wrong, both then and now, not to
acknowledge the USSR’s tremendous historical contribution to the struggle
against all forms of colonialism around the world, so too it would be deeply
misguided not to recognize its profound entanglement in various aspects of
the colonial enterprise within its own territory. In no context did this puzzling
schizophrenia of the Soviet dream express itself so vividly as it did in
Central Asia.
13
Latin America during the Bandung Era: Anti-Imperialist

Movements vs. Anti-Communist States
liliana obregón*
introduction
The 1955 Bandung Conference was the first African-Asian effort to construct a
united position against imperialism in the midst of Cold War politics.
Although Latin American states had more than a century’s worth of experi-
ence with decolonization and independence, they were not invited to Ban-
dung because of the Conference’s regional focus and Latin America’s
political, economic, and legal ties with the United States. Nonetheless, in
the decade before and after Bandung, many Latin Americans participated in
transnational anti-imperialist movements, while their states gradually unified
around an anticommunist agenda led by the United States through the
Organization of American States (OAS). After Cuba’s revolution and its
1962 OAS suspension, Fidel Castro hosted the first Tricontinental Conference
in 1966, where Bandung participants met with Latin American anti-imperialist
movements in an effort to expand the Third World project as an alliance
among the three continents.
This chapter presents an overview of the road from Bandung to Havana
through the transnational alliances in which Latin Americans participated as
states (with their anticommunist regional commitments) and as individuals (in
anti-imperialist global and regional nongovernmental solidarity movements).
interwar anti-imperialist solidarity, brussels 1927

In 1927, several Latin Americans participated in the “International Congress
against Colonial Oppression and Imperialism” held in Brussels. Nearly
* I am grateful for Juan David Martinez’s research assistance. All translations are mine unless
otherwise noted.
232
Latin America during the Bandung Era 233
200 delegates were present, representing anticolonial, anti-imperial societies,

and communist organizations from thirty-seven countries and colonial
regions. The Congress’s main success was the formation of a “League against
Imperialism and for National Independence,” in evident opposition to the
League of Nation’s mandate system.1
The meeting was also an effort by the Communist International’s European
core to expand its influence in the Americas, Asia, and Africa. The participat-
ing Latin Americans denounced U.S. imperialism but were divided as to the
role of communism. While the Anti-imperialist League of the Americas
(LADLA), founded in Mexico in 1924, was a communist party ally, the
American Popular Revolutionary Alliance (APRA), also founded in Mexico
by Peruvian exile Victor Raul Haya de la Torre, vowed for an Indo-American
approach to regional problems that rejected Soviet communism and U.S.
imperialism, both of which were seen as forms of foreign intervention.2
Although LADLA and APRA supported a congress resolution on Latin Amer-
ica, APRA approved it “with reservations” in rejection to LADLA’s alliance to
the Communist International.
The rift between LADLA and APRA represented similar divisions in the
region in relation to the benefits of foreign alliances vis-à-vis nationalist
solutions.3 But as a consequence of the Nicaraguan revolution (1927–1933)
and the assassination of its leader, Augusto Sandino, in 1934, Latin American
anti-imperialist solidarity networks had more reasons to exist and thus con-
tinued to grow.
u.s./latin american cold war beginnings

After the Second World War, the United States emerged as an industrial
power promoting foreign investment, free trade, and security through new
international institutions and organizations such as the International Monet-
ary Fund and the World Bank (established in 1944). Between 1948 and 1951,
the U.S. Marshall (European Reconstruction) Plan gave Europe $13 billion
(equivalent to approximately $130 billion today). The new international eco-
nomic policy was compounded by the First (1919–1920) and Second
(1947–1957) anticommunist Red Scares in the United States, which led to
1
Daniel Kersffeld, “Latinoamericanos en el Congreso Antiimperialista de 1927: Afinidades,
disensos y rupturas” (2010) 16 Journal of Iberian and Latin American Research 2.
2
See Victor Raúl Haya de la Torre, “What is the A.P.R.A.?” The Labour Monthly, December
1926, at 756–759.
3
Kersffeld, “Latinoamericanos en el Congreso Antiimperialista de 1927.”
234 Liliana Obregón
the founding of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) in 1947. Latin Ameri-
can states hoped to benefit from their own Marshall Plan, but instead they
were given Roosevelt’s Good Neighbor Policy of reciprocal trade agreements4
and a part in the Cold War security paradigm as the fear of Nazism shifted to
the fear of Communism.5 The eight Pan-American Union conferences held
since 1889 institutionalized the integration of Latin America into U.S. eco-
nomic, ideological, and security policy.
Despite the Latin American states’ close ties with the United States, the
1944 Dumbarton Oaks meeting to outline the framework for the UN Charter
was limited to China, the Soviet Union, the United Kingdom, and the United
States. The following year, Mexico hosted the United States and Latin Ameri-
can states (except Argentina and Chile) in the signing of the Act of Chapulte-
pec, in which they agreed to solidarity against any act of aggression to an
American state, including the possibility of sanctioning each other. By the
1945 United Nations Conference in San Francisco, Latin American states
acted as a regional contingent to promote their interests, counteract the U.S.
power position on the Security Council, and show their resistance to the
Soviet Union’s promotion of communist activities and its dangerous rivalry
with the United States.6
regional defense and the rio treaty, 1947

Cold War politics and U.S. economic policy continued to play out in the 1947
Inter-American Treaty of Reciprocal Assistance (also known as the Rio
Treaty), which formed a “hemispheric security system” with the “purposes
and principles of the UN,” respect for democracy and human rights, and the
“maintenance of international peace and security.”7 The Rio Treaty con-
tinued the Chapultepec Act because it provided a response to threats and
attacks after methods of peaceful settlement and other procedures had failed.
They also considered that “an armed attack by any State against an American
State shall be considered as an attack against all the American States” in a
broad understanding of “region” and “self-defense.”8 “Aggression,” however,
4
Id. at 59.
5
Eduardo Sáenz Rovner, “Hace medio siglo, El Contexto económico internacional en la época
del Bogotazo” (1998) Anuario Colombiano de Historia Social y de la Cultura 25, at 248–273.
6
Roger R. Trask, “The Impact of the Cold War on U.S. Latin American Relations, 1945–1949”
(1977) 1 Diplomatic History 3, at 273.
7
Sandra Borda and Arlene Tickner, Relaciones internacionales y política exterior de Colombia
(Bogotá: Ediciones Uniandes, 2011), p. 59.
8
See Inter-American Treaty of Reciprocal Alliance (“Rio Treaty”) art. 3. UN Charter Arts. 3,4,
51, 54.
was defined as “not an armed attack,” allowing for communism to be con-

sidered as a “fact or situation that might endanger the peace of America” that
brought retaliatory measures such as “recall of diplomats; breaking of diplo-
matic relations . . . interruption of economic relations and
communications . . . and use of armed force.”9 The broad definition of
aggression paved the way for U.S. dominance in an economic and military
multilateral regional defense system against communism in which neutrality
was no longer an option.10
the birth of the oas and a regional

anticommunist agenda
The year after the signing of the Rio Treaty, twenty-one states (Argentina,
Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Cuba, Dominican Republic,
Ecuador, El Salvador, Guatemala, Haiti, Honduras, Mexico, Nicaragua,
Panamá, Paraguay, Perú, Uruguay, Venezuela, and the United States) signed
the Charter of the Organization of American States (OAS) during the Ninth
Pan-American Conference held in Colombia in 1948. The Bogotá Confer-
ence was the result of a century of meetings beginning with the Panama
Congress of 1826, spanning eight Pan-American Conferences since 1889 and
three Inter-American conferences for peace and security (1936, 1945, and
1947).11
Most delegates at Bogotá assumed that the Conference would be a way to
implement a permanent forum for U.S. economic cooperation, while others
viewed it as an appropriate arena to denounce European interventions.9 The
United States, however, viewed the Conference as the ideal forum in which to
consolidate Latin America’s role in the Cold War. A week before, the U.S.
State Department Policy Planning Staff issued a “U.S. Policy Regarding Anti-
Communist Measures which could be planned and carried out within the
Inter-American System,” known as PPS-26. The policy paper described com-
munism as a “tool of the Kremlin” and as a national security threat to all the
states of the Americas, and suggested U.S. Secretary of State General Marshall
call for a conference resolution against communism. It also anticipated ways
9
See UN Charter Art. 8
10
Caicedo Castilla, J. (1949) La Conferencia de Petrópolis y el Tratado Interamericano de
Asistencia Recíproca firmado en Rio de Janeiro en 1947. San Pablo: Empresa Gráfica de la
“Revista dos Tribunais” Ltda., p. 55
11
The first was held in Washington, DC, in 1889; the second in 1901 in Mexico City; the third in
1906 in Rio de Janeiro; the fourth in 1910 in Buenos Aires; the fifth in 1923 in Santiago de Chile;
the sixth in 1928 in Havana; the seventh in 1933 in Montevideo; and the eighth in 1938 in Lima.
in which the United States could combat communism in Latin America,

including implementing police cooperation and training; refusing passports to
Communists; establishing economic and social cooperation, as well as anti-
communist libraries, radio, press, and motion picture programs; and investing
in businesses and organizing noncommunist labor unions.12 Simultaneously,
U.S. Ambassador Willard S. Beaulac warned that “communists and left wing
liberals” might try to sabotage the Bogotá Conference. At the opening event,
Latin American delegates proposed for economic cooperation to be on the
agenda, while Marshall called for a discussion of “foreign-inspired subversive
activities directed against [the] institutions and peace and security of American
Republics.”13
A week later, on April 9, 1948, Colombia’s popular liberal presidential
candidate, Jorge Eliecer Gaitán, who had not been invited to the Conference,
was shot a few blocks from where the delegates were meeting. Gaitán’s death
spurred tremendous riots in Bogotá, where buildings were burned and thou-
sands killed during what was called “El Bogotazo,” or the beginning of the
period of “La Violencia” (1948–1958).
Most Colombians were worried about the national consequences of
Gaitán’s death and blamed Conservative and/or Liberal party leaders, despite
two parallel theories that suggested foreign participation in his murder. One
theory proposed that it was the CIA’s first covert operation made to coincide
with the Pan-American Conference in order to spread fear of communism
across the region.14 The second pointed at Russia and international commun-
ism as the culprits, as argued by General George Marshall when he informed
the State Department that “revolutionary movements . . . were not confined
to Colombia but had world-wide implications”15 and made it public in a
New York Times article four days after the assassination:
Backing up the findings of the Colombian Government, Secretary of State
Marshall and other delegates to the Inter-American Conference has now
likewise accused Soviet Russia, and its tool, international communism, of
instigating the riots that wrecked Bogotá and cast a pall over the whole
Western Hemisphere. Basing their judgment on first-hand information and
12
Declassified Secret Paper Prepared by the Policy Planning Staff, PPS-26 Problem to Establish
U.S. Policy Regarding Anti-Communist Measures Which Could Be Planned and Carried Out
Within the Inter-American System, March 22, 1948.
13
Trask, “The Impact of the Cold War,” at 136.
14
Servando González, La CIA, Fidel Castro, el Bogotazo, y el Nuevo Orden Mundial, La guerra
psicológica contra América Latina (Hayward: Spooks Books, 2012).
15
Marshall to Acting Secretary of State, April 10, 1948, as cited in Trask, “The Impact of the Cold
War,” at 120.
personal observation on the spot, they see in the tragic events which inter-
rupted their deliberations the same powers and patterns at work as in the
attempted insurrections in France and Italy. And that makes Bogotá, as
Mr. Marshall said, not merely a Colombian or Latin American incident
but a world affair, and a particularly lurid illustration of the length to which
Russia is willing to go in its no longer (cold war) against the democracies.16
No matter which persons or group masterminded Gaitán’s assassination, the

event aligned well with the U.S. delegation’s intentions. The Conference
ended with Resolution XXXII, “The Preservation and Defense of Democracy
in America,” which declared:
[B]y its anti-democratic nature and its interventionist tendency, the political
activity of international communism or any totalitarian doctrine is incompat-
ible with the concept of American freedom which rests upon two undeniable
postulates the dignity of man as an individual and the sovereignty of the
nation as a state.
It also condemned, “in the name of the Law of Nations,” foreign govern-
ments, political parties, or individuals who intervene in American States’
democracies and provided for the adoption of “measures necessary to eradi-
cate and prevent” them and “a full exchange of information concerning any of
the aforementioned activities.”17
While the OAS was the first regional organization created within the
confines of the UN Charter, the Bogotá Pact, and the American Declaration
of the Rights and Duties of Man, it also formed a Monroe Doctrine–, U.S.-
centered regional security system with the main purpose of combatting com-
munism.18 Thus, in relation to Bandung, the alliance formed in Bogotá made
the Latin American states hesitant to participate in any other international
scenario that might jeopardize their privileged relation with the United States,
despite their long-standing tradition of promoting ideals similar to the five
pillars of nonalignment described by Jawaharlal Nehru in 1954: mutual
respect for each other’s territorial integrity and sovereignty, nonaggression,
noninterference in domestic affairs, equality and mutual benefit, and peaceful
coexistence.
16
Robin Kirk, More Terrible Than Death: Drugs, Violence, and America’s War in Colombia
(Public Affairs New York, 2004), p 22. “Colombia Battles Leftist Mobs” N.Y. Times, April 10,
1948.
17
Resolution XXXII of the Bogotá Conference of the American States (1948), Pan-American
Union, The International Conferences of the American States, 2nd Supp., 1942–1954, at 271.
18
Ann Van Wynen Thomas and A. J. Thomas Jr., “The Organization of American States and the
Monroe Doctrine – Legal Implications” (1970) 30 Louisiana Law Review 541.
oas resolution 93 and the árbenz overthrow

Despite the OAS resolutions against communism, opposition movements and
solidarity groups in Latin America continued to radicalize as U.S. interven-
tions in the region grew with events such as the overthrow of the democratic-
ally elected President of Guatemala, Coronel Jacobo Árbenz Guzmán
(1913–1971) in 1951. Árbenz, a moderate socialist, contributed to modernizing
Guatemala by changing the feudal labor system – in which 2 percent of the
population owned 70 percent of the land – through a process of agrarian
reform. In 1952, the Árbenz government promulgated Decree 900, through
which it expropriated uncultivated land (including the U.S.-owned United
Fruit Company’s plantations, 85 percent of which were uncultivated).
U.S. President Harry S. Truman, with the support of Nicaraguan dictator
Anastasio Somoza, authorized Operation PBFortune to overthrow Árbenz,
although it was later aborted when details were leaked.19 When Eisenhower
succeeded Truman in 1953 under an anticommunist, anti-Soviet campaign,
he continued the intention to oust Árbenz with a new operation, PBSuccess.
Eisenhower and the CIA viewed Guatemala as the first “Soviet beachhead” of
the Western hemisphere.20 Thus, U.S. participation in the 1954 Tenth Inter-
American Conference focused on obtaining a regional condemnation of
communism and indirect support for the overthrow of Árbenz.
A few weeks before the Conference, the U.S. representative on the OAS
Council wrote:
[T]he major interest of the Latin Americans lies in seeking assurances from
us on prices of raw materials and terms of trade, access to the U.S. market,
and capital for economic development. . . . At the same time, the U.S. is
seeking one or more anti-Communist resolutions which are not of major
interest to many of the Latin American countries.21
However, the U.S. delegation did not anticipate “the extent to which . . . the
Latin American delegations would go” and how well prepared they were with
the studies and technical language of the United Nations Economic Com-
mission for Latin America, under the direction of Raúl Prebisch.22 Latin
19
Nick Cullahther, Secret History: The CIA’s Classified Account of Its Operations in Guatemala,
1952–1954 (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 1999), pp. 29–37.
20
Id. at 26.
21
John C. Drier, “Report on Outlook for Caracas Conference. Secret Memorandum by the US
Representative on the Council of the Organization of American States to the Assistant Secretary
of State for Inter-American Affairs,” January 5, 1954.
22
OAS files, lot 60 D 665, Confidential “Post-conference – delegation report,” Report Prepared
in the Department of State, Washington, April 1954.
American diplomats hesitated in accepting a resolution that could mean

interventions in their own states, but finally caved in when the United States
pursued a last-minute strategy of buying votes through concessions. Resolution
93, “Declaration of Solidarity for the Preservation of the Political Integrity of
the American States against the Intervention of International Communism,”
passed with Mexico and Argentina’s abstentions and Guatemala’s opposition.
Dictatorships propped up by U.S. aid and those who accepted U.S. conces-
sions supported it.23 Resolution 93 stated, “the aggressive character of the
international communist movement continues to constitute . . . a special
and immediate threat to the national institutions and the peace and security
of the American States,” so they would “continue security surveillance and
exchange of information over [Communists’] activities, funding, propaganda
and travel.”24
Three months later, legitimized by Resolution 93, the CIA and the Guate-
malan opposition overthrew the Árbenz government.25 The coup served as a
model for future U.S. interventions while further radicalizing revolutionary
movements, which were now certain that a moderate progressive regime
would not escape the fury of Cold War persecution.26 By this time, it became
evident that even if the Bandung Conference organizers had contemplated
inviting Latin American states, their economic policies and alliance with the
United States contradicted the neutrality and the condemnation of colonial-
ism and imperialism to which the event aspired.27
the oas and the cuban revolution

The 1959 Cuban revolution that overthrew the U.S.-supported Batista dicta-
torship dramatically changed the existing situation. The following year, during
the Seventh OAS Meeting of Ministers of Foreign Affairs, the United States
led the Declaration of San José against Cuba, which won 19-0.28 In the
23
Max Paul Friedman, “Fracas in Caracas: Latin American Diplomatic Resistance to US
Intervention in Guatemala in 1954” (2010) 21 Diplomacy and Statecraft 4.
24
Resolution XCIII, “Declaration of Solidarity for the Preservation of the Political Integrity of the
American States Against International Communist Intervention,” adopted by the Tenth Inter-
American Conference, Caracas, March 28, 1954. Report of the Delegation of the U.S.A.
156–57, State Department Publication 5692 (Int. Org. & Conf. Series 11, Am. REP. 14, 1955).
25
The role of the U.S. government in the 1954 coup has been well documented. See Stephen C.
Schlesinger and Stephen Kinzer, Bitter Fruit: The Untold Story of the American Coup in
Guatemala, 1st ed. (Garden City: Doubleday, 1982).
26
Friedman, “Fracas in Caracas.”
27
J. Braveboy-Wagner, Institutions of the Global South (New York: Routledge, 2009).
28
The Dominican Republic did not participate, and Cuba withdrew. Mexico clarified its vote
stating that “each state has the right to develop its cultural, political, and economic life freely
language of the previous OAS resolutions, the Declaration condemned the

“intervention of Sino-Soviet powers” and said that all OAS member states
were under the obligation “to submit to the discipline of the inter-American
system.”29 The Cuban government responded a few days later as the “National
General Assembly of the People of Cuba” through with the First Havana
Declaration. The Assembly condemned the San José Declaration as a “docu-
ment dictated by North American imperialism . . . detrimental to national self-
determination, sovereignty and dignity of the sister nations of the Continent”
and argued that Cuba’s relation with the Soviet Union was solely a response to
“an imminent attack by the Pentagon” and its territory potentially being
“invaded by military forces of the US.”
The Havana declaration also condemned (1) a century of U.S. imperialism,
military intervention, and land appropriation in Latin America, (2) the
betrayal of independent states “liberating Latin-Americanism” by OAS “hypo-
critical Pan-Americanism,” (3) U.S. financial oligarchy, racial discrimination,
and “the outrages of the Klu Klux Klan,” and (4) the exploitation of under-
developed countries by “imperialistic finance capital.” In addition, it made a
manifesto of people’s rights and duties, such as:
right of the peasants to the land; . . . of the workers to the fruit of their
work; . . . of children to education; . . . of the ill to medical and hospital
attention; . . . of youth to work; . . . of students to free, experimental, and
scientific education; . . . of Negroes and Indians to “the full dignity of
Man”;. . . of women to civil, social and political equality; [the] duty of
peasants, workers, intellectuals, Negroes, Indians, young and old, and
women, to fight for their economic, political and social rights; the duty of
oppressed and exploited nations to fight for their liberation; the duty of each
nation to make common cause with all the oppressed, colonized, exploited
peoples, regardless of their location in the world or the geographical distance
that may separate them.30
and naturally . . . this is a resolution of a general character for all the members states of the
Organization, and that in no way is it a condemnation or a threat against Cuba, whose
aspirations for economic improvement and social justice have the fullest support of the
Government and the people of Mexico,” while the Delegation of Guatemala left a statement
saying, to the contrary of Mexico, that “it is convinced that the action of the Government of the
Republic of Cuba, in adopting a policy inclined toward the Soviet Union and contrary to the
inter-American system, is endangering the peace and the security of America, and that the
American states would have been justified in assuming a stronger attitude in order to protect
the interests of the hemisphere, in compliance with the Charter, agreement, and resolutions of
the OAS.” OAS, Declaration of San José, August 28, 1960.
29
Declaration of San José, August 28, 1960.
30
Fidel Castro, “Declaration of Havana,” The 26th of July Movement in the US, 1960.
final exclusion of cuba from the oas, 1962

A year later, the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) was formed as the result
of the Conference of Heads of State or Government of Non-Aligned
Countries held in Belgrade, with the participation of the states present at
Bandung. Cuba was the only Latin American state in attendance, although
Bolivia, Brazil, and Ecuador went as observers. Also in 1961, the Fourth
Session of the Council of Solidarity of Afro-Asian Peoples welcomed a
delegation from Cuba and supported a resolution against the U.S. Bay of
Pigs invasion. In the same year, Mexico held the Latin American Confer-
ence for National Sovereignty, Economic Emancipation and Peace, which
passed a resolution supporting a meeting of Asia, Africa, and America
inspired by the principles contained in the First Havana Declaration.
The United States, under President John F. Kennedy, responded to Cuba’s
non-alliance with the launch of its own “Alliance for Progress,” a ten-year
economic aid and development plan for Latin America implemented by
the OAS.
Latin American OAS member states were still reluctant to be drawn into the
United States–Cuba conflict, but by 1962, at the Eighth Meeting of Consult-
ation of the Ministers of Foreign Affairs, the United States used previous OAS
resolutions against communism to argue for Cuba’s political and economic
isolation. Of the twenty OAS states, fourteen voted to exclude Cuba from the
organization, while six (Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Ecuador, and
Mexico) abstained. The resolution declared Cuba’s government incompatible
with the inter-American system, the Rio Treaty, and the principles of unity
and solidarity. Cuba could no longer be represented or attend OAS meetings,
although it was still obliged to the American Declaration of the Rights and
Duties of Man.31
As a result of the U.S. trade embargo, Bay of Pigs invasion, and OAS
exclusion, Cuba radicalized and shifted its need for economic and political
support to the Soviet bloc. In 1962, Fidel Castro responded to the OAS
exclusion with the “Second Havana Declaration,” which was distributed
throughout the Third World and served as a call for other oppositional
movements to resist U.S. hegemony and authoritarian regimes. The Declar-
ation addressed the issue of the OAS as follows:
31
OAS, “The OAS Resolution on Cuba” (1963) 12 Current History 111. Since 1962, Cuba has not
returned to the OAS, even after friendly attempts were made by the U.S. government in 2009.
At Punta del Este a great ideological battle unfolded between the Cuban
Revolution and Yankee imperialism. . . . The OAS was revealed for what it
really is – a Yankee Ministry of Colonies, a military alliance, an apparatus of
repression against the liberation movements of the Latin American
peoples. . . . Cuba has lived three years of the Revolution under the incessant
harassment of Yankee intervention in our internal affairs. . . . The US has
military pacts with nations of all the continents; military blocs with whatever
fascist, militarist, and reactionary government there is in the world: . . . The
ministers meet and expel Cuba, which has no military pacts with any
country. Thus the government that organizes subversion throughout the
world and forges military alliances on four continents, forces the expulsion
of Cuba, accusing her of no less than subversion and having ties beyond the
continent Cuba’s Record . . . Cuba, the Latin American nation which has
made . . . the enjoyment of human rights a living reality by freeing man and
woman from exploitation, lack of culture, and social inequality . . . is expelled
from the Organization of American States by governments which have not
achieved for their people one of these objectives. How will they be able to
justify their conduct before the peoples of the Americas and the world?32
bandung meets latin america at the tricontinental, 1966

Cuba’s response to the OAS made it evident to NAM and the Afro-Asian
People’s Solidarity Organization (AAPSA, formed in 1957) that Latin Amer-
ica was under the control of an imperial power. In 1963, during the Third
AAPSA meeting, attendants accepted Castro’s proposals for adding another
A for American and hosting a Tricontinental conference in which the
nonaligned and anti-imperialist Latin Americans could participate. El
Medhi Ben Barka (1920–1965), an exiled Moroccan opposition leader,33
known for trying to unite Third World revolutionary movements, was the
head of the International Preparatory Committee for the Tricontinental. At
the September 1964 meeting, Ben Barka proposed the Conference blend the
1917 Russian Revolution with the anti-imperialist and national liberation
movements of the day and adopt a global strategy: “We must achieve greater
coordination in the struggle of all the peoples, as the problems in Vietnam,
the Congo and the Dominican Republic stem from the same source: U.S.
imperialism.”
32
Fidel Castro, “The Second Declaration of Havana,” in David Deutschmann and Deborah
Shnookal (eds.), Fidel Castro Reader (Melbourne: Ocean Press, 2007), pp. 241–255.
33
Victoria Brittain, “Africa: A Continent Drenched in the Blood of Revolutionary Heroes,”
Guardian, Jan. 17, 2011.
Ben Barka declared that each one of the anti-imperialist organizations of

Africa, Asia, and Latin America were selected by the groups represented in the
International Preparatory Committee, and that in the nations with several
organizations, a National Front should be formed. For Latin America, Castro
proposed to invite six liberation groups to the Tricontinental meeting:
National Liberation Movement (MLN) of Mexico, Revolutionary Armed
Forces (FAR) of Guatemala, the National Liberation Front (FLN) of
Venezuela, the Popular Action Front (FRAP) of Chile, as well as the left
Liberation Front (FIDEL), the Communist Party of Cuba (PCC), and all
members of AAPSA.34 Ben Barka was disappeared and possibly killed in Paris
in October 1965. Although no one was ever charged with his death, sources
point to a connection with Tricontinental planning, which infuriated many
governments.
Despite Ben Barka’s disappearance, in January 1966 the Tricontinental was
held for two weeks in Havana with Fidel Castro as the main host. During the
Conference, the Organization of Solidarity with the People of Asia, Africa and
Latin America (OPSAAAL) was founded with the purpose of fighting imperi-
alism, colonialism, neocolonialism, and racism and supporting socialist or
communist movements in the Third World. A U.S. Congress report of the
same year declared the meeting as “the most powerful gathering of pro-
Communist, anti-American forces in the history of the Western Hemi-
sphere.”35 The report informs:
[Eighty-three] groups from countries on three continents – represented by
approximately 513 delegates, 64 observers and 77 invited guests. These
groups included 27 Latin American delegations. The Soviet delegation
was the largest at the Conference, consisting of 40 delegates. Asian
countries were represented by 197 delegates, while African countries had
150, and the 27 Latin American groups comprised 165 delegates. Also
participating in the conference were 129 foreign journalists from 35
countries, including several from the US, and more than 100 Cuban
journalists.36
The Tricontinental adopted resolutions that gave policy form to the discus-
sions espoused by participants and reflects the beginning of a postcolonial
34
Antonio Vázquez Carrizosa, Los no alineados: Una estrategia política para la paz en la era
atómica (Bogotá: Carlos Valencia Editores, 1983).
35
U.S. Congress, Committee on the Judiciary. Subcommittee to Investigate the Administration
of the Internal Security Act and Other Internal Security Laws, “The Tricontinental
Conference of African, Asian, and Latin American Peoples a staff study” (1966).
36
Tricontinental Report, at 1.
subjectivity or tricontinentalism as identified by Robert J. C. Young.37 One

resolution vowed: “[T]he peoples of the three continents must reply to
imperialist violence with revolutionary violence to safeguard hard-won
national independence, as well as to achieve the liberation of the peoples
who are fighting to shake off the colonialist noose.”38
The Conference’s final declaration condemned U.S. imperialism for (1)
“carrying out a policy of systematic intervention and military aggression
against the nations of the three continents,” (2) constituting “the basis for
oppression; it directs, provides, and upholds the worldwide system of exploit-
ation,” (3) its “aggressive war in South Vietnam,” (4) its “aggressive policy
in . . . Cambodia” and the Dominican Republic, (5) its “blockade on Cuba,”
and (6) its occupation of Puerto Rico. The Conference also expressed “soli-
darity with the armed struggle of the peoples of Venezuela, Guatemala, Perú,
Colombia” and declared Cuba’s revolution as significant “for the peoples of
the three continents because of her . . . size, geographical position near the US
and in a zone surrounded by Governments which are puppets of the Yankee
imperialists . . . [which] proves . . . [that] revolution is possible and invin-
cible.”39 The Tricontinental also declared that the United States manipulated
the UN, and that the OAS had no legal or moral authority to represent the
Latin American nations.40
Three organizations resulted from the 1966 meeting: the Tricontinental
Solidarity Organization and Peoples (OSTP), the OSPAAAL, and the Organ-
ization of Latin American Solidarity (NPOs). As the OAS and the United
States contributed to radicalize the Cuban government and opposition groups
in Latin America, the Latin American participation in the Tricontinental
further ignited the communist fear of the region’s governments. OAS member
states were terrified of the Tricontinental’s organization and resolutions and
described it as “a positive threat to the free peoples of the world, and, on the
hemisphere level, represents the most dangerous and serious threat that
international communism has yet made against the inter-American
system . . . and constitutes a threat to the security of the hemisphere.”41 With
the favorable vote of all members, except Mexico, in February 1966 the OAS
37
Young argues that tricontinentalism is a more appropriate term for postcolonialism because it
began in Havana in 1966. Robert J. C. Young, “Postcolonialism: From Bandung to the
Tricontinental” (2006) 5 Historein 11.
38 39
Tricontinental Report, at 15. Tricontinental Report, at 16.
40
Tricontinental Report, at 17.
41
OAS, Report of the Special Committee to Study Resolution II.1 and VIII of the Eighth Meeting
of Consultation of Ministers of Foreign Affairs, on the First Afro-Asian-Latin American Peoples’
Solidarity Conference and its Projections (“Tricontinental Conference of Havana”): New
sent a letter of protest to the UN Security Council arguing the Tricontinental

was an open threat and the participants were “terrorists, criminals and guerrilla
organizations” representing “anti-democratic leftist forces” encouraged violent
change and political instability while violating international law and the UN
Charter.42 A few days later, Fidel Castro responded with another letter to the
Secretary General in vigorous defense of the Tricontinental while accusing
the letter signers of cynicism and “being accomplices in the subordination,
domination, and exploitation of their own countries by North American
imperialism.”43
conclusion: some oas states turn to nam

Although the lesser-known history of the Tricontinental has been over-
shadowed by the Bandung conference, it should be remembered as the
scenario that brought together Latin American anti-imperialist movements
with global solidarity alliances, pan-Africanism, and pan-Arabism to counter
the fragmentations of colonial rule. The Tricontinental also brought a new
understanding of twentieth-century imperialism under a modern version of
the Monroe Doctrine as well as a view of internationalism from below, or a
“proletarian internationalism” that sought to promote, according to the con-
ferences goals, “a world . . . without hunger or poverty, without oppression or
exploitation, without humiliations or contempt, without injustice or inequal-
ities, where everyone might live in full moral and material dignity, in true
liberty.”44
On the other hand, because of the strengthened alliance with the United
States after the Second World War, Latin American states – except Cuba –
were, at best, hesitant participants in the Third World movement until the
1970s. As the honeymoon period faded, relations with the United States began
to deteriorate when promises of economic aid and investment did not live up
to the initial expectations of the 1948 Bogotá Conference. Other multilateral
scenarios opened where issues of concern to the Latin American states could
be addressed, such as the role of multinational corporations, technology
transfer, regulation of maritime resources, foreign investment, and trade.45
Instrument of Communist Intervention and Aggression, Vol. 1 (Washington, DC: OAS

Council 1966).
42
Clara Nieto, Masters of War: Latin America and U.S. Aggression from the Cuban Revolution
through the Clinton Years (New York: Seven Stories Press, 2011) p. 207.
43
Id. 44
Young, “Postcolonialism,” at 19.
45
Fehmy Saddy, “Introduction,” in Arab-Latin American Relations: Energy, Trade, and
Investment (Piscataway, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 1983), pp. 10–11.
Although the Third Summit Conference of NAM of 1970, held in Zambia,

showed some Latin American states beginning to identify with anti-
neocolonial economic stances,46 the more radical shift came again in a
1979 Havana meeting of NAM. The Conference brought together ninety-
five member states, twenty observers, and nineteen guests represented by
heads of states, heads of government, ministers of foreign affairs, and inter-
national organizations. Fidel Castro headed the meeting and helped define
the movement’s objectives. Argentina, Bolivia, Cuba, Guyana, Jamaica,
Nicaragua, Panamá, Perú, Surinam, and Trinidad and Tobago participated
with a right to vote, while Barbados, Brazil, Colombia, Costa Rica, Dominica,
Ecuador, El Salvador, Mexico, Santa Lucia, Uruguay, and Venezuela went as
observers. Several Latin American states openly condemned economic
dependence, since it had become clear, as expressed by then–Colombian
president Alfonso López Michelsen, they were “pawns to the Cold War.”
They urged a move away from the extreme isolation caused by industrializing
through export substitution and the promotion of regional integration
programs.47
By 1983, Colombia, a U.S. ally since the founding of the OAS, shifted from
an observer (since 1974) to a member role in NAM.48 From 1995 to 1998,
Colombia held the presidency of NAM. In the context of the Bandung era
and the aftermath of the Cold War, this short history illustrates that the Latin
American states’ practice of regional solidarity is relatively constant, but it does
not rely on coherent policies or ideological positions. Instead, it shifts and is
reconfigured according to the states’ relation to the centers of power and the
economic scenarios of the moment.
46 47 48
Id. at 16. Borda, Relaciones internacionales. Id. at 57.
14
Peripheral Parallels?
Europe’s Edges and the World of Bandung
john reynolds
introduction: parallel worlds

Bandung connotes a distinctly Afro-Asian moment in time and space, marking
the advancement of a decidedly Third World movement. However, Arch-
bishop Makarios’s participation at the Conference, representing a Cyprus still
under colonial rule, conjured the possibilities of a fledgling Afro-Asian front
forging anti-imperial alliances around Europe’s rough edges. More than sixty
years on, such possibilities now appear as little more than faded vignettes of a
solidarity and internationalism that might have been. Animated by a sense of
past opportunities lost – but alternative horizons perhaps again up for grabs in
the rekindling of solidarity through anti-austerity internationalism – this
chapter reflects on the contemporary global order against the backdrop of
the relationship between the world of Bandung and the European periphery.
The 1955 gathering in Bandung offers a useful point of departure from which
to engage with the Third World project from Europe’s margins. This is particu-
larly true for elements that may have been distinguished by an anticolonial
stance at the time of the Conference, whether because of their own traditions of
oppression as colonies (such as Cyprus or Ireland) or their own self-styled brands
of anti-imperialism (as in Yugoslavia, for example). In this chapter, I use the
story of Makarios’s trip to Indonesia to relate Bandung to Europe through its
peripheries, with Cyprus as the primary lens through which to trace this
relationship. Postcolonial trajectories in Ireland, another former British colony
on the outskirts of the imperial continent, serve to further accentuate the
internationalist anticolonial vision – articulated by Makarios at Bandung – as
a lost alternative, a path not followed by the European periphery.
From the Irish perspective, any post-independence engagement with the
Third World that developed as Ireland began to embark on global inter-
national relations in the 1940s and 1950s quickly morphed into a humanitarian
247
248 John Reynolds
mimicry of various aspects of the civilizing mission, performed through

Catholic missionaries, development aid projects, and UN peacekeeping
missions. Any deeper solidarity with the Third World came only in isolated
grassroots activism from social movements, or from the Irish republican
movement’s interaction with liberation struggles that continued through
the 1970s and 1980s, in Palestine and South Africa in particular. Questions
raised in the national parliament as to why a neutral country such as Ireland
would not join or attend the conferences of Third World projects such as the
Non-Aligned Movement were batted away by government representatives
with platitudes expressing “considerable sympathy” to the objectives of that
movement, but stating that direct involvement would be of no value to
Ireland.1 In the more recent context of twenty-first-century U.S. imperialism,
the Irish state’s abandonment of any pretense of political solidarity with those
who have borne the brunt of that imperialism – in Afghanistan, Iraq, and
beyond – can be seen in the ongoing hospitality granted to the U.S. military
to use Shannon Airport as a hub and pit stop for its invasion and rendition
operations.
This eschewal of Ireland’s own anticolonial heritage and ambivalence
toward anti-imperial politics on the international plane can be seen as
indicative of the European periphery’s failure to support the Third World
movement. If we understand the Bandung period as a liminal moment for
global anticolonialism, what intervening forces determined the direction
taken in those parts of a European periphery that might otherwise have
built on historical commonalities with the Third World? The structures and
institutions of international law – particularly the European Union and the
International Monetary Fund – are central to this story of the regional
periphery’s turn toward the allure of a neoliberal European center. On
the one hand, there was a common political commitment to national
liberation and formal sovereignty for colonized territories. On the other
hand, dynamics of race and geography oiled the wheels of European
identification and pushed against solidarities with the Third World. More-
over, the colonies inside Europe had arguably not been constructed as
spaces of exclusion and exception2 in quite the same way as those on non-
European soil.
Most significant, however, was the economic pull of the center and the
hegemony of the market. Akhil Gupta emphasizes the importance of a
1
See, e.g., Comments of Minister for Foreign Affairs Michael O’Kennedy, Dáil Éireann
Debates, Vol. 316, No. 13, Nov. 1979.
2
Arjun Chowdury, “The Colony as Exception” (2007) 6:3 borderlands e-journal.
Peripheral Parallels? 249
materialist analysis to understanding the dynamics of why the Non-Aligned

Movement – or, we could argue, the Bandung project more generally – was
ultimately less successful in forging postcolonial unity than the European
project was.3 This point extends to its structural forces that induced the
European periphery to gravitate to the core. The allure of access to the
protected single market, once it was constructed, was bound to prevail. Late
capitalism’s monopoly in the Western world meant that peripheral economies
like Greece, Ireland, and Portugal took up at the earliest opportunity the
privileged trading conditions, subsidies, and protectionism offered by the
European Communities.
With this in mind, I explore some aspects of the relationship between
the European periphery and the Afro-Asian movement before turning to the
question of whether Europe “colonizing itself” today holds within it the
implicit potential to contribute to broader processes of decoloniality4 taking
root, in the spirit of Bandung.
colonialism, postcolonialism, and the

european periphery
The notion of a “spirit of Bandung” was born of the 1955 Conference and can
be summarised as a call 1) for a peaceful coexistence among the nations, 2) for
liberation of the world from the hegemony of any superpower, from colonial-
ism, from imperialism, from any kind of domination of one country by
another, and 3) for building solidarity towards the poor, the colonised, the
exploited, the weak and those being weakened by the world order of the day
and for their emancipation.5
The possibilities embedded in solidarity with that “spirit” as a counter-
weight to the prevailing global order began to crystallize across several planes
on Europe’s fringes in the years following the Conference. On the plane of
international relations and diplomacy, the central role played by Tito and
Yugoslavia in the formation and evolution of the Non-Aligned Movement is
well documented and was indeed significant. In the international legal sphere,
3
Akhil Gupta, “The Song of the Nonaligned World: Transnational Identities and the
Reinscription of Space in Late Capitalism” (1992) 7:1 Cultural Anthropology 63, 64–65.
4
See, e.g., Walter D. Mignolo, The Darker Side of Western Modernity: Global Futures,
Decolonial Options (Durham: Duke University Press, 2011).
5
See the Bandung Spirit Network, available at at www.bandungspirit.org. See also, e.g., the
“Declaration on the New Asian-African Strategic Partnership” of the 2005 Asian-African
Summit (Bandung, 24 Apr. 2005), which sought “to reinvigorate the Spirit of Bandung.”
250 John Reynolds
both Greece and Ireland waged law against British imperialism, using the
European Convention on Human Rights to challenge repressive emergency
measures imposed in Cyprus and the north of Ireland, respectively. In the
realm of ideology and political economy, sustained discourse over the possi-
bility of the post-colony in Cyprus emerging as a communist thorn in the side
of European capitalism serve as a reminder of the alternative paradigms that
were imagined in the wake of Bandung.
The mid-1950s was a pivotal juncture for British colonial rule in Cyprus.
After withdrawing from Egypt, Britain moved its Middle Eastern Land and Air
Headquarters to Cyprus in 1954,6 upping the strategic importance of the island
colony. At the same time, Archbishop Makarios III – de facto political leader
of the Greek Cypriot community – had begun to agitate at international fora
for the application of the principle of self-determination to Cyprus. He
appeared at the United Nations in 1951 to lobby delegates and denounce
British policy. At his instigation in 1954, Greece formally requested that
Cypriot self-determination be included on the General Assembly’s agenda.7
For Britain, questions of governance in Cyprus were – as all questions
concerning its colonial territories – an internal matter of the empire. In July
1954, during a discussion in the House of Commons on constitutional
arrangements in Cyprus, Minister of State for the Colonies, Henry
L. Hopkinson, made clear the government position that “there are certain
territories in the Commonwealth which, owing to their peculiar circum-
stances, can never expect to be fully independent.”8 The United States was
also opposed to any internationalization of the Cyprus question, in the
interests of keeping Turkey onside and maintaining NATO’s stability in the
region.9 This influence was sufficient to ensure that in December 1954 a
majority of the General Assembly considered that “for the time being, it does
not appear appropriate to adopt a resolution on the question of Cyprus,” and
thus decided “not to consider further the item entitled ‘Application under the
6
Robert E. Harkavy, Great Competition for Overseas Bases: The Geopolitics of Access Diplomacy
(New York: Pergamon Press, 1982), p. 126.
7
Eric Solsten (ed.), Cyprus: A Country Study (Washington, DC: Federal Reserve Division,
Library of Congress, 1991), pp. 27–8.
8
House of Commons, 28 July 1954: 508, quoted in Achilles C. Emilianides, “The Cyprus
Question before the House of Commons: 1954–1955,” in Michalis Kontos, Sozos-Christos
Theodoulou, Nikos Panayiotides, and Haralambos Alexandrou (eds.), Great Power Politics in
Cyprus: Foreign Interventions and Domestic Perceptions (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars
Publishing, 2014), p. 15.
9
Katsumi Ishizuka, Ireland and International Peacekeeping Organisations 1960–2000
(Abingdon: Routledge, 2013), pp. 61–62.
Principle of Equal Rights and Self-Determination of peoples in the case of the

population of the island of Cyprus.’”10
This provoked general strikes and riots in Cyprus, on the back of which
EOKA11 was founded in early 1955 and began its armed struggle under the
leadership of Georgios Grivas. Preexisting special powers, in place to facili-
tate the suppression of any form of resistance to British rule, were bolstered
by the passing of legislation such as the Curfews Law 1955 and the Deten-
tion of Persons Law 1955. A formal state of emergency was declared in the
colony later that year. The pattern followed a path well worn by British
governing authorities in the emergencies that had gone before in India,
Malaya, Kenya, and numerous other colonies.12 Emergency Powers Regula-
tions were enacted, and there was liberal use of their expansive powers of
detention.
By early 1956, Makarios had been deported and exiled under the emergency
regulations. Greece submitted its complaint to Strasbourg in Greece v. UK,
alleging a range of rights violations arising from British emergency policies:
torture, whipping, and other forms of ill treatment; arbitrary arrest, detention,
and deportation; collective punishment in the forms of fines and movement
restrictions; and restrictions on privacy, expression, and assembly. The Euro-
pean Commission on Human Rights, in response, developed the “margin of
appreciation” doctrine to grant discretion to the state in determining whether
and in what form emergency derogations from its own human rights obliga-
tions are justified.13 It was clear from this that the liberal European human
rights project would not challenge European colonialism, even where its
victims were Europeans.
Against this backdrop – diplomacy initiatives stilted by western opposition at
the UN, the turn to an explicitly anticolonialist liberation struggle, and the
proliferation of colonial law as an oppressive force (with the subsequent
acquiescence of international human rights institutions) – Makarios went to
Bandung in 1955, aiming to rally support for the anticolonial movement in
Cyprus through a demonstration of solidarity with the African and Asian
10
General Assembly Resolution 814 (IX) 17 December 1954. Notably, the British government had
submitted a proposed agenda item of its own in response to the move by Greece, entitled
“Support from Greece for Terrorism in Cyprus.”
11
Ethniki Organosis Kyprion Agoniston, or National Organization of Cypriot Fighters.
12
See, e.g., John Reynolds, Empire, Emergency and International Law (Cambridge: Cambridge
13
Greece v. UK, Application No. 176/56, Report of the European Commission on Human Rights,
September 26, 1958.
252 John Reynolds
states.14 This formed part of an ongoing move to internationalize the Cyprus

question, including Makarios traveling to Egypt, Lebanon, and Syria to build
support among anticolonial networks.15 He had a somewhat anomalous pres-
ence at Bandung, both in the sense of coming from outside Africa or Asia and
from a territory still under colonial rule.16
While ostensibly present in an observer capacity, Makarios by no means
hardly a passive presence at Bandung, and he worked hard to meet with as
many leaders as possible. The British authorities deemed it necessary to
monitor his activities, and at the end of the Conference the embassy in
Jakarta sent a report back to the Foreign Office detailing “[i]nformation
about the doings of Archbishop Makarios at Bandung.”17 This covered
everything from his reception upon arrival at the airport by a senior
Indonesian Foreign Ministry official and a group of Greek diplomats, to
which hotel he stayed in and the conversations he had over the course of
the week, including his meeting with President Sukarno on the final day of
the Conference.
While in Bandung, Makarios held a press conference at which he issued a
statement explaining the reasons of solidarity and outreach “which led us to
come here from our distant country”:
The Bandung Conference is a historic step towards the final burying of
colonialism in the present world. All dependent peoples are following with
relief and satisfaction the proceedings of this Conference. In no less degree
the Cypriot people participate in these feelings. Although the question of
Cyprus was not directly considered in the Conference yet the condemnation
by it of colonialism necessarily includes Cyprus. . . . Most of the Asian-African
countries did actually support us last year at the U.N. and we are grateful for
that support. We have no doubt that this year not most of them, but all of
them, without a single exception will support our cause, which should be a
14
“Archbishop Makarios: Activities in Bandung,” FO 371/117633/1081/377 [1955].
15
Robert Holland, Britain and the Revolt in Cyprus, 1954–1959 (New York: Oxford University
Press, 1998), p. 28.
16
In the lead-up to the Conference, the British Foreign Office expressed explicit concerns over
the possibility of observers from territories still under colonial rule – whether British (Ghana,
Kenya, Singapore) or French (Tunisia, Morocco) – being invited to the Conference. As it
happened, the hosts did not adopt a formal policy of inviting representatives from such
colonies, but a number of observer delegations, as well as what one British diplomat described
as a “rather scruffy collection” of uninvited visitors from various national liberation movements,
did come to Bandung during the Conference. Nicholas Tarling, “‘Ah-Ah’: Britain and the
Bandung Conference of 1955” (1992) 23:1 Journal of Southeast Asian Studies 74, 78, 105.
17
“Archbishop Makarios: Activities in Bandung.”
common cause for all freedom-loving people. Colonialism in its flight from
Asia and Africa should not find refuge in Cyprus.18
The British embassy report argued that the press conference “does not appear
to have made any serious propaganda impact,” but expressed concern over the
fact that “the Archbishop and the Minister were prominent during the final
public session, when Nehru greeted him cordially and conversed with him for
some minutes.”19 The author of the report, G. Micklethwait, attached a cover
note to his dispatch to the Foreign Office in which he wrote, “We shall not
know how far Makarios got until the next round of the U.N. I fear he may have
got somewhere with Mr. Nehru.”20
R. W. Parkes, another British diplomat based in Jakarta who was in Ban-
dung throughout the Conference, belittled the Archbishop’s efforts and meet-
ing with Sukarno as “eager beavering.”21 But Makarios’s presence had the
potential to threaten more than just British control of Cyprus, with the
Conference situated in the larger world story of anti-imperialist alliances.
The Final Communiqué was clear in declaring that “colonialism in all its
manifestations is an evil which should speedily be brought to an end.”22 Yet,
for the British ambassador to Indonesia, O. C. Morland, the references to
colonialism in the discussions and the outcome documents were “milder than
they might have been.”23 Makarios was not happy that the Final Commu-
niqué referred explicitly to the right to self-determination in the French
colonies of North Africa, but not to British colonies nearby. He nonetheless
continued his engagement with the Afro-Asian movement through the 1950s,
with visits to Kenya and meetings with a supportive Nasser. After gaining
independence in 1960, Cyprus under Makarios joined Yugoslavia and Cuba
as the only non-Afro-Asian founding members of the Non-Aligned Movement
in 1961.
Bandung and the Third World projects that followed were naturally bound
up with Cold War geopolitics. Britain and the United States were paranoid
about the potential influence of China and North Vietnam over newly inde-
pendent colonies, and were concerned that the Bandung Conference
18
“Statement by Archbishop Makarios, 23 April 1955,” in Archbishop Makarios: Activities in
Bandung, F.O. 371/117633/1081/377 [1955].
19 20
Archbishop Makarios: Activities in Bandung, F.O. 371/117633/1081/377 [1955]. Ibid.
21
Tarling, “Britain and the Bandung Conference” 74, 105, citing Chancery to SEAD, 5 May
1955, F.O. 371/116984 [D2231/358].
22
Asian-African conference of Bandung (24 April 1955),” Asia-Africa Speak from Bandung, para.
D.1(a).
23
Morland to Foreign Secretary, April 28, 1955, 40, F.O. 371/116983 [D2231/319].
254 John Reynolds
heralded a leftward shift among “adolescent Eastern nations.”24 They also

became increasingly worried about inroads being made at the peripheries of
Europe. Following Cypriot independence, it became common for the British
and U.S. governments to express fear of Cyprus becoming “another Cuba”25
or a “Cuba in the Mediterranean.”26 A 1964 telegram from the State Depart-
ment in Washington to the U.S. diplomatic mission in Geneva made it clear
that “we are not prepared to let conditions drift to the point where Cyprus
becomes another Cuba, as will almost certainly be the case if the Makarios
regime continues in control of an independent [Cyprus].”27 Perry Anderson
recounts how, in American eyes, Makarios was little better than “Castro in a
cassock,” prompting diplomat George Ball to remark: “That son of a bitch will
have to be killed before anything happens in Cyprus.”28 It was thought that to
achieve resolution of the Greek-Turkish tensions in Cyprus in a manner
satisfactory to NATO, “some way had to be found to keep Makarios out of
the equation – either forcing him to accept a fait accompli or, alternatively,
deposing him, if necessary through a military coup.”29 Such posturing
prompted Che Guevara to tell the UN General Assembly: “Peaceful coexist-
ence has also been brutally put to the test in Cyprus, due to pressures from the
Turkish Government and NATO, compelling the people and the government
of Cyprus to make a heroic and firm stand in defense of their sovereignty.”30
This express solidarity, from whence it came, intimated the potential for
alliances between Europe’s edges and the Third World to unsettle the estab-
lished global center-periphery order.
Ultimately, of course, Cyprus was no Cuba,31 Makarios was no Castro, and
Grivas – a militant anticommunist – was certainly no Che Guevara. His
EOKA fighters made up a predominantly right-wing organization whose
24
R. W. Parkes, quoted in Tarling, “Britain and the Bandung Conference,” 74, 104.
25
Andrew Holt, The Foreign Policy of the Douglas-Home Government: Britain, the United States
and the End of Empire (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), p. 137.
26
Cihat Göktepe, British Foreign Policy towards Turkey, 1959–1965 (New York: Routledge, 2013),
p. 163.
27
Foreign Relations of the United States, 1964–1968, Vol. XVI: Cyprus, Greece, Turkey,
Doc. 144, Telegram From the Department of State to the Mission in Geneva, Aug. 23, 1964.
28
Perry Anderson, “The Divisions of Cyprus,” London Review of Books, Apr. 24, 2008.
29
Stan Draenos, Andreas Papandreou: The Making of a Greek Diplomat and Political Maverick
(London: I. B. Tauris, 2012), p. 87.
30
Che Guevara, “Speech to the 19th General Assembly of the United Nations,” New York,
Dec. 11, 1964.
31
The mistaken cartographic representation of the island of Cyprus in the place of Cuba in early
seventeenth-century colonial maps notwithstanding. See Marco van Egmond, “Cuba or
Cyprus? A Remarkable Copy of the Mercator-Hondius Atlas from 1606,” Utrecht University
Library website, July 2014.
brand of Greek nationalism resonated sufficiently with the conservative Ortho-

dox clergy for their association to work. As in Ireland before it, self-
determination in Cyprus was implemented in the form of a narrow nationalist
project without a clear redistributive socioeconomic policy. As such, the
potential rift from continental hegemony failed to take lasting root in the
island post-colonies.
Similar cleavages of ideological views within the Bandung movement itself
hampered it from the outset. Samir Amin makes the point that “Bandung did
not originate in the heads of the nationalist leaders . . . as is implied by
contemporary writers”; rather, it was “the product of a radical leftwing cri-
tique, which was at that time conducted within the communist parties” whose
common struggles against imperialism served to bring together “the social and
political forces whose victories are decisive in opening up to possible socialist
advances in the contemporary world.”32
Against this, the delegations of Iraq, Libya, Pakistan, the Philippines, South
Vietnam, Thailand, Turkey, and others voiced strong anticommunist senti-
ments at the Conference. Sri Lankan Prime Minister John Kotelawala was
adamant that the Bandung “Cocktail Party,” as he described it, “would result
in the world understanding that most of the Asian and African peoples were
opposed to Communism.”33 The explicitly socialist elements of Bandung
were sidelined and diluted in favor of a “third way” politics of compromise.
The more radical underpinnings and potential of Bandung – which “focused
on the essential need to re-conquer control over the accumulation process
(development which is auto-centred and delinked from the global econ-
omy)” – had dissipated “within some fifteen years” of the Conference due to
the limits of the anti-imperial programs of the Third World’s national bour-
geoisies, paving the way for the “re-compradorisation” of the economies of the
South.34
Meanwhile, there was no real question of the European periphery de-
linking from the trajectory of postwar capitalism as it developed. While
Cyprus, Greece, and Yugoslavia were among the very few European countries
to vote in favor of the General Assembly resolution proclaiming the Charter of
Economic Rights and Duties of States,35 there was a lack of active support for
the New International Economic Order or the work of UNCTAD through the
32
Samir Amin, “Beyond Bandung: Awakening of the South” Pambazuka News, Issue 455,
October 29, 2009.
33
Tarling, “Britain and the Bandung Conference,” at 74, 84, 97.
34
Amin, “Beyond Bandung.”
35
United Nations General Assembly, Twenty-Ninth Session: Official Records, 2315th Plenary
Meeting, 12 December 1974; General Assembly Resolution 3281 (XXIX), 12 December 1974.
256 John Reynolds
1970s and 1980s, and no meaningful opposition from within Europe to

international financial institutions imposing structural adjustment in the
Third World.
Ultimately, convergences between social struggles in the Global North and
in the Global South “were lamentably lacking in the Bandung epoch.”36 In
the post-Bandung epoch, since the breakup of Yugoslavia and the dissolution
of its membership of the Non-Aligned Movement, the successor states have
steadily leaned toward the European Union. Bosnia and Herzegovina initially
tried, unsuccessfully, to join the Non-Aligned Movement in 1995; since then
other Balkan states have lined up one after another to display their free-market
credentials for European Union accession. Because of Europe’s hegemonic
claims, membership of the Non-Aligned Movement is deemed unbecoming
and therefore prohibited for EU member states. Cyprus and Malta, for
example, were forced to relinquish their membership of the Non-Aligned
Movement upon joining the European Union.
the peripheralization of the center, or europe

“colonizing itself”?
In July 2013, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) approved another tranche
in its series of “bailout” funds for Greece, but with a warning that the country
must accelerate its structural economic adjustments and implement “deeper
public sector reforms.”37 Vijay Prashad noted that this essentially meant more
layoffs of public-sector labor in Greece (in stark contrast to the IMF’s concur-
rent report on the United States which asked the government and the Federal
Reserve there to lay off on fiscal austerity schemes and to “introduce labor
market policies to complement efforts to boost domestic demand”38). He
declared, as a result, “Greece: welcome to the Global South.”39
For all the external and internal structural issues that undermined the
Greek economy, five years of crisis clearly does not stack up against the
36
Amin, “Beyond Bandung.”
37
International Monetary Fund, “IMF Completes Fourth Review Under Extended Fund
Facility Arrangement for Greece, Approves €1.72 Billion Disbursement,” Press Release No. 13/
280, July 29, 2013.
38
International Monetary Fund, “IMF Executive Board Concludes 2013 Article IV Consultation
with the United States,” Press Release No. 13/277, July 26, 2013.
39
Vijay Prashad, “Tuesday IMF reading,” available at www.facebook.com/vijay.prashad.5?fref
(July 30, 2013). See also Balakrishnan Rajagopal, “Greece: Welcome to the Third World and
Here Are Some Lessons,” The Huffington Post, July 13, 2015; Vijay Prashad, “What if Greece
were in the ‘Third World’?,” al-Araby al-Jadeed, July 1, 2015.
centuries of conquest, mercantilism, and exploitation that have been the

making of the Global South. So what does it mean for a preeminent chronic-
ler of Third World and Global South histories40 to welcome the nation
eulogized in the West as “the world’s oldest democracy”41 into the anomie
of the Global South in the twenty-first century?
The core-periphery dynamics at play in the post-2008 scenario may be
understood as a form of peripheralization of the center, the logical product of
a globalization in which space is reinscribed and sites of power are, to
some extent, de-territorialized. For world-systems theorists, globalization – “asso-
ciated with the spread and deepening of capitalism”42 – does not represent a
departure from previous imperial trajectories, but rather a fine-tuning of struc-
tures that has similar objectives (market expansion and control, harnessing of
natural resources, and exploitation of labor in the periphery) at its heart.43 From
the perspective of the Third World, such global market fusion connotes the
consolidated management of the non-European world by international insti-
tutions in the form of the IMF and the World Bank, through the “techniques
and technologies generated by globalization and governance.”44 Viewed from
the South, therefore, globalization has meant, simply, “domination is global.”45
What can be described as “the relocation of sovereign economic powers in
international trade and financial institutions” constitutes a form of “recoloniza-
tion”46 that has haunted the Third World since decolonization; since Bandung.
Those restrictive international economic measures that have long been
imposed in the Global South found their way to the European Union’s
peripheries in 2010, in what might be seen as the coming together of
40
Vijay Prashad, The Darker Nations: A People’s History of the Third World (New York: New
Press, 2007); Vijay Prashad, The Poorer Nations: A Possible History of the Global South
(London: Verso, 2012).
41
William J. Clinton, Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: Administration of
William J. Clinton, 1999 (Washington, DC: Office of the Federal Register, National Archives
and Printing Office, 1999), 2011.
42
Samir Amin, “The Challenge of Globalization” (1996) 3:2 Review of International Political
Economy 216, 216.
43
Samir Amin, “Imperialism and Globalization” (2001) 53:2 Monthly Review 6, 9.
44
Antony Anghie, Imperialism, Sovereignty and the Making of International Law (Cambridge:
45
Makau Mutua, “What is TWAIL?” (2000) 94 American Society of International Law
Proceedings 31, 38.
46
B. S. Chimni, “Third World Approaches to International Law: A Manifesto” (2006) 8
International Community Law Review 3, 3 (n. 1). See also Guilherme Leite Gonçalves, “Are
We Aware of the Current Recolonisation of the South?” Critical Legal Thinking, October 18,
2012, available at: http://criticallegalthinking.com/2012/10/18/are-we-aware-of-the-current-
recolonisation-of-the-south/.
258 John Reynolds
reemergent colonial logics and ever-deepening neoliberal logics. In the midst

of sovereign debt proliferations triggered by the vacillations of finance capit-
alism, Greece, Ireland, Portugal, and Cyprus were compelled to draw from
an emergency bailout loan facility established by a “troika” comprising the
European Commission, European Central Bank, and IMF. The principal
beneficiaries of this arrangement are the financial institutions holding the
bonds of the peripheral nations’ sovereign and banking debts. The brunt of
the austerity measures on which the loans are conditional is disproportio-
nately visited upon marginalized socioeconomic groups in the countries in
question.
Stumbling through the economic collapse from 2008, the dual aims of
those wielding political and economic power via the EU and the European
Central Bank have been to restrict the crisis to Europe’s periphery and to
placate the international financial markets so as to prevent “contagion”
spreading to its core. Clear deference has been shown to the structures and
institutions of the finance sector, justified with reference to the necessity of
preserving the extant system for fear of what might prevail were it to collapse.
Greece, Ireland, Portugal, and Cyprus were, in this way, effectively forced
into structural adjustment programs involving the dilution or removal of social
protections. As debt levels continued to escalate, the troika imposed retrogres-
sive measures in order to repay and reassure private bondholders. Such vivid
demonstration of the severity of European emergency rescue measures was
also intended to spur larger euro-zone states into addressing their own debt
levels. The protection of German and French banks being held up as sacro-
sanct is a reminder of Lenin’s critique of finance capitalism a century prior,
indicting the excessive concentration of capital and power in French and
German banks.47
The result of the crisis has been the increasing fracture and fragmentation
of the EU. The people of peripheral states, cast as irresponsible basket cases,
have been held responsible for the reckless lending of private institutions and
the poor administration of public institutions (while the political and eco-
nomic powers at the core remain immune from accountability for their own
questionable lending and governance practices). Culturally condescending
attitudes and rhetoric – particularly in relation to the Mediterranean nations,
essentialized by their northern European counterparts as lazy, nefarious, and
incapable of good governance and basic accounting – have been a hallmark of
the euro-zone crisis. Corruption, cronyism, and clientelism – although
47
V. I. Lenin, Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism: A Popular Outline (1917) (New
York: International Publishers, 1939), pp. 31–46.
similarly prevalent elsewhere in Europe – are projected as stemming from

some intrinsic defect in the Mediterranean character. This situation prompted
Oscar Guardiola-Rivera to observe:
Europe is now colonising itself. The Greeks, who were the cradle of Western
civilisation, are now denounced by the Northern Europeans as people who
are dark-skinned, live in debt and are lazy – in other words, the same way they
used to describe us in the colonies.48
Such “barely coded racialised suggestions”49 around the indolence and indul-
gences of the periphery feed into a narrative that normalizes the subjection of
Greece’s economic management, for example, to “enhanced and
permanent . . . on-site monitoring” by European “experts.”50 Requirements of
the bailout programs have included legal and constitutional amendments to
prioritize debt repayments over the funding of government services, while the
“bold structural reform agenda”51 imposed on the labor market involves deep
cuts to salaries, pensions, and the minimum wage. With a confidential docu-
ment circulated among euro-zone finance ministers in advance of Greece’s
second bailout having warned that such extension of further loans would be
unlikely to cure the underlying fiscal ails,52 and even more widespread asser-
tions by economists of the utter absurdity of the third bailout imposed by the
Eurogroup on Greece in the summer of 2015, obvious questions arise as to the
ideological motivations driving this particular form of austerity.
when parallel worlds collide

Against the backdrop of Guardiola-Rivera’s image of Europe colonizing itself,
current core/periphery configurations may be unpacked to consider whether
two peripheries (a global periphery and a European periphery), whose interests
increasingly diverged as Bandung’s legacy receded, may yet (re)converge. Can
connections be built to instigate an enriched unity between popular move-
ments in the Global South and progressive social struggles in the Global North?
For many reflecting on the Third World project in a contemporary
context, “[t]he Bandung Spirit is to be interpreted today as non-alignment to
48
Michael Stoff, “Did Davos Man Pick the Wrong Destination?” Reuters, January 31, 2012.
49
Illan Rua Wall, “The Irish Crisis: Europe Colonises Itself” Critical Legal Thinking, December 7,
2011, available at http://criticallegalthinking.com/2011/12/07/europe-colonises-itself/.
50 51
Eurogroup Statement, Feb. 21, 2012. Ibid.
52
This draws from a leaked report that was drafted by experts from the IMF, European
Commission, and European Central Bank. “Greece: Preliminary Debt Sustainability Analysis”
Feb. 15, 2012, available at: http://graphics.thomsonreuters.com/12/02/GreeceDSA.pdf.
260 John Reynolds
neo-liberal globalisation.”53 Reading this universal challenge in the context of

our two peripheries and their interrelation, Bandung is the particular specter
haunting Europe today. The challenge calls for a de-linking from the struc-
tures of neoliberal globalization, rather than integration into those structures
as has been the tradition of the Third World nationalist bourgeoisie, the
peripheral EU membership, or the BRICS formation. Here, the emergence
of more radical political movements on the European periphery – SYRIZA,
Podemos, the beginnings of a “resurgent left” in Ireland54 – raises some
glimmer of hope. This relates to fiscal and debt politics, with SYRIZA seeking
to confront debt unsustainability not as a Greek issue, but a regional one –
and, by extension, conjuring the potential to confront it as a global issue
whereby Third World debt must similarly be addressed. But it also relates to
the broader streaks of anti-imperialism and internationalism that have been
formative in the political development at the grassroots of these movements:
reconsidering relationships with NATO, deepening solidarity with Palestine,
de-linking from institutional straitjackets, tackling corporate power, and ques-
tioning vertical development models. The experience of Latin America here is
instructive, where the severity of neoliberal programs through the 1980s and
1990s precipitated the rise of social movements to usher in a new left era that
has enjoyed some progress in terms of intervention in the economy and de-
linking from the more hegemonic structures and institutions of global
governance.55
While European governments remain bent on defending the interests of the
dominant segments of capital, Amin retains hope in the possibility of Europe’s
progressive humanist and democratic cultures prevailing from below. For him,
“Europe must and can be freed from the liberal virus” by its peoples:
There are political, social and ideological forces in Europe that lucidly
support the vision of ‘another Europe’ (social and friendly in its relations with
the South). But there is also Great Britain, which has since 1945 made the
historical option of enlisting unconditional support for the United States.56
53
Darwis Kudori, Summary Report, “Bandung 60 Years On: What Assessment?” Université Paris
1 Panthéon-Sorbonne, June 27, 2014. See also Hee Yeon-Cho, “‘Second Death’, or Revival of
the ‘Third World’ in the Context of Neo-liberal Globalization” (2005) 6:4 Inter-Asia Cultural
Studies 479.
54
Michael Lee-Murphy, “Ireland’s Resurgent Left” Jacobin, January 6, 2015.
55
See, e.g., Eduardo Silva, Challenging Neoliberalism in Latin America (Cambridge: Cambridge
56
Samir Amin, “Laying New Foundations for Solidarity Among Peoples of the South,” Working
Paper, December 2014, available at www.bandungspirit.org/IMG/pdf/laying_new_foundations
.pdf, 8.
One of the latest sites of struggle for progressive forces resisting neoliberal
hegemony in Europe relates to the “new generation” of all-encompassing
trade and investment agreements being pursued and signed by the EU. Sixty
years after Bandung, the Global South is all too familiar with the processes of a
rapidly developed international economic law, and perhaps most notably the
effects of investor-state litigation. The investor-state dispute settlement mech-
anism in agreements such as the EU-Canada Comprehensive Economic and
Trade Agreement (CETA) and the proposed EU-US Transatlantic Trade and
Partnership Agreement (TTIP) essentially replicates a legal regime con-
structed and entrenched by bilateral trade agreements and investment treaties
between Western states and Third World hosts since the 1950s, in the facilita-
tion of North-to-South flows of investment (and South-to-North flows of
corporate profit on the back of cheap labor and materials). The structural
biases in the international investment arbitration regimes in particular have
entailed hugely detrimental consequences for the public interest in Global
South countries.57 Concerns abound that new trade and investment agree-
ments, and their investor-state dispute settlement regimes specifically, will
have similarly negative impacts on labor rights, public health care, and
environmental protection in Europe. Many of Europe’s peripheral states,
those most beholden to foreign investment, will also be most vulnerable to
the misplaced logic of investor protection.
The popular resistance across Europe to CETA and TTIP has relied heavily
on the experience of the Third World, invoking precedents of investment
tribunals awarding inordinate damage claims to multinational corporations,
and drawing on the work of Third World movements and activists in the face of
this.58 Similar South-to-North reverberations of resistance were present in the
influence of the Arab popular uprisings on the inception of the indignados and
Occupy movements in Western cities in 2011. For Amin, the rebirth of a strong
front of popular resistance in the South suggests that “[a] new internationalism
of peoples [comprising] Europeans, Asians, Africans and Americans is there-
fore possible.”59 The European institutional response, however, to SYRIZA’s
57
See generally M. Sornarajah, The International Law on Foreign Investment (3rd ed.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010).
58
See, e.g., European Citizens’ Initiative, “European Citizens’ Initiative Demands: Stop
Negotiations for TTIP and CETA,” Motion Presented to the European Commission, July 15,
2014; The People’s Assembly, “Press Release: Manchester Stop TTIP Action Day,” July 9, 2014;
Jubilee Debt Campaign, “No TTIP: Stop the Corporate Carve-up,” July 8, 2014; Friends of the
Earth Europe, “The TTIP of the Anti-Democracy Iceberg: The Risks of Including Investor-to-
State Dispute Settlement in Transatlantic Trade Talks,” October 2013.
59
Samir Amin, “Laying New Foundations,” at 9.
262 John Reynolds
attempts to articulate an alternative trajectory to financialization and fiscal

coercion – in binding Greece into “the most intrusive economic supervision
programme ever mounted in the EU”60 and solidifying its subjugation as “a
semi-colonial appendage of the EU”61 – demonstrates the sheer and reaction-
ary force that any such movement will come up against. There can be no
illusions about this.
Decoloniality “originated among Third World countries after the Bandung
Conference in 1955” and “dispersed all over the world.”62 The task in the
Global South today is to build on the radical strands of earlier Third World
struggles and to dispel the fiction of trickle-down development under global
capitalism. The challenge facing progressive forces in a Europe that is colon-
izing itself is to come up with a decolonial response from within that draws on
and supports emancipatory elements of Third World struggles while repudiat-
ing the projections of globalized Western modernity as a universal ideal.
60
Stefan Wagstyl at al., “Eurozone leaders reach deal on Greece,” July 13, 2015. But see further
Jamie Martin, “The Colonial Origins of the Greek Bailout,” Imperial & Global Forum, July
27, 2015.
61
Tariq Ali, “Diary,” 37:15 London Review of Books, July 30, 2015.
62
Walter D. Mignolo, The Darker Side of Western Modernity: Global Futures, Decolonial
Options (Durham: Duke University Press, 2011), pp. xi–xii.
15
The Bandung Conference and Latin America

A Decolonial Dialogue with Oscar Correas
germán medardo sandoval trigo*
introduction
Born in Argentina and a professor at the Autonomous University of Puebla,
México, for fifteen years, Oscar Correas1 is one of the most relevant writers of
critical legal theory in Latin America. His work and teaching have provided a
new understanding about the relationship between society and state law, as
examined through critical theory, the sociology of law, and legal pluralism.2
Correas’s Marxist formation has allowed him to show how deeply embedded
capitalism is in modern thought, emphasizing the epistemic limits of modern-
ity and lawmakers’ use of hegemonic power to normalize state law as the
unique alternative in social order.3
His work has affirmed that law is an essential part of the capitalist system
because it reinforces capitalism’s ideology and necessary asymmetries of
power. For Correas, capitalism authorizes law to be a monopoly of state
* This dialogue is translated from Spanish by the author.

1
Oscar Correas Vázquez is senior researcher at the Centre for Interdisciplinary Research in
Sciences and Humanities at the National Autonomous University of Mexico, author of many
books and coordinator of some legal collections, and professor of the sociology of law at the
Postgraduate Division of the Faculty of Law at the same university.
2
Oscar Correas has collaborated with the Autonomous National University of Mexico and other
universities, including the University of Barcelona, Spain, since 1991. His most relevant books
are Introducción a la crítica del derecho moderno (CAJICA, University of Puebla, Mexico,
1982); Crítica de la ideología jurídica: ensayo socio semiológico (Legal Research Institute,
Autonomous National University of Mexico, 1988); El otro Kelsen (Legal Research Institute,
Autonomous National University of Mexico, 1989); Teoría del derecho y antropología jurídica:
un dialogo inconcluso (Ediciones Coayacan, Mexico, 2010).
3
Oscar Correas studied his PhD at Saint Etienne University in France and was influenced by
Antoine Jeammaud, André-Jean Arnaud, and Michel Miaille. His work has been writing a
different but compatible version of the critical approach of law. His fundamental
understanding of Marx allows for analyzing the discourse of law from the theory.
263
264 Germán Medardo Sandoval Trigo
violence, a discourse to normalize the aspirations of society, and a mechanism

to control society.
This chapter presents two perspectives of the Bandung Conference: the first
through the Marxist lens of Oscar Correas, and the second based on interpret-
ation through the decolonization of law.4 This chapter is based on a conversa-
tion with Correas and has been developed as a dialogue framed through these
two perspectives.5 Moreover, we both engage with the Bandung Conference
through the social and historical context of Mexico and Latin America in the
twenty-first century. Developed through these perspectives and contexts, this
chapter demonstrates the Third World’s critique and distrust of the hege-
monic instruments of international law (as articulated most vividly through
the Marxist approach to the international legal order), while highlighting the
counterhegemonic positions associated with Bandung, a necessary posture
that accompanies the aspirations of a decolonized world.
a marxist-decolonial conversation
Sandoval: In 1946, the postwar Bretton Woods Agreements (BW Agree-
ments) heralded a new international order that opened the way for the
affirmation of equality between world powers. The creation of the World
Bank and International Monetary Fund set the path for the global consoli-
dation and improvement of a hegemonic economic model. In 1955, the
Bandung Conference raised the possibility of an emerging paradigm from
postcolonial and still-colonized countries (later to be termed the Third
World). From a Third World perspective in the twenty-first century, did the
Bandung Conference contribute to real sovereignty and equality between
nations?
Correas: After the Second World War, the hegemony of the United States
and its European allies emerged. The importance of those alliances is clearly
evident today. We only have to look at the case of Crimea to account for the
4
Decoloniality incorporates a wide number of perspectives, including the works of Enrique
Dussel, Santiago Castro, and Ramón Grosfoguel. My principal influence is the work of
Boaventura de Sousa Santos, particularly the epistemologies of the South. As such,
I understand decoloniality to be a productive dialogue between the Eurocentric tradition with
other sources of knowledge that they have silenced and reduced to subalternity by the violence
of modernity. In this vein, I take distance from the clash of false essentialisms or the totalization
of thought. Decoloniality in law provides me a way to understand the experience lived but also
the philosophical foundations of the vertical practices I study. It also obviously tries to give
direction to new grounds in the law.
5
Conversations were conducted in March 2014 in Mexico City.
The Bandung Conference and Latin America 265
relevance of the European Union as an ally of the United States. Meanwhile,

there was no real attempt to establish equality for all nations.
Sandoval: I would argue that the BW Agreements initiated a global recon-
struction following the Second World War. From your perspective, how was
the world regenerated or reconstructed in social terms after the BW
Agreements?
Correas: The BW Agreements may have generated economic reconstruc-
tion, but the division of the world took place in Yalta in 1945. The BW system
established the guidance of a country’s economy, but conference attendees in
Yalta practically allocated, in political terms, the world among themselves. To
a degree, the world was made available for the benefit of the Soviet Union and
the United States in Yalta, at least geographically. Great Britain’s participation
was limited, with Stalin and Roosevelt being the real decision-makers.
Sandoval: I believe the Bretton Woods Conference was part of a stage in
the world’s reorganization. As the victors and vanquished countries of the war
were homogenized, they were aligned by the World Bank and International
Monetary Fund. As such, what is your notion about these institutions? Can we
understand them as an extension of colonialism or imperialism?
Correas: From my perspective, these institutions are designed to portion the
world among the powerful countries and to establish policies that allow them
to continue imposing their rules. I can certainly say that these institutions have
not favored the Third World because their nature is typically imperialist. It is
easy to see the helplessness of modern international law to contribute to social
transformation with fifty years of history speaking for itself. International law is
powerless because it is in the hands of those who always dominate. The
international community ends up being influenced by the United States
and its European allies. Quite frankly, it is very difficult to suggest that
international law has improved international relationships at all.
Sandoval: In some ways, international law provides many perspectives, but
the limitation of its discourse is a consequence of the epistemic limitation of
its bases. The same enlightened sources affirm colonial and imposed under-
standing about human rights, public space, trade, and equality. The Bandung
Conference was intended to establish an era after colonialism, seeking equal
(primarily economic) relationships between the countries previously subject
to colonialism in Asia and Africa. With the great number of independence
movements in these countries aiming to eliminate underdevelopment and
secure economic equality, do you think that these independence movements
really had an emancipatory nature?
Correas: It depends on which countries you look at. The Cuban case
demonstrated independence in respect of the United States, although it
required a degree of dependence from socialist countries. But Cuba is an

exception. Many other countries achieved their independence only on a
formal basis through the creation of a state, a constitution, courts, etc. In
many parts of the world, we can consider this independence as merely formal.
Until recently, it seemed that France would no longer intervene in Africa.
With the unquestioned French intervention in Chad in 1983, they returned to
the role of imperialist power. If that is what we call independence, it is not
factually accurate. Additionally, having achieved their independence, Latin
American countries continue in a similar pattern of dependence or subordin-
ation. Some obey the United States more than others, but all of them obey to
some degree.
With Chávez, a drive for regional independence started where he imple-
mented instruments and important international partnerships, with results still
pending. In the current political climate, we will see if Venezuela can avoid
further intervention from the United States. So we have to distinguish when
talking about independence during the twentieth century. Most countries
achieved it in a formal way, but I would not say they achieved real
independence.
Sandoval: The independent state is the first step in acquiring recognition of
equality with “enlightened” countries. But we know that using First World
instruments, such as international law, to achieve this aim is a restrictive way
to truly communicate and achieve emancipatory aspirations. We see this with
the three premises that underpin international law. The first is the necessity
for states to join international instruments to improve living conditions and
achieve progress. The second is the hegemonic idea, recently exacerbated by
the homogenizing impulse of global neoliberalism, that turns the Third
World into a mere satellite that is without voice or knowledge, and accepting
of the rules of the gentle colonizer. The third is its basis on the principle of
sovereignty, both politically and economically. It is this third premise that
evidences, at least among critical scholars of international law, the relevance
of the Bandung Conference as an expression of the need to avoid formal
intrusions into the sovereignty of states.
Correas: Intervention or intrusion in economies has always existed, despite
the expression or term sovereign now being used. Terms like sovereignty often
make people believe in the recognition of equality and in the altruistic nature
of these principles – thus its importance – but not everything is like that.
Sandoval: Despite the emergence of the Third World through the Ban-
dung Conference, treaties, conventions, and all forms of international law are
hegemonic. The Third World is using the voice of the First World and is not
actually saying what it has to. Now that we are all part of the legacy that has
served to build a “different world” following the Second World War, what
historical moment do we now find ourselves in?
Correas: We are in a historical moment in which center countries (in
economic terms) are gathering the networks that were spread during the
welfare state – the same way a fisherman catches a fish. A covenant between
the working class, the state, and the bourgeoisie promised to improve the lives
of the working class and increase economic growth. Of course, this depended
on the significant progress or growth of a particular economic model. But
while there was an economic boom, a decline seemed to be also imminent.
Over the past decade, the United States and many European countries have
been disarming the welfare state in order to more aggressively refund capital-
ism. Therefore, it seems we are at the very end of the welfare state. It has
finished for us, and also in countries like Greece, Italy, Spain, the United
States, and even Germany. We are seeing the emergence of a more aggressive
form of capitalism, which we call neoliberalism. At the same time, we appear
to be in a time of rebellion; for example, the Venezuelan case. We have to see
what happens. Political actors have been planning their next moves. As an
example, it is useful to observe the role South America played through
Mercosur.6
Sandoval: This is definitely true. We are going through a period of rebel-
lion, perhaps on a historical scale, where new media and actors are not part of
the traditional lines of dialectical subordination. International law may have
also restored the means to attend to the defense of human rights (far beyond
economic impositions), even if in a weak manner. What do you think about
this assertion?
Correas: Human rights are double faced. They have been used to fight
states that did not have the same objectives. They have been used to oppose
totalitarian or tyrannical states. But it is not always that way. For example,
throughout the regime of Felipe Calderon in Mexico (2006–2012), there were
many human rights violations and systematic disregard for the rule of law,
without anything being said outside of Mexico. In our era of transition with
Marxist and anarchist renaissances, social movements, and where the state has
systematically violated human rights, the era of neoliberalism began with a
great failure. Human rights discourse has not fully fulfilled any of liberalism’s
promises in the past or present because it is not its principal function.
6
Mercosur is an economic sub-bloc whose principal purpose is to promote free trade in the
region. Participating countries are Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay, Uruguay, and Venezuela.
Bolivia, Chile, Colombia, and Ecuador are associate countries, and Mexico and New Zealand
are observer countries.
Sandoval: Along this same line, a fundamental consideration is the Third

World’s transition from colonial dependency to searching for the means to
overcome underdevelopment. The Third World was, supposedly, no longer
colonialized and had obtained the sovereign freedom to take a suitable
political and economic form, at least within the confines of the state form.
With this in mind, what was the Marxist position in relation to Africa, Asia,
and Latin America during decolonization and this achievement of formal
equality?
Correas: Marxism’s position was determined by Soviet foreign policy. Stalin
established the idea of socialism in one country to protect what he had gained
in the war of socialist countries. Of course, he intended to protect the Soviet
Union, complying with the agreement it made with the United States to split
the world in two, and following their respective economic distribution of the
world. This was, in fact, a strong remnant of imperialism, and the Soviet
Union respected this agreement. Cuba was a unique case where its revolution
was not solely determined by the Soviet Union, and the United States
respected this. There was no invasion of Cuba7 and no real consideration of
an invasion. In some way, this was a means to respect Yalta’s agreement.
Additionally, when thinking of Latin American countries such as Argentina,
you must consider the performance of communist parties, while recognizing
the conservative mindset of countries collaborating very closely with the
United States. Marxism in Latin America depended on the routes taken by
socialist and communist political parties. Contrasting socialists, the commun-
ists literally followed Soviet communications, although in Mexico, for
example, parties were a little more independent.
Sandoval: This reminds me of “internal colonialism” as described by Pablo
Gonzalez Casanova.8 This states that a series of elements have been predeter-
mined in the (post)colonial transition (both epistemological and in terms of
actual power), with structures that guide the dichotomy of the hegemonic
position. This is so even when it regulates or emancipates, as with race,
gender, or human rights. This brings us to a much delimited sense of freedom
from that expressed by the states who participated in the Bandung Confer-
ence, because the First World has imposed the contents of “rights” through
international law, treaties, financial and economic development, or human
7
There was an attempt in 1961, the so-called Bay of Pigs Invasion. Nevertheless, it did not last
more than a few hours. Some say that the participation of the United States occurred
indirectly, by using a group of Cuban paramilitaries. It was an “almost invasion” whose results
are not clear to this day.
8
Pablo González Casanova, Sociología de la explotación (CLACSO, 2006).
rights. As an example, Mexico has many international treaties that pursue

respect, freedom, and equality for their citizens, but violations of human rights
are undeniable. However, in your opinion, should the progression of human
rights also be considered? If we analyze this further, are human rights from the
First and the Third worlds? Do we have the same rights? Are universal human
rights, in fact, desirable for the First and Third worlds?
Correas: There is something very particular about human rights. Third
World countries have human rights that First World countries decide. As
such, we can argue that human rights have two sides. While Mexico (as an
example) is a state member of a number of international treaties, these are
seldom complied with. The oversight of the Inter-American Commission on
Human Rights has helped, but after twenty years we’ve seen that this system is
not strong enough. We must also fight against the hegemonic conception of
human rights. In Venezuela, for example, this hegemonic conception has
been used in a reactionary manner. They attack the Venezuelan Revolution,
because nongovernmental organizations (most of them hegemonic) are
funded by American dollars and are probably working as a means to destabil-
ize the Venezuelan government. What we may interpret as a fight for social
change in Venezuela is, in fact, completely different. Therefore, it is very
difficult to talk about human rights, as they are international instruments that
hold power over weak countries and are controlled by global powers. For
example, human rights are used to identify friend or foe, and enemy or
terrorist. This is just a rhetorical question. We must remove the fear of
criticizing human rights and perform an organized critique that will provide
a critical view of their reactionary use. Removing that fear is necessary because
the traditional path of class struggle has been rearticulated as a human
rights issue.
Sandoval: In the same light, I would argue that human rights must acquire
a counterhegemonic foundation and emancipatory content. Returning to
Bandung, however, it was assumed that African and Asian countries would
achieve equality through these international treaties, and would thus reduce
the economic inequality between social classes. History demonstrates that this
has not happened. Do these international instruments generate more stability
in social classes or do they work against such stability?
Correas: These international instruments, especially as applied in Africa,
are focused on one key issue. When leaving, the Belgians, British, and French
left things worse than when they arrived. Colonialism created a degree of
peace, like the Pax Romana, but on departure they left latent racial and
cultural conflicts. If we defend the practice of international law in these
countries, then we must take into account that many concepts from the
European tradition do not work in Africa. When arriving, the Europeans took
territories and named them. In the Belgian Congo, an alliance with the
dominant group sought to overwhelm the rest, as the Spanish did with
Tlaxcaltecas in Mexico. As soon as the conqueror left these territories, he
made an exchange, taking resources from the territory in return for legal and
social institutions. The system of social pressure remained and then increased
after independence, leaving these territories as before, except without
resources or social cohesion. Imperialism or colonialism left nothing interest-
ing. Similarly, the so-called great benefits of international law left nothing.
Sandoval: They only left large resources that were to be distributed among
the new hegemonic states and their elites, through legal and illegal arrange-
ments. Yesterday I was reading a short critique of human rights that you wrote9
that concluded with a phrase I love. It said that human rights are not for
everybody because, in the end, they do not have the same meaning. When
Zapata says “Land and Freedom,” he will not tell a capitalist or feudal lord of
the Mexican Revolution that he wishes to divide the land. Therefore, we have
different positions, which goes to the root of my question regarding the human
rights of the First and Third worlds.
Returning to the development of decolonization, the Bandung Conference
supposedly made it possible for colonial territories to affirm their independ-
ence and sovereignty. Do you think this stage emerged from an ideological
neutral position, or did countries intending to fill nationalistic gaps only repeat
the models of colonialism using preexisting theories, structures, and
ideological forms?
Correas: They looked for independence, but independence was not simply
a political matter. It was a matter of enterprises or economies. If pursuing
independence, they could only do it in a formal sense, with their institutions
obeying foreign capital and the requirements of capital. The colonial power
left, but enterprises that states or their nationals had invested in remained and
continued to command. Therefore, independence is pure rhetoric.
Sandoval: It is, indeed, the rhetoric of the colonizer. That is why, when
thinking about a possible emancipatory understanding of international law,
the Bandung Conference comes to my mind. However, it may just simply be
“formal independence,” as you said. The general accord around human rights
is very important in providing a new dimension for the aspirations of our
societies. Under my criterion, the problem focuses on the categorical depend-
ence because the use of any right that has been forged in the First World has a
9
Óscar Correas, “Los Derechos Humanos Subversivos” (1991) Alegatos, UAM, México,
núm. 18, Mayo-Agosto.
different context when applied in the Third World. The First World uses the
weakness of Third World political systems to legalize the illegal. The resist-
ance of Third World nations has created some interesting means, including
Bandung Conference and BRIC.10 However, the Third World in the twenty-
first century seems to be completely at the mercy of an economic policy that
has already been structured around the interests of rich countries. What is the
position that Marxism would propose to deal with these events?
Correas: What comes to mind are the discussions that took place in the
1960s between Maoists and Mao.11 Maoists argued, for example, that people in
Argentina lived in a semi-colonial situation. They argued that one of the most
important actions was to make the revolution happen, but this revolution
would be bourgeois-democratic. In the revolution, the working class would
ally with the almost nonexistent national bourgeois. The purpose of the
alliance was to achieve national freedom. This was not to be a socialist
revolution, but a bourgeois-democratic revolution with liberal policies like
under [Alexander] Kerenski’s government [in Russia in 1917].
I was one who did not believe in such a situation. We, the Argentinean
people and activists, believed that Argentina was an independent country that
was ready for socialism. We thought that these [Maoist debates] were pointless
discussions because we did not have the conditions for the leftist party to
impose such a thing. Instead, guerillas put into effect socialism imposed by
their own organizations. But other leftist organizations outside of the guerrillas
could not impose anything. Therefore, we do not know what would have
happened had we obeyed Mao during the guerrilla period.
Now, forty years later, Mao was also possibly right about our countries and
the socialist revolution, because there were no conditions, because as history
10
As critical theory has shown, every legal system has an ideological orientation. For example, to
Max Weber, modern law turns law’s general contents into a rationality that works as a system.
Its own goals (telos) are described in the rationality of the system. In this vein, one could
describe the logic of international law as primarily influenced by multinational corporations
(and other actors) that create a capitalist society. Today, modern law has taken a neoliberal turn
with very few alternatives available. In this way, we have to be suspicious about the BRICS
because it could be part of the same capitalist rationality. Thus, BRICS governments assume a
“counterhegemonic” position, but they also use the same legal tools creating that rationality to
step out of it.
11
For China, the consequences of the “great leap forward” implemented by Mao in the early
1960s created a significant difference of opinion within the Communist Party. This process set
the general conditions for the industrialization but also gave the opportunity for the emergence
of capitalist practices. In this vein, the correct interpretation of the revolution was contested and
the communist ideal was split. Mao was marginalized within the party because of the millions
of people who died and were dislocated by this program. Later, Mao responded by putting
forward the “cultural revolution.”
has taught us, when capitalism is behind the revolution, it is a disrupting factor
that moves away from the real emancipation. Cuba’s experience was a mere
coincidence in history; in contrast, the so-called twenty-first-century socialism
of Venezuela is not really socialism because it does not have the ideological
conditions or the popular support. These American experiences were a
democratic-bourgeois revolution that tried to become a national liberation
movement that should worry us. Marxism should be present in certain organ-
izations, parties, or resistance groups and ought to accompany whatever
project is achieved. [Nonetheless,] I believe that the most organized project,
apart from Cuba, is the Venezuelan one. [For example,] unlike Venezuela,
Nicaragua does not have the economic conditions or the means to distribute
the economic growth of the region.
We should also reflect on 1940s Argentina, as a process carried in a
particular moment. The slogan, “We want a socially fair country, economic-
ally free and politically sovereign” was that of an accomplished and fulfilled
industrialization process that co-opted the decisions of the working class and
national bourgeois in a short time period, and gave Perón a language of
economic sovereignty when stating, “Let’s industrialize Argentina.”
The result of nationalist policies was catastrophic for the working class, with
Perón’s fascist policies clearly supported. For Perón, the first country of
importance was the United States, the second was De Gaulle’s Nationalist
France, and only the third was Argentina. What would have happened
if nationalist revolutions and leftist parties had triumphed? Could the
Argentinian leftist nationalism be different while it was controlled by a
hegemonic power?
Sandoval: The other problem, of course, is that ex-colonial countries
achieved their supposed freedom without creating national identities and
traditions from their native cultures or from the ground up. They instead
attached themselves to antique forms of dependence and colonialism, hence
their disfigured identity. But the Soviet Union also ideologically influenced
the Third World movement. What do you think was the role of the
Soviet Union?
Correas: The nonaligned were a bloc (led in Latin America by Cuba) that
had a close relationship with the Soviet Union, particularly in economic
matters. This removed power from the nonaligned. In thinking about the role
that the nonaligned had with the Soviet Union, they did not defend the Soviet
Union or prevent its fall because none of them, including the Russians, had
enough power. A half-century after Bandung, there is no more Soviet Union.
The whole world is being included in the neoliberal project. The question is,
what would the current role of a nonaligned insurgence be, who are the
nonaligned, and who are they not making alliances against? Previously, it was
easy to identify blocs of allies, like the United States and the West. But now,
there is no more Soviet Union, and Russia has adopted an imperialist polity.
We have to wait and see how the blocs are reconstructed. This does not mean
it must come to socialism, and there is a possibility that a capitalist position
will be maintained but with substantial differences. Even Venezuela, Russia,
and China have adopted capitalist forms.
Sandoval: They have adopted a global hegemonic position. There is a lack
of alternative ideologies. After the fall of the Berlin Wall, the balance between
capitalism and socialism went away, and Third World countries were left
completely defenseless against the forces of capitalism. In the case of Latin
America, the limited development that was achieved is now at risk of
being lost.
Correas: Capitalism has been renewing and acquiring new forms and
methods. Mexico’s degree of economic development is nothing compared to
the United States, but we still try to reach similar standards. In this context, there
will always be a difference. Therefore, it may be interesting to think about the
construction of our nations, from a philosophical perspective, as being non-
opulent and mainly egalitarian societies. It would be unnecessary to copy the
First World and would follow a model of modest development instead. To
accept this new paradigm, it is necessary to educate ourselves but also to
embrace a new philosophical conviction. This would require a new conscience
for the twenty-first century, like Engels’s conscience relating to the manifest-
ation of consumerism that was not different from a capitalist process. We should
think about noncapitalist alternatives in order to avoid the thirst of productivity.
I am convinced that it would be worth creating a culture of modesty.
Sandoval: A new conscience on limited services and products should be
created. As Boaventura de Santos says, we require “prudent knowledge for a
decent life.” Do you think that the modern notion of progress is relevant for
the direction of third world countries, like Mexico?
Correas: The notion of progress is a notion of the bourgeoisie and is
possible only under the justification of capitalism. In the case of Mexico, its
fight for progress can be seen in the form of highways, electric power, and
hydrocarbons. There are many routes to achieve progress, but maybe Mexico
chose the worst because of its historical dependence on the United States.
Anyway, there is not much difference between routes because, at the end of
the day, progress has usually ended up only benefiting the bourgeoisie and not
the working classes.
Sandoval: What do you think about Mercosur? Do you think this insti-
tution provides an alternative?
Correas: It is worthwhile to strengthen that region as an economic bloc and

actually defend it. But it is also important that countries like Venezuela
increase their leadership for the bloc to prosper.
Sandoval: Maybe it is worth highlighting that this counterhegemonic
version of international law provides the possibility of establishing regional
blocs that can counteract violent onslaughts from these neoliberal times.
I would like to emphasize the colonial perspective related to this conversation
with a quote that belongs to Aimé Césaire’s speech on colonialism, published
in 1950:
The fact is that the so-called European civilization – “Western” civilization –
as it has been shaped by two centuries of bourgeois rule, is incapable of
solving the two major problems to which its existence has given rise: the
problem of the proletariat and the colonial problem; that Europe is unable
to justify itself either before the bar of “reason” or before the bar of
“conscience”; and that, increasingly, it takes refuge in a hypocrisy which is
all the more odious because it is less and less likely to deceive. Europe is
indefensible.12
The question that I turn to is about the right to self-determination. From the
South, we blame Europe for imposing its knowledge, rules, and contents.
Nevertheless, our education as political scientists, philosophers, humanists, or
lawyers derives from the source that has colonized us. In this sense, according
to the judgment of history from Césaire, are we (the Third World)
indefensible too?
Correas: What remains after colonialism should be defensible, as it
creates the critical capacity to solve problems beyond capitalism. It is worth
reflecting on the notion that if a civilization incapable of solving the
problems it created is a decadent civilization, then modernity (and capital-
ism) has always been decadent! The bourgeoisie has followed that path into
this postmodern context, but what does the unachieved project of modernity
mean? It is the understandable creation of the citizen, freedom, and equal-
ity. But the real achievement of the achieved project of modernity was to
create industrialized capitalism to the degree we have realized in the twenty-
first century. Some critics say that capitalism has failed, but that is a great
mistake. With each crisis, capitalism grows and takes other capacities and
manifestations. Indeed, amplified reproduction has configured the eco-
logical and social state of our times. A crisis is necessary for capitalism to
12
Aimé Césaire, Discours sur le colonialism: Editions Presence Africaine, 1955, trans. Joan
Pinkham (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1972).
prevail, and the violence with which it resurges defeats the last configur-
ation of the economic system.
Sandoval: The most relevant problem is how, if at all, it is possible to
emancipate us from neoliberal globalization. Current conditions do not give
us the possibility to even think about it. Before and after Bandung, nations had
the desire to achieve their independence and sovereignty. In many societies,
however, indigenous people were not part of this project or assimilated into
national formations. According to the emerging Third World, did indigenous
peoples have the same protection and rights at that time?
Correas: No! They had to fight for them, and they achieved their rights
through fighting. As an example, in the context of the international courts
judging crimes against humanity and ILO Convention No. 169, the pressure
of judicial demands before international courts does not compare to the
understated codes that courts actually know of. We must realize that colonial
systems never disappeared, especially for indigenous people. We still impose
our law on them, but they can speak for themselves in their terms and
conceptions. The problem is the limitations of their law as mirrored by the
state. Maybe Bolivia and Ecuador should be considered examples for restruc-
turing values inside their normative orders.
Sandoval: I agree. I see the Bolivian and Ecuadorian process as part of the
decolonial transition. That is why Marxism and decoloniality have a lot in
common. Marxism has demonstrated the exploitation of the working classes
and the continuity of imperialism and colonialism as part of the dialectical
opposition of classes. Through decoloniality, the complementary concept of
otherness shows the contradiction in the Eurocentric theory of emancipation.
In this dialogue I have tried to expose both the focus and principal ideas that
we must take into account to theorize a new dimension far from the boundar-
ies of the twentieth century. We have a big task to accomplish. We must
conceptualize international law as thoughts that are constructed from the
ground up. We must take the risk and rethink the foundations of international
law far from the boundaries of capitalism and its ideology. The global aspir-
ation of equality is far from being achieved, because international and domes-
tic instruments of modern law have been created on one conception of a
modern world. Throughout the entire world, in Europe, Africa, America,
Asia, and Oceania, we live with our hands tied. We are colonized by capitalist
exploitation and destruction, and we still have to fulfill “our future days.” Our
present days will test human strength, humility, and the prudent desires of
inhabitants, groups, and other emerging actors. In order to change, it is urgent
that these emerge.
16
A Triple Struggle
Nonalignment, Yugoslavia, and National, Social, and
Geopolitical Emancipation
zoran oklopcic
From Brioni hope has come to mankind

Hope and justice for all men as one kind
Tito, Nehru, Nasser gave us peace of mind
When they built the movement of the Non-Aligned1
introduction
While Yugoslav scholars recognize the Bandung Conference as an important
milestone in the development of postwar anti-imperialist struggle, it has
political and ideological importance in Yugoslavia as a prequel to the Non-
Aligned Movement (NAM) and Yugoslavia’s critical role in its inception.
NAM was not only a central pillar of Yugoslav foreign policy but also an
equally critical component of Yugoslav self-understanding of its domestic
political project. This chapter examines the conceptual tensions and political
failures of that vision. However, it also explores how the vision can serve as a
productive foil against which to understand the current global socioeconomic
and political conjunctures, and offer resources through which we can struggle
against the “nested hegemonies” of the current context.
Yugoslavia was not just another communist state; rather, it was a unique
sociopolitical enterprise that incarnated the success of national, social, and
geopolitical struggles for emancipation. This view was rehearsed in party forums,
further elaborated in academic journals, and literally broadcasted to the wider
public. Every morning, the opening of TV Kalendar (an “on this day in history”
educational broadcast) showed Tito, Nehru, and Nasser shaking hands on the
1
Dušan Višekruna, Song of the Non-aligned (Belgrade: Radio-Television Belgrade, 1987),
quoted from Akhil Gupta, “The Song of the Nonaligned World: Transnational Identities and
the Reinscription of Space in Late Capitalism” (1992) 7:1 Cultural Anthropology 63, at 64.
276
A Triple Struggle 277
island of Brioni in 1955, sealing their agreement to found the Non-Aligned

Movement. In defending Yugoslavia’s central role in the Third World, commen-
tators strove to show how Tito’s international strategy and “entire life path”
anticipated the concerns and aspirations of Bandung – ahead of Bandung.2
On the rare occasions when Yugoslav diplomats publicly evaluated the
heritage of the Conference, they noted its limitations, although they credited
its “capability . . . to rise above transient political conflicts [among the partici-
pating states] and jointly present to the world a [politically] meaningful
document.”3 However, they saw its flaws as profound:
[t]he failure of Bandung to initiate permanent action derived from the
composition of that movement. The persuasive and generally acceptable
common denominator was missing, because there did not exist fundamental
and permanent aspirations [among the participating states] that would unite
them. Throughout history, mutual connections based on geographical loca-
tion and “colouredness” were never sufficient bases for cooperation and
attachment. The bloodiest wars are waged against neighbours and those of
the same colour of skin.4
While Bandung influenced NAM “in the field of coexistence,”5 the dominant
Yugoslav narrative understood NAM as a perfected, more robust incarnation
of Bandung’s emancipatory promise. In hindsight, the irony of this view is
glaring. Not only did NAM’s “fundamental and permanent aspirations” prove
to be equally fleeting, but the bloodiest wars over territory have been waged
among and by neighbors in the midst of the dissolving socialist Yugoslavia, its
founding member.
This chapter returns to the rudiments of NAM’s international political
theory, which was never fully articulated. It charts the causes of NAM’s
ideational failure, and in doing so identifies the blind spots that frustrated
the solidification of its fundamental aspirations. It also explores ways to
2
Čedomir Vučković, “Tito i Nesvrstanost” (1977) 4 Politička misao 571, at 571. [“Tito and Non-
Alignment”] Recent historical scholarship, however, paints a more nuanced picture. According
to contemporary historians, until the mid-1950s Yugoslavia didn’t show much enthusiasm for
closer political cooperation with third-world countries. Still reeling from the traumatic break
with the Soviet Union, the Yugoslav leadership didn’t want to provoke the West, on which it
relied for material and military assistance, by entering into political alliances toward which the
West may have looked unfavorably. See Dragomir Bondžić and Slobodan Selinić, “Pogled iz
Beograda na Bandunšku konferenciju 1955, godine” (2008) 1 Istorija 20 veka 71. [“A View from
Belgrade on the 1955 Bandung Conference”]
3
Leo Mates, Počelo je u Beogradu: 20 godina nesvrstanosti (Zagreb: Globus, 1982), at 19.[“It
began in Belgrade: 20 Years of Non-Alignment”]
4 5
Ibid. Ibid.
278 Zoran Oklopcic
uncover the possibilities for a different way in which territorial conflicts

among various internal and external neighbors can be productively imagined
and resolved, and aims to speak constructively to a larger political failure
shared by NAM and Bandung alike.
The first section focuses on the writings of Edvard Kardelj (1910–1979),6
the chief ideologue and constitutional architect of postwar communist Yugo-
slavia. Kardelj saw NAM as an institutional and global political framework
for a simultaneous and synergistic triple – national, social, and global –
emancipatory struggle. Within this vision, NAM’s political purpose was to
serve as both buffer and accelerator. As a buffer, it would serve to shield the
newly independent and underdeveloped peoples against the enduring hege-
monic designs of capitalist and communist blocs. As an accelerator, it aimed
to contribute to increasing the speed of weaker countries’ economic develop-
ment. The chapter goes on to critique Kardelj’s vision and argue that his
commitment to the ideal of “voluntary alliances,” as well as his anxieties about
“nesting hegemonies” between communities of unequal power, further
undermined the success of his tenuous belief that the three struggles could
be reconciled in theory and in practice under the aegis of self-determination.
The chapter then analyzes the critical potential of Kardelj’s thought by
applying Akhil Gupta’s critique of NAM and its transnational nationalism.
Although the failures of Kardelj’s theoretical, political, and institutional vision
prevent us from applying it to current global socioeconomic and political
conjunctures, they remain a productive foil against which to think about new
purposes of projects – historically exemplified by NAM and the spirit of
Bandung – that may continue to aspire to give organizational form to trans-
national political solidarity. Finally, the chapter sketches out concrete con-
structive lessons from the conceptual tensions and political failures of Kardelj’s
thought for NAM and Bandung alike.
edvard kardelj as a theorist of self-determination

and nam
After a period of closer political cooperation with the West, necessary to
ensure the survival of the Yugoslav regime after its expulsion from the Soviet
6
Born in Ljubljana in 1910, Kardelj joined the workers movement at the age of 16 and became a
leading figure in the Communist Party of Slovenia in the interwar period. After the war, as a
close associate of Marshall Tito, he negotiated the Yugoslav border with Italy, and was the
main architect of Yugoslav federalism and the system of workers’ self-management. Although
initially a staunch Stalinist between the two world wars, his theoretical defense of Yugoslav
socialism helped distinguish it from the “real socialism” of the Soviet Union after 1948.
bloc in 1948, Yugoslav foreign policy from the mid-1950s onward firmly
embarked on a course of what became known as the principle of nonalign-
ment. The germs of this shift – always argued for in relation to the idea of
popular self-determination – were already present in Kardelj’s early postwar
statements. Speaking before the UN General Assembly in 1949, he envisaged
the international order as “a thoroughly pluralistic system . . . as being in the
interest of all nations.”7 While such order implied “liberating peoples from all
manner of foreign domination,” “humanity’s progress” could not be grounded
in a “narrow, self-centered nationalism.”8
In his later writings, Kardelj most clearly articulated the idea of self-
determination and NAM in terms of a triple overlapping and mutually
reinforcing political struggle. Writing in the 1970s, Kardelj claimed that there
was an intrinsic link between the success of the war of national liberation in
Yugoslavia from 1941 to 1945 and the Yugoslav communists’ commitment to
the ideal of self-determination of equal and free nations. Only on this condi-
tion, according to Kardelj, did the Yugoslav nations accept Yugoslavia’s
continued existence as a reconstituted federal state. The ideal of voluntary
political association that presided over Yugoslavia’s political reconstitution in
1943 justified its subsequent refusal to submit to the hegemony of Stalin’s
Soviet Union in 1948. Ultimately, the idea of voluntariness that justified
Yugoslav federalism internally, and Yugoslavia’s independence vis-à-vis the
Soviet Union externally, eventually found its political manifestation in NAM
globally.
As the global embodiment of the idea of voluntary association between self-
determining nations, NAM was simultaneously justified on ideological and
prudential grounds. On the one hand, NAM was “the logical and most
consistent reflection of our internal policy of socialism, self-management
and democracy particularly in internationality [sic], that is, inter-republic
relations.”9 On the other hand, its creation was a matter of practical necessity:
“the pressure exerted against Yugoslavia,” wrote Kardelj, “was such that the
young social system might not have been able to resist it had it not started
combining with another revolutionary process that shook the entire world.”10
7
Kenneth Bassom, “Edvard Kardelj and the Pluralism of Self-Managing Interests” (Unpublished
PhD thesis, UW-Madison, 1989) at 217.
8
Ibid.
9
Edvard Kardelj, “Remarks during the Discussion in the Plenary Session of the Tenth Congress
of the League of Communists of Yugoslavia, Belgrade, May 27, 1974” in Kardelj, Yugoslavia in
International Relations and Non-Alignment (1978), p. 140.
10
Edvard Kardelj, “Self-Management and Non-Alignment,” at 222. For an argument that the
Yugoslavian communist regime used the emancipatory rhetoric of nonalignment to beef up its
280 Zoran Oklopcic
Although the idea of voluntary association has played an important role in

Kardelj’s political thought, its relevance for his account of self-determination
should not be overstated. While some contemporary commentators see Kar-
delj as a closeted Althusian because of his emphasis on voluntary associ-
ations11 – which, for Kardelj, start locally, grow nationally, and establish
global “frameworks . . . of mutual cooperation and reciprocal responsibility”12 –
he remained a faithful Marxist-Leninist exegete throughout his political career
as a communist theoretician and constitution maker.
Kardelj’s views on the national question, like Lenin’s (and Stalin’s before
him), excluded the possibility of communist engineering of national con-
sciousness, for Kardelj insisted that socialism “can neither make nor unmake
nations.”13 One of the direct implications of his Leninist view of nationhood
has been a judgment about the kind of international struggles that can most
effectively bring about global socioeconomic emancipation. Kardelj did not
believe in engineered political consciousness, so he advocated support for
authentic, “home-grown” national liberation movements whose existence and
struggle is not critically reliant on help from the outside. As a result, the global
“fate of socialism” will and ought to be decided through internal class struggle,
not “struggle across blocs.”14
Fostering external self-determination beyond existing colonial empires
would be neither feasible nor legitimate. This view, which implicitly presup-
poses the legitimacy of the current international political status quo, immedi-
ately came under assault as “revisionist” from other communist countries such
as China, whose projects of national and social emancipation had been more
radical than Kardelj’s.15 Responding to such accusations in the Chinese media
in the early 1960s, Kardelj in turn accused the Chinese of “socialist
domestic legitimacy, see Robert Niebuhr, “Nonalignment as Yugoslavia’s Answer to Bloc

Politics” (2011) 13:1 Journal of Cold War Studies 146.
11
M. McCullock, “Polyvalent federalism: Johannes Althusius to Edvard Kardelj and Titoism” in
Lee Ward and Ann Ward (eds.), Ashgate Research Companion to Federalism (Ashgate, 2009),
p. 331.
12
Edvard Kardelj, “The Historical Roots of Non-Alignment,” at 178.
13
Edvard Kardelj, “Points of Departure for a Socialist and Democratic Policy in International
Relations,” at 29.
14
Ibid.
15
Sino-Yugoslav disagreements had been brewing since the 1950s and continued well into the
next decade. In 1958, “Mao Zedong noted that Tito had proved himself an unreliable partner
more than once. Zhou Enlai, in his turn, said that ‘Tito is simply being a hooligan.’” See
“From the Diary of P. F. Yudin: Memorandum of Conversation with Mao Zedong on 5 April
1958,” April 19, 1958, History and Public Policy Program Digital Archive, AVPRF, f. 0100,
op. 51, por. 6, pap. 432, ll. 132–33; translation from Russian by David Wolff. Published in
CWIHP Working Paper No. 30. http://digitalarchive.wilsoncenter.org/document/118744.
Bonapartism,” arguing that the “capitalist encirclement” that forced Lenin to

conclude that global confrontation was inevitable in the 1920s – and which the
Chinese were proposing in the early 1960s – had now abated. The purported
retreat of capitalism for Kardelj – perhaps not a farfetched idea in the 1960s –
made the policy of violent confrontation with capitalism in the name of social
and national emancipation everywhere not only dangerous but also unneces-
sary. The global “ratio of social forces” in which Kardelj believed in the 1960s
was decisively on the side of socialism.
Significantly, Kardelj mobilized Lenin’s arguments not only to call for a
reduction in communist combativeness against the capitalist bloc but also to
raise awareness of an equally problematic global hegemony emerging from
within the communist bloc. The idea of socialism does not abolish the risk of
hegemonic designs on the part of one socialist country over another. “We
must not lose sight,” Kardelj wrote, “of the fact that as long as the possibility for
any form of exploitation exists, candidates for such exploitation will also
exist.”16 Kardelj stated that the combination of “the unevenness of socialist
development” and the existence of states “as independent political forces” will
always create temptations for stronger socialist countries to “climb up on the
shoulders of another” in the name of revolution.17 And this insistence on
critical vigilance is perhaps his most original insight as an international
political theorist: polities and political movements that seek to unite the
projects of national, social, and global geopolitical emancipation should be
attentive not only to global sociopolitical hegemony of the capitalist West but
also to what we could today call nested hegemonies within the global socio-
political alternative of international socialism.
The general purpose of NAM should be seen in this light. As a global
political embodiment of the triple struggle, and attentive to the changed
global “ratio of social forces,” NAM should serve both as a buffer and as an
accelerator. As a buffer, NAM would serve to guard against hegemonic designs
both of capitalist and communist camps. Its aim was to “steadily narrow the
latitude for imperialist policy,” and to prevent the Third World from becom-
ing “an appendage” of the developed world.18 As an accelerator, NAM should
foster the “speedier advancement of the under-developed countries.”19 As the
newly independent countries “[did] not possess sufficient means of their own
for more rapid advancement,” the role of NAM was to fight for a new world
16
Kardelj, “Remarks during the Discussion,” at 27. 17
Ibid. at 165. 18
Ibid. at 187.
19
Kardelj, “The National Question and the Policy of Non-Alignment” [lecture delivered at the
University of Dar-es-Salaam, Tanzania, 1968] in ibid. at 112.
282 Zoran Oklopcic
economic order that would enable these nations to escape the “monopoly
grip” of the “transmuted forms of imperialist policy.”20
In this larger international milieu, where NAM serves as a shelter for Third
World socioeconomic projects, the function of self-determination coincides
with the functions of NAM. Self-determination was to serve as “an indispen-
sible defensive barricade,”21 the aim of which was not to subvert the capitalist
world economy directly, but rather to give ideological support to the third-
world polities emerging from the vestiges of colonialism – buying time, as it
were – as the objective process of global social transformation unfolded in the
direction of socialism’s imminent victory. NAM therefore supported “further
strengthening of the historical trend of national . . . emancipation of peoples
and countries of Asia, Africa, Latin America and other regions.”22 But the true
value of self-determination internationally lies in its internal aspect, where self-
determination functions as a principle that justifies the Third World nation’s
control over natural resources, prevents outside exploitation, and justifies its
right to choose the economic system “most propitious for its development.”23
the difficulties of kardelj’s international

political theory
Once providing the frame for the political imagination of many non-Western
militants, politicians, and intellectuals, the idea of self-determination that
morally dignified and judicially articulated the triple struggle for national,
social, and geopolitical emancipation has, since the end of decolonization,
been on the decline. The vocabulary of self-determination on which Kardelj
relied has been overtaken by the language of human rights, offered as “a
substitute for what many around the world [actually] wanted, a collective
entitlement to self-determination.”24 That shift did not occur spontaneously,
but through the political pressure of the United States and its allies.25 After
their triumph in 1989, NAM lost its political importance, while the idea of self-
determination was reduced to a pale version of itself, increasingly relegated to
justifying the internal right of (liberal) “democratic governance.”26
Likewise, many of those on the left, who otherwise shared Kardelj’s political
sensibilities, also abandoned the triple struggle. Hart and Negri, the most
20 21 22 23
Ibid. at 147. Ibid. Ibid. at 185. Ibid.
24
Samuel Moyn, Last Utopia: Human Rights in History (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2010),
p. 45.
25
Ibid. at 118.
26
Thomas Franck, “The Emerging Right to Democratic Governance” (1992) 86: 1 American
Journal of International Law 46.
influential among them, rejected national self-determination as a morally and

strategically bankrupt project. They asserted that the pursuit of national
and sociopolitical self-determination within a territorial polity “misidentifies
and thus masks the enemy.”27 Trying to “(re)establish local identities that are
in some sense outside and protected against the global flows of capital and
Empire”28 was as pointless as it was historically discredited.
However, the first decade of the twenty-first century has corroded faith in
both the victorious global agenda of liberal-democratic capitalism and in its
non-territorial alternatives. Struggles for national emancipation are still
conducted along territorial lines, and they continue to be implicated, as
in the case of Ukraine, in wider projects of powerful states’ hegemonies.
Equally, the financial meltdown of 2008 that originated in the United States
has also dramatically affected the countries in global peripheries and semi-
peripheries, some of which have tried or are trying to respond to it by
reasserting their right to choose their own model of socioeconomic
development.29
None of the themes with which Kardelj was preoccupied in the 1960s
and 1970s have disappeared from the international agenda. But that does
not mean that simply excavating rudiments of his international political
theory can or should serve as inspiration for how to respond to enduring
struggles for national, sociopolitical, and geopolitical emancipation. Instead,
we should examine the imminent tensions and contradictions in his polit-
ical thought.
The first tension arises from the conflicting roles of self-determination in
the arenas of socioeconomic and national emancipation. As demonstrated by
his writings on international relations and NAM, Kardelj never contemplated
a reconstructive role for self-determination within newly emancipated social-
ist and Third World countries that would have justified the territorial recon-
figuration of those nations after they had achieved independence. Protected
by the norm of territorial integrity, their internal self-determination should
have been used to achieve “speedier advancement” of their underdeveloped
economies. Such internal self-determination, whose telos lies in the idea of
economic development – a socioeconomic imperative already explicitly
27
Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001),
p. 47.
28
Ibid. at 45.
29
Alexis Tsipras, “End Austerity before Fear Kills Greek Democracy” Financial Times, January
20, 2015. (“Austerity is not part of the European treaties; democracy and the principle of
popular sovereignty are. If the Greek people entrust us with their votes, implementing our
economic programme will not be a ‘unilateral’ act, but a democratic obligation.”)
284 Zoran Oklopcic
espoused by the Bandung conference30 – contained no prescriptions about

the boundaries or internal constitutional makeup of multinational states
around the world.31
In contrast, the idea of self-determination that emerges from Kardelj’s work
as Yugoslavia’s chief constitutional architect had richer content, speaking
directly to national struggles for emancipation. While remaining agnostic on
national self-determination abroad, in the Yugoslavian context Kardelj ultim-
ately settled on the idea that only discrete nations in their territorial units can
authentically exercise national self-determination within a voluntarily united
larger federation. Such a federation, where territorially self-determining
nations pursue a common socialist project vis-à-vis other countries, is a point
of equilibrium that enabled Kardelj to reconcile social and national impera-
tives of self-determination.32 “Our federation,” he writes, “is not a framework
for any new Yugoslav nation, nor for any national integration about which in
their time some advocates of hegemony and denationalizing terror used to
dream.”33 Yugoslavia was justified thus only as a framework – a tiny NAM-like
polity – for the national self-determination of its constituent nations, only as
long as it pursued its project of socialist self-management in contrast to Soviet
“real socialism.”34 Under these conditions, according to Kardelj, “As a matter
of principle, the national question in the new Yugoslavia is resolved. The
guarantee for this is the federal system, and the entire political, constitutional
and social mechanism which provides . . . self-determination to all nations of
Yugoslavia.”35
Yugoslavia violently dissolved in 1991, vividly demonstrating the wishful
character of Kardelj’s conclusion that national and social registers of self-
determination can be reconciled, both in practice and in principle. Beyond
the factual circumstances that may have contributed to Yugoslavia’s
30
See Partha Chatterjee, “Empire and Nation Revisited: 50 Years after Bandung” (2005) 6:4
Inter-Asia Cultural Studies 487, at 488.
31
For a discussion of the interplay between the ideas of self-determination and development
during decolonization, see Sundhya Pahuja, Decolonizing International Law: Development,
Economic Growth and the Politics of Universality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2011).
32
For the transition in Kardelj’s thinking in 1960s, and the shift in Yugoslav Communist Party
policy toward the national question, see Walker Connor, The National Question in Marxist-
Leninist Theory and Strategy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984), pp. 434–437.
33
Edvard Kardelj, “The Federation and the Republics” at 168. 34
Ibid. at 165.
35
Edvard Kardelj (“sperans”), Razvoj slovenačkog nacionalnog pitanja (treće, pregledano i
dopunjeno izdanje) (Belgrade: Izdavački Centar Komunist, 1988) [translation mine], at xxxii–
xxxiii. [The Development of the Slovenian National Question (third, redacted and amended
edition).]
dissolution,36 Kardelj’s idea of self-determination contributed to the destruc-

tion of Yugoslavia’s model of socialist self-management. The incorporation of
Lenin’s and Stalin’s formula of the “right of nations to self-determination,
including the right of secession”37 in all of Yugoslavia’s postwar constitutions
was “weaponized” by their pro-capitalist liberal and nationalist opponents in
the late 1980s38 to argue for the destruction of the Yugoslav socialist project.
Without deeper grounding in political theory and public sentiment, the idea
of self-determination – as a framework for the reconciliation of national and
social registers of struggle – proved incapable of sustaining itself against an
exclusively national(ist) understanding of self-determination.
Such an exclusively nationalist idea of self-determination not only catalyzed
the demise of socialist Yugoslavia but also undermined the larger project of
geopolitical emancipation, the third aim of self-determination. The idea of
self-determination was mobilized to justify national emancipation for Sloven-
ians and Croatians beyond socialism and to realign them geopolitically:
abandoning the project of nonalignment in favor of a return to their
common European “home” or “family.” The outcome of “self-determination”
in Yugoslavia, then, was not simply the destruction of socialism in that region
but also the strengthening of the regional hegemony of the United States and
the European Union in the Balkans, and the disappearance of NAM from
Europe.
Self-determination contributed to this outcome, as did Kardelj’s political
working assumptions that justified his understanding of national self-
determination. In the same way he worried about the ever-present potential
of the Soviet Union to “climb up on the shoulders of another” among socialist
countries, Kardelj worried about the nesting mini-hegemonies within Yugo-
slavia itself. An enduring communist suspicion of the hegemonic potential of
36
See Anne Orford’s discussion of the role played by the IMF in imposing economic austerity in
Yugoslavia that contributed to a sharp rise in unemployment, which critically contributed, in
turn, to the dramatic rise of nationalism in the late 1980s. Orford, Reading Humanitarian
Intervention: Human Rights and the Use of Force in International Law (Cambridge:
37
See “Osnovna načela” (Basic principles), Ustav SFRJ (1974) (Constitution of SFRY) https://
hr.wikisource.org/wiki/Ustav_Socijalisti%C4%8Dke_Federativne_Republike_Jugoslavije_
(1974). For an extended discussion, see also Robert Hayden, Blueprint for a House Divided:
Constitutional Logic of the Yugoslav Conflicts (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press,
1999).
38
For an example of the use of Kardelj’s account of self-determination for the purposes of
creating an independent liberal-democratic Slovenia, see Peter Jambrek, “Pravica do
samoodločbe slovenskega naroda” quoted from Dejan Jović, “Fear of Becoming Minority as a
Motivator of Conflict in the Former Yugoslavia” (2001) 5 Balkanologie, www.balkanologie
.revues.org/index674.html.
286 Zoran Oklopcic
the largest nations in multinational states led him to design a constitutional

system that transformed Yugoslavia into a very loose federation and deliber-
ately institutionally weakened Serbia, its strongest member. This occurred not
out of some innate anti-Serbian sentiment (although Serbian nationalists
occasionally accused him of this), but as the result of an anxiety about the
need to balance the “ratio of social forces” between different nations at the
domestic, not simply the international, level.39 Such design features an indel-
ible irony, destined to reveal itself when either the local or the global ratio of
social forces changes.
Finally, the interstice between nested hegemonies and self-determination
does not only set the stage for discord between national, social, and geopolit-
ical registers of emancipatory struggle. Within the struggle for national eman-
cipation itself, nested hegemonies – or to be more precise, the assertion of
nested hegemonies – make self-determination incapable of arbitrating among
the competing claims for national emancipation. Again, the dissolution of the
former Yugoslavia is a particularly bitter example. The Croatians resisted
greater Serbian hegemony, and in turn were accused of hypocrisy: They
wanted to dismantle a larger multinational state only to institute hegemony
in their own smaller one.
Self-determination has only been able to “solve” the problem of (counter)
assertions of national hegemony through a definitional fiat, always implicitly
reliant on the arbitrary framing of territorial conflict. As Martti Koskenniemi
rightly observed, “what appear as ‘minorities’ from an extensive gaze (focusing
on ‘Yugoslavia’) will turn themselves into majority populations once one’s
focus is closer (on ‘Croatia,’ say).”40 Unable to offer authoritative perceptual
framing of territorial conflict made self-determination “useless when . . . most
needed.”41 Committed to the idea that the national question is “resolved”
through a marriage of self-determination’s national and social components in
a voluntary federation, Kardelj did not insist on specifying the identity of the
bearer of the right to self-determination. What might have appeared as con-
structive ambiguity in 1974 significantly contributed to the virulence of
national conflict in 1991 when the marriage between the national and social
components of self-determination dissolved.
39
Aleksandar Pavković, “From Yugoslavism to Serbism: The Serb National Idea 1986–1996”
(1998) 4:4 Nations and Nationalism 511, at 525.
40
Martti Koskenniemi, “National Self-Determination Today: Problems of Legal Theory and
Practice” (1994) 43 International and Comparative Law Quarterly 241, at 260.
41
Ibid. at 264.
the constructive lessons of kardelj’s thought

Kardelj’s institutional responses to nesting hegemonies – the alliance of weak
nations within a voluntary Yugoslav federation and the world alliance of weak
peoples within NAM – regardless of their demerits, both capture an important
insight. Projects of national and socioeconomic emancipation cannot remain
blind to the power dynamic between the weak and the strong, whether locally,
regionally, or globally. However, the idea of triple struggle – the synergistic
portrayal of struggles for national, social, and geopolitical emancipation under
the aegis of “self-determination” – that has justified such institutional
responses has proved untenable. In the former Yugoslavia, the idea of a
synergy among three types of emancipatory struggle proved powerless in
influencing grassroots imaginaries of self-determination. The national(ist)
understanding of self-determination easily suppressed any idea that meaning-
ful national self-determination can exist only in the context of socioeconomic
emancipation within a truly politically pluralistic global order. The worry
about nesting hegemonies in the 1960s and 1970s contributed, after 1990, to
the reassertion of one particular – neoliberal and Western – political and
socioeconomic hegemony in the name of self-determination.
If such diagnosis is correct, it is dubious whether the contemporary critical
potential of Kardelj’s rudimentary international political theory could be
anything but modest. Looking back, it is not difficult to see how Kardelj’s
appreciation of “the ratio of social forces” changing in favor of global socialism
in the early 1960s was profoundly mistaken. In fact, the general political failure
of both NAM and Bandung led some scholars, such as Cyra Choudhury, to
treat their visions of national, sociopolitical, and geopolitical emancipation as
a matter of “international fantasy” and not a coherent political program.42
Choudhury rightly notes that macro-hegemonies, “the depredations of the
Global North and regional hegemons,” were of primary concern for Bandung
and NAM countries.43 As a result, none of these countries “could afford to
recognize self-determination within the borders of an existing state.”44 When
confronted with intrastate demands for self-determination, such as in East
Pakistan, their “statist orientation” left them “philosophically ill-equipped” to
deal with such demands in a principled manner. In drawing attention to this
problem, Choudhury correctly stresses the fact that the Bandung principles
failed to take into account internal colonization and oppression.45
42 43 44 45
See Choudhury, Chapter 19 in this volume. Ibid. at p. 331. Ibid. Ibid.
288 Zoran Oklopcic
However, the lessons of the imminent contradictions in Kardelj’s thought

and the attendant failures of its institutional manifestation remain relevant for
thinking about national, social, and geopolitical emancipation today. Rather
than rejecting Kardelj’s theoretical contributions to the idea of self-
determination and nonalignment, their failures will, at the very least, impel
us to think more systematically about what kinds of intellectual and practical
interventions may contribute to more resilient forms of transnational, grass-
roots, political “solidarity,” despite larger socioeconomic challenges they
cannot control.
The first lesson of Kardelj’s failure concerns his neglect of the affective
grounds of transcontinental solidarity, together with the attendant need to give
that foundation a solid institutional frame. Although NAM was consistent in
its repudiation of Western “cultural imperialism,” developing such affective
solidarity has never been high on its agenda, partly because NAM itself was
built on the rejection of Bandungian affirmation of geographical, cultural,
and racial grounds for translational solidarity.46 As Akhil Gupta reminds us,
rather than being seen as part of ongoing efforts to contribute to “a poetics of a
new kind of transnational ‘Third World,’”47 The Song of the Non-Aligned
quoted in the epigraph should be seen as an exception: an example of a larger
failure to engender affectively based transnational political solidarity. While
the EU systematically worked to engender European political identity through
“active propagation,” there was no such comparable effort on behalf of
NAM.48 And as Gupta rightly argues, pursuing such a project has also been
objectively difficult. The educational policy of NAM’s member states have
made no serious attempts (regardless of daily visual reminders in the Yugoslav
TV Kalendar) to contribute to such solidarity, but the objective conditions of
“late capitalism” made the likelihood of such a project even more marginal.
As the producers of raw material and sellers of inexpensive labor, the Third
World countries’ position within the international economy fostered competi-
tion rather than cooperation among them.49
Regardless of the objective reasons for its failure, Gupta suggests that paying
more attention to “non-national spatial configurations”50 of feeling is a worth-
while exercise, as it corrodes the belief in the “naturalness” of nations.
Understanding nations as spatial constellations of affective political solidarity,
and nationalism as a sequence of attempts to construct “a new kind of spatial
46
See Mates, Počelo je u Beogradu.
47
Gupta, “The Song of the Nonaligned World,” at 67. Thanks to Luis Eslava for drawing my
attention to Gupta’s argument.
48 49 50
Ibid. at 69. Ibid. at 70. Ibid. at 64.
and mythopoetic metanarrative,”51 may “also enable us to speculate about the

conditions that might lead to its demise and the eventual development of an
alternative hegemonic spatial formation.”52 While Gupta celebrates “diversely
spatialized, partially-overlapping, or non-overlapping collectivities,”53 he stops
short of proposing the devotion of intellectual energy to such a goal.
In an implicit rejoinder to Kardelj, Gupta highlights “something paradox-
ical” in NAM’s ideology that makes “nationalism need[ed] [for] transnation-
alism to protect itself.”54 As “a rainbow coalition of dispossessed nations,”
Gupta rightly notes that the countries of NAM were “caught between multiple
levels of spatial commitment and organization.”55 As the “other” of the
international order based on formally equal states, NAM challenged it in the
name of that very promise, sovereign equality, making nationalism ineradic-
able from its own ideological DNA. The tensions in Kardelj’s thought should
also be seen, as a result, as a manifestation of the contradictions in NAM’s
nationalist transnationalism.
Poetic, aesthetic, and theoretical contributions toward transnational pol-
itical solidarity could escape this paradox not only by imagining different
forms of subjectivities, as Gupta suggests, but also by declining to mediate
the triple struggle in the conventional vocabulary of “self-determination.”
Rather, the diversity of nations, their sociopolitical projects, and loci of
political power – whose organizational embodiment NAM historically
aspired to be – should be justified directly in the name of the principle
that unites and organizes them all: global political pluralism. Instead
of being seen as the international protective shield for projects of “self-
determination,” projects such as NAM should be seen as organizational
manifestations of the implicit, if fundamental, pluralist vision of the world
without which any “self-determination” (of a particular “nation” in a world
of other nations, that is) would make no sense.
By implication, understanding “self-determination” as a token concept
predicated on deeper, global pluralist commitments would give additional
meaning to Kardelj’s worry about nested hegemonies. Kardelj’s attention to
the multiplication of hegemonic projects should also impel us to be
cautious of recent arguments in international political theory that celebrate
the political resurgence of regional power blocs, and their alleged capacity
to act as counterpoise to the global hegemony of the United States.56 But
51 52 53 54 55
Ibid. at 71. Ibid. at 73. Ibid. Ibid. at 67. Ibid. at 68.
56
See Chantal Mouffe, “Schmitt’s Vision of a Multipolar World” (2005) 104:2 South Atlantic
Quarterly 245. See also Danilo Zolo, “The Re-emerging Notion of Empire and the Influence
of Carl Schmitt’s Thought” in Louis Oddyseos and Fabio Pettito (eds.), The International
290 Zoran Oklopcic
as the financial crisis in Greece has demonstrated, within such wishful

regional counterpoises, cores and peripheries continue to exist, replicating
the logic of political and economic domination. Meaningful political
pluralism within the EU – if one is to consider it as a candidate for
regional counterhegemonic counterpoise – is diminished not only because
of the current EU constitutional framework and economic crisis but also
because of the sheer power differentials among the countries that
compose it.
A first move toward overcoming a “statist orientation” that Choudhury
implicates in the unprincipled response of NAM and Bandung countries
toward intrastate conflicts is to understand the spirit of Bandung and NAM
not as a defender of national sovereignty and self-determination, and not
only as a promoter of global political pluralism, but also as meta-
counterpoise, aspiring to give more political clout not only to the countries
of the Global South in general, but to all those fringe countries in regional
counterpoises that are caught in the dynamic of political and economic
domination.
However, such a perspective encounters an important objection, as one
could argue that defending global political pluralism is impossible without
simultaneously embracing national self-determination. While national self-
determination is impossible without assuming global political pluralism,
that pluralism can be justified only in the name of some collectivity’s self-
determination. Answering this objection brings us to the final implication
of Kardelj’s rudimentary international political thought, and its remaining
potential to reconceive struggles for national self-determination
domestically.
Following Gupta means rejecting Kardelj’s Leninist understanding of
nationhood as something that conscious effort, including socialism, can
“neither make [n]or unmake.” But instead of following Gupta further – and
simply imagining overlapping, transnational identities in place of a sovereign
nation – we should return to Kardelj and his preoccupation with nested
hegemony. In rejecting the naturalness of nationhood, but taking nested
hegemonies seriously in the context of national conflict over territory, we
would not be wishing away the reality of territorial conflict, but would instead
reveal a way to resolve it, simultaneously deflating nationalistic accounts of
self-determination, which have themselves been used to undermine the triple
struggle. By insisting on the constructed character of a nation, we would not
Political Thought of Carl Schmitt: Terror, Liberal War and the Crisis of Global Order (New
York: Routledge, 2007).
be denying the resilience or sincerity of nationalist sentiments, but would be

given an opportunity to mobilize the ideal of voluntary associations – not only
as part of Kardelj’s argument in favor of domestic federalism, or NAM, but also
as an implicit criterion of how to solve national conflict over territory.
If the communist-led transformation of Yugoslavia from a unitary to a
federal state improved the voluntary character of the Yugoslav polity, there is
no principled reason not to extend this principle not only upward (toward
NAM) but also downward, toward the very “nations” and their “states” that
have created a “voluntary” federation. Seen in this light, the principle behind
“self-determination” is not the respect for national sovereignty, but rather the
commitment to increasing the voluntary character of polity at any level of
territorial government, which may include further territorial reconfigurations,
and at the subnational level, allowing, for example, local municipalities to
form larger regions, and potentially to turn every higher level of territorial
government into a federal-like polity.57 This should be seen as an answer to
Choudhury’s identification of Bandung and NAM discourse as “philosophic-
ally ill-equipped” to deal with the problem of intrastate conflicts over (territor-
ial) self-determination.
The traces of such a vision have already been detected in Kardelj’s thought.
Those who call Kardelj an Althusian have rightly highlighted the fact that the
Yugoslav constitution understood the commune as the basic building block of
Yugoslav federalism and the framework for individuals’ direct participation in
political life and socialist self-management.58 Although his Leninism com-
pelled Kardelj to locate ultimate sovereignty at the level of a monolithic
“nation,” the Yugoslav constitutional order possessed instruments that enabled
municipalities, basic political “microorganisms,”59 to form regional territorial
units between the local and the republican level. The dominant vision of
nationalist self-determination in the former Yugoslavia, however, prevented
these mechanisms – and the ideal of a non-statist voluntary alliance of
communes behind them – to play any constructive role in the resolution of
territorial conflict. However, that vision of political arrangements outside the
57
For an account of Serbs using this institutional opportunity in Croatia in 1990, see Drago
Roksandić, “Srbi u Hrvatskoj (1989–1991): izmedu lojalnosti, neposlušnosti i pobune”[“Serbs in
Croatia (1989–1991): between loyalty, disobedience and rebellion”] in Snežana Prijić-
Samardžija and Petar Bojanić (eds.), Neposlušnost [Disobedience] (Narodna Biblioteka Srbije,
2011), p. 87.
58
Jovan Đorđević, Ustavno pravo [Constitutional Law] (Beograd: Savremena Administracija,
1989), at 342. On the relationship between Althusius’ thought and Yugoslav federalism, see
Jovan Đorđević, “Remarks on the Yugoslav Model of Federalism” (1975) 5 Publius 78.
59
Ibid.
292 Zoran Oklopcic
nation-state carries the spirit of Bandung that represented NAM’s counter-

hegemonic potential.
conclusion
In focusing on the work of Edvard Kardelj, we have uncovered the tensions in
the idea that understood NAM as the simultaneous external manifestation and
intrinsic implication of the principles and anxieties upon which the new
communist Yugoslavia was reconstituted as a voluntary federation after the
Second World War. In highlighting the theoretical tensions and political
failures of Kardelj’s vision, we have also focused on the interplay between
the ideas of voluntary association, self-determination, and nesting hegemonies
that led him to believe that a synergistic relationship between national, social,
and geopolitical emancipation may find its final reconciliation in Yugoslav
multinational federalism on the one hand and NAM, as an international
alliance of weaker nations committed to their speedier economic develop-
ment, on the other.
Regardless of the tensions in his argument and the failures of his domestic
and international agenda, critically engaging Kardelj’s rudimentary inter-
national political thought is productive. Taking heed from Gupta’s emphasis
on the “poetics” of nonalignment, and setting aside Kardelj’s Leninist views of
nationhood, enables us to begin to imagine a different purpose for the
organizations committed to transnational political solidarity. This should also
help us envision a different way of describing and resolving national(ist)
struggles over territory outside of the vocabulary of self-determination. In
doing so, Kardelj’s thought remains a foil against which the ideal of a syner-
gistic triple struggle can be critiqued, reimagined, justified, and organized –
contributing to the survival of both the spirit of Bandung and the Non-Aligned
Movement.
17
“Let Us First of All Have Unity among Us”

Bandung, International Law, and the Empty Politics of Solidarity
umut özsu
introduction
In April 1959, four years to the day after roughly 2,000 delegates, journalists,
and observers convened in Bandung, Ruslan Abdulgani, vice-chairman of
Indonesia’s National Council, delivered his customary annual address on
the meaning and legacy of the Conference. As a career politician who had
involved himself in the Indonesian struggle for national liberation and served
in a variety of government positions in the years that followed the achievement
of independence, Abdulgani was well placed to speak to the issue, not least
because he had acted as secretary-general of the Conference. For Abdulgani,
while the Conference had been significant for its “tangible” results, including
the Final Communiqué,1 its most important contribution had been “intan-
gible,” the result of an arduous but productive exchange of views.2 Abdulgani
argued that the “Spirit of Bandung,” a force of “moderation in world affairs”
and a means of achieving “co-existence between differing political and social
systems,” had dominated the Conference, and that a coordinated approach on
the part of Asian and African states supplied “the only answer to the problems
and conflicts of the world.”3
Abdulgani’s characterization of the Conference was anything but idiosyn-
cratic. To be sure, Bandung was designed partly with the intention of
1
“Text of Final Communiqué of Asian-African Conference” in William L. Holland (ed.),
Selected Documents of the Bandung Conference: Texts of Selected Speeches and Final
Communiqué of the Asian-African Conference, Bandung, Indonesia, April 18–24, 1955 (New
York: Institute of Pacific Relations, 1955), p. 29. The text is also reproduced in George
McTurnan Kahin, The Asian-African Conference: Bandung, Indonesia, April 1955 (Ithaca:
Cornell University Press, 1956), p. 76.
2
Roeslan Abdulgani, “Let Us Cherish the Bandung Spirit” in Roeslan Abdulgani, Bandung
Spirit: Moving on the Tide of History (Djakarta: Prapantja, 1964), p. 57, at 64.
3
Ibid.
293
294 Umut Özsu
providing Indonesia’s President Sukarno an opportunity to grandstand on the

world stage. By bringing together a large number of Asian and African states in
Java, Sukarno gave himself a shot in the arm prior to the country’s first general
election in September 1955, projecting the former colony’s power throughout
what some had already come to dub the Third World.4 China, India, and
most other states approached Bandung with their own ambitions, taking steps
to refine ideological positions, elevate their international profiles, score points
against regional rivals, and bring specific disputes to the attention of a wider
audience. All this made for heated, at times acrimonious, discussion. Even so,
when all was said and done, the Conference was a forum in which national
interests were articulated on the basis of the quasi-legal rhetoric of Afro-Asian
“solidarity.” It was through this imprecise and notoriously flexible discourse
that Jawaharlal Nehru, Zhou Enlai, and most other delegates, including
Sukarno himself, crafted their speeches, framed their arguments, jockeyed
for position, and negotiated the text of the Final Communiqué. Only by
talking the talk of transcontinental “cooperation” did they hope to secure a
measure of acceptance for their views.
The notion that Bandung marked a “moment of solidarity” proliferated
rapidly in the years that followed. Claims of this sort were not limited to
diplomats and other state functionaries; many international lawyers joined in
the chorus. In 1960, for instance, Dutch jurist Bert Röling argued that
Bandung was best understood as an attempt to forge a union of proletarian
states, positioning itself against the bourgeois North in a global Kampf ums
Recht.5 Nearly twenty years later, Mohammed Bedjaoui, the Algerian lawyer
and diplomat who would later preside over the International Court of Justice,
wrote that the fourth major summit of the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM),
held in Algiers in 1973, had been “to the Third World’s struggle for economic
emancipation what the Bandung Conference of 1955 and the Belgrade Con-
ference of 1961 were to the struggle for political liberation.”6 Proclamations of
this sort have spawned a rather triumphalist literature in which sloganism and
hagiography frequently take the place of sober and historically informed
analysis. Major players are lionized, sharp disagreements are elided, speeches
are quoted selectively, and bargaining positions are interpreted in light of
subsequent alliances, as though Bandung’s conveners had consciously
4
For the locus classicus, with direct comparison to pre-revolutionary France’s Tiers état, see
Alfred Sauvy, “Trois mondes, une planète” (August 14, 1952) 118 L’Observateur 14.
5
B. V. A. Röling, International Law in an Expanded World (Amsterdam: Djambatan, 1960),
p. 69.
6
Mohammed Bedjaoui, Towards a New International Economic Order (Paris and New York:
UNESCO/Holmes and Meier, 1979), p. 90.
“Let Us First of All Have Unity among Us” 295
planned the Conference as the first in a series of events that would generate an
unambiguously defined bloc with a clearly discernible set of policies and
strategic objectives.7 For decades, Bandung has been taken to signal a break-
through for Asian and African solidarity, and it is this idea of solidarity that
has driven much of its reach and reputation, encouraging bold, often
highly speculative claims that subsequent conferences were animated by the
1955 “spirit.”
This chapter examines the way in which the idea of solidarity was deployed
at Bandung and in the context of later developments, chiefly the NAM and
the project for the New International Economic Order (NIEO). Ultimately,
I argue, the notion of solidarity, lynchpin of the call for South-South cooper-
ation to which Bandung has been linked, owed much of its influence to its
conceptual and practical muddiness – an ability to valorize competing devel-
opment and state-building initiatives without binding states to concrete, genu-
inely revolutionary programs of action. Over- and underdetermined, meaning
everything and yet nothing at all, “solidarity” was capable of serving as a
central point of reference precisely because it was of a fundamentally symbolic
rather than substantive character. States with essentially irreconcilable legal
traditions, economic policies, and ideological affiliations could thus find
common cause in its rhetoric.
cultivating vagueness
To some degree, Bandung’s transformation into a venue for the Conference
reflected a wider attempt to unify – or at least to make a show of unifying – the
disparate forces of the Third World in the mid-1950s. An important center of
the uprising against British, Dutch, and Japanese forces during the 1940s, the
city underwent a rapid makeover after its designation as the site for the
Conference. Dozens of hotels were constructed, the electricity supply was
augmented, and enormous quantities of foreign goods, from lace curtains to
American cigarettes, were imported. Bandung was also placed under
heightened security, partly because Dārul Islām, a group of anticolonial mili-
tants that laid the foundations for today’s Jemaah Islamiah, maintained positions
in the surrounding mountains. If the city were to play host to a conference of
the scale envisioned by the prime ministers of Burma, Ceylon (now Sri Lanka),
India, Indonesia, and Pakistan at earlier meetings in Colombo and Bogor, it
7
As Robert Vitalis has recently demonstrated, this has resulted even in pervasive
mischaracterization of the Conference’s actual participants. See “The Midnight Ride of
Kwame Nkrumah and Other Fables of Bandung (Ban-doong)” (2013) 4 Humanity 261.
296 Umut Özsu
would need to be “modernized,” even if this brought with it some of the

gentrification associated with the colonial institutions that many participating
states vowed to put behind them once and for all.8
Understandably, much has always been made of the Conference’s location,
particularly since it was ultimately dominated by the concerns of Asian (and
not African) states and peoples. However, its timing is no less revealing.
Bandung took place during a period of growing international tension and
complexity. The Cold War was in the process of establishing itself as an
abiding phenomenon, reaching deep into newly liberated states and non-
self-governing territories alike. NATO had been formed six years earlier. The
Warsaw Pact would follow suit only a month after Bandung. The Algerian
struggle for independence was already under way, and would soon be joined
by the Vietnam War. By the end of 1956, British, French, and Israeli troops
were marching into Egypt to restore Western control of the Suez Canal, and
the Soviets were busy crushing the uprising in Hungary against the Stalinist
regime of Mátyás Rákosi.9 These events were followed by the 1961 Berlin
Crisis, the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis, the 1962 border war between China and
India, and the steady consolidation of the Sino-Soviet split. In the background
of all such developments was a large and rapidly growing body of international
law. From the 1948 Genocide Convention to the 1949 Geneva Conventions,
from international refugee law to international human rights law, from the
prohibition of the nondefensive use of force to the explicit recognition of the
principle of self-determination, the new, “modern” international law – inaug-
urated officially in San Francisco and developed normatively in Nuremberg,
Tokyo, and elsewhere – was cited by all and sundry.
This volatility in international order was reflected in the Conference pro-
ceedings. The states that were represented at Bandung diverged not simply
along religious and ethnolinguistic lines but also strategic and ideological
ones. Consider the opening speech of John Kotelawala, Ceylonese prime
minister and one of the “Colombo five” who had initially proposed the
Conference. Convinced that the use and proliferation of nuclear weapons
threatened “nothing less than the total destruction of that collective civiliza-
tion which the nations of the world have labored over the centuries to
produce,” Kotelawala insisted that “[t]he argument of physical force must
8
For a good description of Bandung’s preparation for the Conference, see Homer A. Jack,
Bandung: An On-the-Spot Description of the Asian-African Conference, Bandung, Indonesia,
April 1955 (Chicago: Toward Freedom, 1955), pp. 4–6.
9
For close consideration of Nasser’s strategy during the Suez Crisis, with particular attention to
the legacy of Bandung, see Peevers, Chapter 34 in this volume.
yield to the argument of spiritual power,” this being the only means of coping
with an “age of anxiety” marked by “a panic-stricken race for military superior-
ity.”10 With their “common interest in peace,” and their “traditional respect
for the spiritual values of life and for the dignity of the human personality,”
the “nations of Asia and Africa” were capable of playing an essential role in
this regard, particularly since none of them possessed nuclear weapons.11
Highlighting his Buddhist faith, Kotelawala stressed that the Third
World’s “strength” lay in its “weakness.”12 It was precisely because they were
“all poor and underdeveloped” that Third World states could “offer formally
[their] services as mediators,” helping in the process to reform the UN
Security Council.13
Though fundamentally anticommunist, Kotelawala’s foreign policy bore
traces of “neutralism.” Carlos Romulo of the Philippines, a market-oriented
state embroiled in an ongoing neocolonial relationship with the United States,
toed a more explicitly pro-Western line.14 The “old structure of Western
empire will and must pass from the scene,” Romulo proclaimed, suggesting
that the United Nations, an essentially different type of organization from that
of the League of Nations, provided a forum in which the struggle for self-
determination would bear fruit.15 For the Third World to position itself “in the
forefront of the attempt to create a twentieth-century world based on the true
interdependence of peoples,” it had to resist absorption into international
communism, learn from the mistakes of European nationalism, and mount
a concerted struggle against both Western racism and non-Western “counter-
racism.”16 Interestingly, Romulo was defensive about his country’s depend-
ence on American power. While it could not be denied that it had lent support
to colonial powers and held inconsistent policies toward subject peoples, the
United States had in his view behaved fairly in regard to the Philippines,
10
“Opening Speech by Sir John Kotelawala, Prime Minister of Ceylon, on April 18, 1955” in
Holland, Selected Documents, p. 7.
11
Ibid., 8. This, of course, would change before long. China tested its first nuclear weapon in
1964, and India followed suit in 1974. Pakistan and other states launched development programs
in the 1970s.
12 13
Ibid. Ibid., 9–10.
14
He would go on to claim that “neutralism,” a product mainly of Indian strategic thinking,
“works in practice to the advantage of communism.” Carlos P. Romulo, The Meaning of
Bandung (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1956), p. 32. For Romulo’s
anticommunism, see further Lisandro E. Claudio, “The Anti-Communist Third World: Carlos
Romulo and the Other Bandung” (2015) 4 Southeast Asian Studies 125.
15
“Opening Statement by the Honorable Carlos P. Romulo” in Holland, Selected Documents,
pp. 13–14.
16
Ibid., 15–16.
298 Umut Özsu
particularly in the period leading up to its formal independence.17 In addition,

there was much to be said for the characteristically American insistence upon
“liberty.” The “struggle for freedom” was “an unending, constant, unremitting
demand,” and there was no point replacing colonial oppression with the
“super-barbarism” of a socialist system that Romulo regarded as a mere place-
holder for the tyrannical, hyper-bureaucratized state.18
Naturally, claims of this sort lay at a considerable distance from those
offered by Zhou Enlai, one of the Conference’s most energetic participants
and certainly its most powerful socialist representative. At pains to assure other
delegates that his country harbored no designs on its neighbors and did not
seek to expand its sphere of influence, Zhou claimed that it was actually
China that was “suffering from the subversive activities which are openly
carried out without any disguise by the United States of America.”19 In his
view, Maoist China bore a close resemblance to newly independent states like
Burma, India, and Indonesia; broadly analogous Western mechanisms of
exploitation and administration had rendered them “backward economically
and culturally.”20 Zhou was sympathetic to Nehru’s Panchsheel or “five
principles” (nonaggression, noninterference, “peaceful coexistence,” equality
and mutual benefit, and respect for sovereignty and territorial integrity).21
Building on this framework, he offered his own sevenfold vision of inter-
national order: sovereignty and territorial integrity needed to be respected,
no state could legitimately use or threaten force against another, no state
possessed the authority to intervene in any other state’s domestic affairs, all
states needed to adhere to the principle of racial equality, sovereign equality
had to be respected at all costs, every state had the right to choose its own
political and economic system, and all states were obligated to refrain from
causing harm to other states.22 It was by means of these principles, and not on
the basis of a chauvinistic nationalism that demanded “privileges or special
conditions,” that China would approach the world.23
17 18
Ibid., 13. Ibid., 15, 20.
19
“Supplementary Speech by Premier Chou En-lai, April 19, 1955” in Holland, Selected
Documents, p. 23.
20
Ibid., 22.
21
Ibid., 23; “Statement by Chou En-lai to the Political Committee of the Bandung Conference
on April 23, 1955” in Holland, Selected Documents, p. 25. A treaty concluded between China
and India the year before had already expressed mutual support for the Panchsheel. See
Agreement (with Exchange of Notes) on Trade and Intercourse between Tibet Region of
China and India, signed at Peking, 29 April 1954, 299 UNTS 57.
22
“Statement by Chou En-lai” in Holland, Selected Documents, pp. 26–27. Needless to say, these
tenets overlapped and were not easily distinguishable.
23
Ibid., 27.
For all this variety in visions of world order, the Conference ultimately
found expression in a shared commitment to “solidarity.” Thus, Kotelawala
stressed that Asian and African states could help secure “national and inter-
national peace” only by ensuring “mutual co-operation for the common
good.”24 This, in turn, could be achieved only by remaining mindful of
Buddha’s commitment to nonenmity, and by working to “disseminate” the
“spirit” of this wisdom with a view to making Bandung “reverberate in history
and earn the gratitude and blessings of ages to come.”25 For his part, Romulo
stated that his country had “watched with proud solidarity and a feeling of
oneness the establishment of the other independent nations of a free Asia,”
and that what was now required was “a true meeting of minds,” a synchroniza-
tion of efforts that would ensure “greater world coherence.”26 Tellingly,
though, when considering the question of what the Third World’s specific
“goal” should be, he offered little more than platitudes about “the betterment
and the greater freedom . . . of the lives of the people.”27 Determined to
counter China’s increasing isolation, Zhou argued that the Conference
should not be used as a forum in which “to publicize one’s ideology and
the political system of one’s country,” as this would result in its being “dragged
into disputes about . . . problems without any solution.”28 “Let us first of all
have unity among us,” Zhou declared, tediously relentless in emphasizing the
significance of “achieving agreement,” finding, “common ground,” ensuring
“collective peace,” remaining true to “common desires and demands,” and
taking action in light of “mutual understanding and respect, mutual sympathy
and support.”29 “Solidarity,” it seems, was a source of serious concern to all
states at the Conference.
The Final Communiqué – a rather muddled instrument replete with the
sort of loose, hortatory language typical of what has since come to be known as
“soft law” – addressed a wide variety of matters. Although it was positioned
near the beginning of the document, the section on issues of “economic
cooperation” boasted neither ambition nor imagination. The twenty-nine
states assembled in Bandung acknowledged the need for joint ventures, trade
diversification, stable commodity prices, mutual technical assistance,
increased foreign investment, and international institutions to fund economic
development. Making it clear that the Conference did not intend to form a
24
“Opening Speech by Sir John Kotelawala” in Holland, Selected Documents, p. 11. 25
Ibid.
26
“Opening Statement by the Honorable Carlos P. Romulo” in Holland, Selected Documents,
pp. 12, 18.
27
Ibid., 19.
28
“Supplementary Speech by Premier Chou En-lai” in Holland, Selected Documents, p. 21.
29
Ibid., 21–23; “Statement by Chou En-lai” in Holland, Selected Documents, p. 24.
300 Umut Özsu
“regional bloc,” the communiqué fell well short of criticizing the postwar class
compromise, a kind of globalized New Deal. Instead, it openly supported the
establishment of the International Finance Corporation and Special United
Nations Fund for Economic Development, and encouraged the work of the
International Bank for Reconstruction and Development.30 This was followed
by a section about “cultural cooperation,” the bulk of which was devoted to
underscoring the Third World’s “age-old tradition of tolerance and universal-
ity” and the promotion of greater understanding between the peoples of Asia
and Africa.31 Thanks in no small part to the presence of Charles Malik, an
experienced Lebanese diplomat who had served on the drafting committee of
the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the Final Communiqué also
contained a few generic references to human rights. The Conference “took
note of” the Universal Declaration, “declared its full support” for the UN
Charter’s human rights principles, “deplored” racial segregation and discrim-
ination in South Africa and elsewhere, and called for the implementation of
UN resolutions in regard to the “Palestine question.”32 After some perfunctory
language about disarmament and the need to prohibit nuclear weapons, as
well as a handful of elliptical statements about colonialism in North Africa
and West Irian (West Papua),33 the document concluded with its well-known
list of ten principles. Most of these derived from the framework proposed by
Nehru and amplified by Zhou, although “peaceful coexistence” was not
included and different language, such as a reference to the right of collective
self-defense (which was somehow meant to cohere with the requirement to
abstain from collective arrangements that served the interests of great powers),
also found its way into the document.34 Given the communiqué’s nonbinding
character, none of these principles entailed new international legal obliga-
tions. At most, they could be taken to express support for the normative
authority of the UN Charter, existing UN resolutions, and related rules of
30
“Text of Final Communiqué,” pp. 29–31. Hence Gilbert Rist’s well-placed denunciation:
“Bandung’s main contribution on ‘development’ was to hasten the advent of new international
institutions (or to inflect the policy of existing ones) charged with promoting the ‘development’
model of the industrial countries, and especially the United States.” Gilbert Rist, The History of
Development: From Western Origins to Global Faith, 4th ed. (London: Zed Books, 2014), p. 88
(original emphasis).
31
“Text of Final Communiqué,” p. 32.
32
Ibid., 32–33. For Malik’s advocacy of language about human rights, see Roland Burke,
Decolonization and the Evolution of International Human Rights (Philadelphia: University of
Pennsylvania Press, 2010), pp. 20–25. See further Roland Burke, “Afro-Asian Alignment:
Charles Malik and the Cold War at Bandung” in Derek McDougall and Antonia Finnane
(eds.), Bandung 1955: Little Histories (Caulfield: Monash University Press, 2010), p. 27.
33
“Text of Final Communiqué,” pp. 33–35. 34
For the complete list, see ibid., 35.
customary international law. As one student of Asian-African cooperation later

noted, if “[t]he conference came to an end on a note of unanimity,” it was
only because “the articles were so generally and vaguely formulated that
all sides of the various disputes could read into them the points they wished
to see.”35
To a significant degree, Bandung’s imprecise idealism, its reliance on the
nebulous and easily manipulated rhetoric of “solidarity,” was a matter of
design. Nehru and others were determined to ensure a modicum of unity at
the Conference. They were aware that prolonged discussion of Soviet policy
in Eastern Europe or the status of NATO and other U.S.-supported security
regimes, such as the recently formed Central Treaty Organization and South-
east Asia Treaty Organization, could derail the proceedings before they had a
chance to yield even meager results.36 Potentially even more damaging would
be direct reference to the fact that democratic institutions had not been
entrenched in most new states, many of which found themselves governed
by comprador bourgeoisies that had managed to leverage themselves into
positions of “national” power, often with considerable brutality and repres-
sion.37 In this respect, “solidarity” was valuable precisely because it enabled
representatives of states with widely differing legal systems, economic regimes,
and ideological commitments to coalesce around a common discourse of
opposition to colonialism and imperialism. More than any other factor, it
was the shared experience of colonial subjugation (or at least quasi-colonial
subordination, as in the case of former imperial powers like Iran, Japan, and
Turkey) that would ensure such “solidarity.”38
35
David Kimche, The Afro-Asian Movement: Ideology and Foreign Policy of the Third World
(Jerusalem: Israel Universities Press, 1973), p. 72.
36
As it happened, both issues lay at the source of significant disagreement at Bandung. For the
ensuing debates, see Kahin, Asian-African Conference, pp. 18–32. Nehru insisted that “every
step that takes place in reducing that area in the world which may be called the unaligned area
is a dangerous step,” imploring others to find ways of reducing “tension.” See “Speech by
Prime Minister Nehru before the Political Committee of the Asian-African Conference, April
22, 1955” in Kahin, Asian-African Conference, pp. 66, 71. In addition to rejecting suggestions of
Soviet “colonialism” in Europe, Zhou opposed collective security alliances, arguing even after
the Conference that the Final Communiqué could not “be used to defend the many aggressive
military blocs.” See “Excerpts from Premier Chou En-lai’s Report on the Asian-African
Conference to the Standing Committee of the National People’s Congress, Peking, May 13,
1955” in Kahin, Asian-African Conference, p. 63.
37
Odd Arne Westad, The Global Cold War: Third World Interventions and the Making of Our
Times (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), p. 102.
38
On this see Christopher J. Lee, “Between a Moment and an Era: The Origins and Afterlives of
Bandung” in Christopher J. Lee (ed.), Making a World after Empire: The Bandung Moment
and Its Political Afterlives (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2010), p. 1, at 10.
302 Umut Özsu
Vagueness also strengthened the hand of powers that were inimical to or at

least suspicious of the Conference. For months prior to Bandung, diplomats
and functionaries in Britain, the United States, and a variety of other Western
states took steps to ensure that a large batch of “friendly” countries (a safe list
might include Iran, Iraq, Israel, Japan, Lebanon, Libya, Pakistan, the Philip-
pines, South Vietnam, Thailand, and Turkey) would be represented, that
territories held under formal colonialism would not be extended official
invitations, and that the event would not serve as a staging ground for com-
munist agitation. Thus, writing to British Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden in
January 1955, Colonial Secretary Alan Lennox-Boyd argued that Bandung was
likely to prove “a polyglot conference,” with the common denominator being
an ill-defined “denunciation of racialism and colonialism.” It would therefore
be wise to encourage anticommunist states to attend “in order to combat the
influence of Communist China and any neutralists which may be present.”39
These efforts were not always successful, but they did have the effect of
diluting the content of the “fraternity” that was put on offer later that year: a
large number of anticommunist states were represented, and made a point of
voicing their concerns throughout the proceedings. Bandung may have been
the first full-scale meeting of the budding Third World alliance, but it was
certainly not without its share of disagreement, a fact that was concealed, even
mystified, through reliance on a highly amorphous solidarist discourse. This,
after all, was a discourse that purported to be “beyond left and right.”40
manufactured legacies
Rather than following uncontroversially from Bandung’s promise, the NAM –
which was not restricted to Asia and Africa – was launched partly in response
to a certain dissatisfaction with the 1955 Conference’s disjointed proceedings
and vacuous pronouncements. “Nonalignment” – a term that Nehru had
employed as early as 1949 but that began to enjoy widespread popular circula-
tion only during the 1960s41 – had not secured explicit recognition at
39
Tellingly, the draft of Lennox-Boyd’s letter included an additional clause here: “or in order to
ensure the maximum amount of confusion in the Conference’s proceedings.” Quoted in
Nicholas Tarling, “‘Ah-Ah’: Britain and the Bandung Conference of 1955” (1992) 23 Journal of
Southeast Asian Studies 74, 88.
40
The expression belongs to Richard Wright, a pan-Africanist and analyst of négritude; see The
Color Curtain: A Report on the Bandung Conference (Cleveland: World Publishing Co., 1956),
ch. 1.
41
Lorenz M. Lüthi, “Non-Alignment, 1946–1965: Its Establishment and Struggle against Afro-
Asianism” (2016) 7 Humanity 201, at 202–203.
Bandung. Many now called for a more active and strategically cohesive
alliance of states, committed to international peace and maintaining a certain
distance from both the Soviet Union and the United States (and also, of
course, able to exploit their geopolitical rivalries). It was with something like
this hope that Josip Tito hosted Nehru and Egypt’s Gamal Abdel Nasser (soon
to embark upon a struggle for influence in Africa with Ghana’s Kwame
Nkrumah) at his Brijuni resort in 1956, five years before the first meeting of
the movement’s heads of state or government would be convened in Belgrade.
A shared experience of colonial or semi-colonial subjugation, underwritten by
nineteenth- and early twentieth-century conceptions of “race” and “civiliza-
tion,” may have been enough to bring a variety of different states together in
Bandung. But it had failed to generate a concrete program of action with
concrete legal obligations and clearly defined politico-economic objectives.
The NAM – led by a tricontinental troika of charismatic statesmen – would
press matters further.42
The NAM was not always as stable or effective as initially hoped, riven as
it was by intense competition, factionalism, and internal core-periphery
dynamics.43 Yet it proved resilient, facilitating the work of the Group of
77, a bloc of Third World states in the United Nations that some continue
to regard as Bandung’s greatest indirect consequence,44 not least because of
its championship of legal principles like “sustainable development” and the
“common heritage of mankind.” Viewing the movement with a mixture of
42
The literature on the relationship between Bandung in 1955 and Belgrade in 1961 is enormous.
For well-founded skepticism of the popular view that the bond is a tight one, see, e.g., Vitalis,
“Midnight Ride”; Lüthi, “Non-Alignment”; Itty Abraham, “From Bandung to NAM: Non-
Alignment and Indian Foreign Policy, 1947–65” (2008) 46 Commonwealth and Comparative
Politics 195; Itty Abraham, “Prolegomena to Non-Alignment: Race and the International
System” in Nataša Mišković, Harald Fischer-Tiné, and Nada Boškovska (eds.), The Non-
Aligned Movement and the Cold War: Delhi – Bandung – Belgrade (Abingdon: Routledge,
2014), p. 76, at 76, 88–9; Jeffrey James Byrne, “Beyond Continents, Colours, and the Cold War:
Yugoslavia, Algeria, and the Struggle for Non-Alignment” (2015) 37 International History
Review 912. See also G. H. Jansen, Afro-Asia and Non-Alignment (London: Faber and Faber,
1966), pp. 223, 280. For a helpful overview, see further Simon Stevens, “Non-Alignment and
the United States,” H-1960s H-Net Reviews (August 2014), available at www.h-net.org/reviews/
showrev.php?id=38806 (last accessed January 30, 2015).
43
For the contention that China, Egypt, and Ghana employed the movement partly as a means
of converting unindustrialized states into special export markets, see Guy Laron, “Semi-
Peripheral Countries and the Invention of the ‘Third World’, 1955–65” (2014) 35 Third World
Quarterly 1547.
44
See, e.g., Vijay Prashad, The Darker Nations: A People’s History of the Third World (New York:
The New Press, 2007), p. 41 (arguing that “this UN bloc over time would be the most important
accomplishment of Bandung,” providing a “bulwark against ‘dollar imperialism’ and offer[ing]
an alternative model for development”).
304 Umut Özsu
suspicion and opportunism, Moscow often claimed that Bandung had

promised a “united anti-imperialist front,” but that China had sought to
persuade other states that the Soviet Union was not properly “Asian,” with
the result that they lost sight of the fact that “[t]he struggle for peace, for the
peaceful coexistence of states with different social systems, the struggle
against imperialism, colonialism, and neocolonialism demands the
unflinching solidarity of all progressive, peace-loving and freedom-loving
mankind.”45 This led to a series of attempts on the part of Soviet authorities
to co-opt the NAM. The Soviets regarded the movement as a potentially
important bulwark against Western military alliances and justified it as a
tactically sound orientation for states that had not yet “transitioned” to full-
fledged socialism. But they also sought to control developments in Asia,
Africa, and Latin America by creating their own solidarity networks and
allocating aid to Third World states that occupied positions of particular
geopolitical importance.46 In December 1957, for instance, little more than
two years after Bandung and only a year after the foundations had been laid
for a coordinated nonaligned strategy, the first conference of the Soviet-
supported Afro-Asian Peoples’ Solidarity Organization convened in Cairo.
Including representatives from more than forty-five Asian and African states,
the meeting established an international secretariat for the organization and
produced a broad agenda for its subsequent work. This organization was
anything but ineffective, and closely related groups like the Organization of
Solidarity with the Peoples of Asia, Africa, and Latin America, founded in
January 1966 at a tricontinental meeting in Havana, continued to thrive in
the years to come.47
More interesting still is Bandung’s relation to the NIEO. Coming to the
fore in the wake of the oil crisis in 1973 and securing recognition in a set of
45
“To Whose Advantage Is the Isolation of the Peoples of Asia and Africa?” [Pravda editorial]
(1964) 16 The Current Digest of the Soviet Press 26, 27. Note that Western international lawyers
sometimes adopted positions similar to those espoused by Chinese officials on the question of
the Soviet Union’s relations with the Third World; see, e.g., Richard A. Falk, “The New States
and International Legal Order” (1966-II) 118 Recueil des cours 1, 12 (suggesting that “[t]he Soviet
Union is not new, nor nonaligned, nor very Asian”).
46
Only one year after Bandung, which made a considerable impression on the Politburo, the
Soviets agreed to provide a large loan to Indonesia. The total amount of aid and other resources
that the Soviets provided in the years that followed was greater than that received by all other
developing states except Egypt. Ragna Boden, “Cold War Economics: Soviet Aid to Indonesia”
(2008) 10 Journal of Cold War Studies 110, esp. 110, 114–115, 120.
47
For the Afro-Asian Peoples’ Solidarity Organization, see Kimche, Afro-Asian Movement,
pp. 127–38; Roy Allison, The Soviet Union and the Strategy of Non-Alignment in the Third
World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), pp. 29–31; Dietmar Rothermund, “The
Era of Non-Alignment” in The Non-Aligned Movement, p. 19, at 21–22.
General Assembly resolutions the following year,48 the NIEO sought to enact
a stronger form of Keynesianism than that which had found a home in the
Bretton Woods institutions after the Second World War. This was to be
achieved through fairly staid means, even in the view of some Western
development specialists. Aid, debt relief, technology transfer, permanent sov-
ereignty in respect to natural resources, the establishment of a specific right to
development, and tighter regulation of foreign investment and the activities of
transnational corporations – all of these had been proposed for some time
already, and all had been recognized as plausible, even laudable responses to
North-South inequality by the early 1970s. Nevertheless, the NIEO ran
aground by the early 1980s, when the debt crisis, combined with years of stiff
resistance on the part of the United States and other Western states, brought
about its demise.
The conventional narrative about the NIEO as an outgrowth of the “Ban-
dung Spirit,” a struggle for emancipation waged both inside and outside the
United Nations Conference on Trade and Development, is not entirely
without justification. As with the NAM, though, the links to Bandung are
generally exaggerated. At root, the NIEO was a project of global redistribution
articulated in legal terms and made viable by a series of sharp spikes in the
price of oil. Although buttressed by its own rhetoric of “solidarity,” the NIEO
was an attempt to reform an international legal and economic order that had
been destabilized by the collapse of the Bretton Woods monetary system and
challenged by the programmatic revitalization of neoclassical economics.
Bandung, on the other hand, was dedicated to minimizing ideological dis-
agreement and overtly anti-Western sentiment, with discussions focusing on
collective security, nuclear disarmament, reform of the UN system, general
issues of sovereignty and nonintervention, and, above all, the ongoing and
multifaceted process of decolonization. Importantly, this desire to forge the
broadest possible consensus resulted in the marginalization in the Final
Communiqué of a number of pressing political questions. These included
the future of Vietnam, relations between the two Koreas, China’s recent
occupation and annexation of Tibet, continued French and British suppres-
sion of Sub-Saharan Africa, the question of which government – Beijing or
Taipei – had the right to represent “China” at the UN, the normative status of
48
See Declaration on the Establishment of a New International Economic Order, GA Res. 3201
(S-VI), UN Doc. A/Res/S-6/3201 (1974); Programme of Action on the Establishment of a New
International Economic Order, GA Res. 3202 (S-VI), UN Doc. A/Res/S-6/3202 (1974); and
Charter of Economic Rights and Duties of States, GA Res. 3281 (XXIX), UN Doc. A/Res/29/
3281 (1974).
306 Umut Özsu
the (originally socialist) concept of “peaceful coexistence,” and, of course, the

thorny question of whether the struggle against colonialism and imperialism
needed to adopt a strictly communist posture. It also meant that key politico-
economic issues like export restrictions to China were typically sidelined, rote
denunciations of racism and colonialism taking the place of hard-nosed
critique of the capitalist settlement achieved in the wake of the Second World
War. In this respect, the NIEO – itself little more than a moderate package of
reform proposals – marked a departure from, not a realization of, the “Ban-
dung Spirit,” though one that retained a residual attachment to the discourse
of “solidarity.”49
conclusion
It is often said that those who gathered together in Bandung in the spring of
1955 cannot be faulted for having failed to develop a coherent strategy, one
that would be formalized in a binding instrument that enshrined concrete
legal obligations. After all, it is frequently claimed, the Conference was
intended as a taste of things to come – the first in a series of initiatives that
would foster South-South cooperation and interdependence. It is further
stressed that Bandung showcased broad-based agreement on the need to
combat colonialism and counter the growing threat of nuclear war.50 Such
agreement would never have been reached, wrote Indian commentator Anga-
dipuram Appadorai a few months after the Conference, had the event’s
sponsors pressed for the formation of “an Asian-African bloc” or the develop-
ment of “a common foreign policy.”51 Five years later, Indonesian jurist
J. J. G. Syatauw argued that the Conference should be judged not by its
“concrete results,” which were admittedly rather “moderate,” but “in the
meeting of minds which led to a statement of principles.”52 While not entirely
without merit, such claims elide the most crucial point: from a legal and
49
For an insightful argument to this effect, see Helen E. S. Nesadurai, “Bandung and the
Political Economy of North-South Relations: Sowing the Seeds for Re-visioning International
Society” in See Seng Tan and Amitav Acharya (eds.), Bandung Revisited: The Legacy of the
1955 Asian-African Conference for International Order (Singapore: NUS Press, 2008), p. 68, esp.
at 69, 71–74, 81–86.
50
For an insightful rethinking of this point, see Parfitt, Chapter 2 in this volume.
51
Angadipuram Appadorai, The Bandung Conference (New Delhi: Indian Council of World
Affairs, 1955), p. 29.
52
J. J. G. Syatauw, Some Newly Established Asian States and the Development of International
Law (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1961), p. 237.
economic point of view, Bandung was a missed opportunity, and this missed
opportunity was anything but an accident. When all is said and done, the
Bandung Conference was a forum for lofty but vacuous invocations of “soli-
darity.” Only on the basis of a romantic, thoroughly depoliticized slogan of
this sort could such a motley collection of states coalesce around something
approximating a consensus.
part iii.
Nations and Their Others

Bandung at Home
18
The Colonial Debris of Bandung

Equality and Facilitating the Rise of the Hindu Right in India
ratna kapur
“The despised, the insulted, the hurt, the dispossessed – in short, the underdogs of the
human race were meeting. Here were class and racial and religious consciousness on a
global scale . . . This meeting of the rejected was in itself a kind of judgment upon the
Western world!”1
“One day everybody is themselves – and the next day they are Hindu, Muslim, Sikh,
Christian. People shrink, dwindling into symbols.”2
introduction
In April 1955, a gathering of 29 nations and more than 600 delegates at
Bandung met to articulate a third way of operating within the existing global
order that Cold War alliances were shaping. This effort combined the nation-
alist urges of Asian and African countries, the common goal of which was to
struggle against colonialism, racism, and discrimination, and to fight for
equality for all.
While these noble endeavors continue to inform the spirit of the consti-
tutions of a number of countries present at Bandung, sixty years later, scholars
have increasingly questioned whether the values that infused Bandung with a
sense of purpose and progress have boomeranged. This chapter examines how
conservative and right-wing forces have used the modernist ideals of challen-
ging racism and discrimination, as well as securing equality, in the postcolo-
nial context to set up a relationship with their own citizens on terms that are
precisely reminiscent of the colonial encounter. The seeds for this enterprise
are found in the anticolonial, anti-Western framing of the Bandung
1
Richard Wright, The Colour Curtain: A Report on the Bandung Conference (Cleveland: World
Publishing Company, 1956).
2
B. Kidwai, Cracking India (London: Milkweed Editions, 1991), p. 93.
311
312 Ratna Kapur
Conference, where newly formed nation-states sought to establish themselves

as part of a distinct cultural and national project.
This chapter discusses a central paradox of Bandung: how the embrace of
universal human rights, and specifically the right to equality for all,3 is set in
tension with an emphasis on Bandung’s distinct anticolonial, non-Western,
cultural, and civilizational formation.4 This tension between equality and
difference plays out not only externally, where the postcolonial nation-state
asserts its distinct political and cultural position from the so-called West, but
also internally in countries such as postcolonial India, where it produced the
very politics of exclusion and subordination of the other – specifically religious
minorities – which was a core feature of colonial governance. This feature
thus implicates Bandung in the colonial debris that lies scattered in the
sensibilities of the postcolonial present.
The values of Bandung, celebrated as a point of arrival for newly independ-
ent nation-states and freedom from colonial rule, obscured the imperial effects
or dark side that shadowed this moment. These effects weave their way
through the body and soul of a nation-state and leave their mark in tangible,
albeit elusive, ways. While India embraced the project of human rights,
including liberal equality, as a central feature of the modern liberal demo-
cratic state, the architecture of this right is shaped against the historical
backdrop of the colonial encounter, which nurtured a cultural nationalism
that enabled the articulation of the nation-state as distinctly Hindu, distinct
from the West and the former colonial power.5 In this understanding, the right
to equality of religious minorities became contingent on either assimilating to
Hindu majoritarianism by surrendering their distinct cultural and religious
identity or risking exclusion, incarceration, and even annihilation for failing to
comply.
The paradox presented at Bandung, between an anticolonial nationalism
and equality, was not a recipe for a radical politics. The work of two of the
early ideologues of the Hindu Right, V. D. Savarkar and M. S. Golwalkar,
illustrates how this paradox partly facilitates the rise of the Hindu Right and its
ability to justify Hindu majoritarianism in and through the discourse of
equality. The judiciary increasingly validates the Hindu Right’s version of
equality and, in the process, Hindu majoritarianism. The end result is not a
3
Asian-African conference of Bandung (24 April 1955),” Asia-Africa Speak from Bandung,
Section C, p. 6.
4
The Ministry of Foreign Affairs, “Final Communiqué,” Section B, pp. 4–6.
5
A. Vajpeyi, Righteous Republic: The Political Foundations of Modern India (Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press, 2012).
The Colonial Debris of Bandung 313
betrayal of the Bandung dream, but rather a manifestation of the dark side that
constituted part of that vision.
cultural distinction and the rise of the hindu nation

The Bandung Conference was partly an expression of the reassertion of the
distinct traditional cultures and religions that colonial rule had tried to reform,
marginalize, or eradicate. In the context of the modern world, the Conference
called for a renewal of ancient Asian and African cultures and religions, which
were seen as thwarted in their development for centuries as a result of colonial
rule.6 At the cultural level, the construction of an Asian voice was a unifying
force set in opposition to the West in terms of race, religion, and culture. This
effort to identify and embrace what was distinct from the West had the effect
of calling for a return to a precolonial, precolonized era, and excavation of
what was truly authentic.
Jawaharlal Nehru embodied this vision of a nation as distinct from the
West, and in Bandung was regarded as projecting a culturally superior
attitude induced by a “conscious identification with an ancient civiliza-
tion.”7 This vision became prescient of the ways in which fundamentalist
and deeply conservative forces would repeat the colonial effects of govern-
ance in response to their religious minorities. Within postcolonial India,
culture, religion, and race were deployed in contradistinction not only to
the Christian West but also to the religious other, specifically the Muslim.
Both of these moves were essential to establishing a distinct national
identity.
While Nehru and the Indian National Congress party struggled to find ways
to balance the diverse segments of the population in the nationalist project,
the Hindu Mahasabha – a nationalist organization founded in 1914 that
campaigned for Hindu political unity – took advantage of this political inde-
terminacy by firmly and forcefully emphasizing that the life of the sovereign
state could only be construed and representative of a portion of its citizenry:
the Hindus.8 The most influential early exponent of this position was
6
Wright, The Colour Curtain, p. 204.
7
C. P. Romulo, The Meaning of Bandung (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press,
1956), pp. 11–12.
8
The establishment of the Hindu Mahasabha was partly in response to the rise of the Muslim
League, which was increasingly seeking a separate homeland. The Mahasabha supported
Hindu political unity, including education and economic development for Hindus as well as
the reconversions of Muslims to Hinduism. It was also opposed to the secularism envisaged by
the Congress under Nehru based on the wall of separation between religion and the state.
314 Ratna Kapur
V. D. Savarkar, president of the Hindu Mahasabha.9 Savarkar argued that the

inimitable Indian state formation was to be crystallized through the energies of
Hindus to pursue a distinct sovereign form that was founded and articulated in
conflict with the emerging idea of Pakistan as well as the Indian Republic as
envisioned by Nehru. While Savarkar and Nehru were opposed to every
manifestation of empire, their positions diverged on how the newly emerging
nation-state was going to assert its autonomy and identity.10
Nehru and the Congress party were intent on establishing a British model
of governance, where sovereignty was equated with a coming together of
“consensual political will, paternalistic protection, and a universal democratic
citizenry’s inalienable right to life.”11 In contrast, Savarkar’s ideology was based
on the commonality of one section of the citizenry:
[T]he life of a nation is the life of that portion of its citizens whose interests
and history and aspirations are most closely bound up with the land and who
thus provide the real foundation to the structure of their national state . . . So
with the Hindus, they being the people whose past, present, and future are
most closely bound with the soil of Hindusthan as Pitribhu [Fatherland], as
Punyabhu [Holyland], they constitute the foundation, the bedrock, the
reserved forces of the Indian State.12
Sarvarkar’s pamphlet was published when the Hindu Mahasabha was in the
midst of developing a response to the government’s 1909 Minto-Moreley
reforms.13 These reforms gave separate electorates to candidates who mobil-
ized under the banner of the Muslim League.14 The Act became a precursor
to the two-nation theory that garnered strength as Muslims in India became
increasingly uncomfortable with the idea of being a minority in a free and
independent India. The Congress Party attempted to maneuver this tension
through an alliance with the League and the conceptualization of an Undiv-
ided India (Akhand Bharat). In contrast, the Hindu Mahasabha’s intervention
opposed the secular balance that Congress advocated, and identified Hindus
as a distinct race with an originary way of life and cultural values. This
9
V. D. Savarkar, Hindutva: Who Is a Hindu, 6th ed. (Delhi: Bharti Sahitya Sadan, 1989).
10
S. Sarkar, Beyond Nationalist Frames: Postmodernism, Hindu Fundamentalism, History
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2002); S. Sarkar, T. Basu, and T. Sarkar, Khaki Shorts
and Saffron Flags: A Critique of the Hindu Right (New Delhi: Orient Longman, 1993).
11
M. Basu, “Fathers of a still-born past: Hindu empire, globality and the rhetoric of the trikaal,”
Unpublished PhD dissertation, University of Pittsburgh (2008).
12 13
Savarkar, Hindutva, p. 139. Indian Councils Act 1909.
14
The All India Muslim League was founded in 1906 by Aga Khan III. Its subsequent leaders
proposed the creation of separate Muslim India. This demand was formally made in 1940 under
the leadership of Muhammad Ali Jinnah in the form of Pakistan.
ideological stand, articulated as Hindutva, was the basis of the distinct national
identity and homeland that the Hindu Mahasabha espoused.
Savarkar emphasized that Hindutva and Hinduness were political concepts,
and that Hindutva was different from Hinduism.
[W]hen we attempt to investigate into the essential significance of Hindutva
we do not primarily – and certainly not mainly – concern ourselves with any
particular theocratic or religious dogma or creed. Had not linguistic usage
stood in our way then “Hinduness” would have certainly been a better word
than Hinduism as a near parallel to Hindutva. Hindutva embraces all the
departments of thought and activity of the whole being of our Hindu role.15
Savarkar used the argument of Hindutva and Hinduness as distinct from

Hinduism as a means for establishing superiority of the Hindu race rather
than religion. According to Savarkar, “Hindus are not merely the citizens of
the Indian state because they are united not only by the bonds of love they
bear to a common motherland but also by the bonds of a common blood.”16
This definition thus classifies a Hindu in racial terms. But Savarkar did not
stop at this concept of a common fatherland and a common racial bond.
Rather, he saw a Hindu as one who inherits Indian civilization and shares a
common cultural heritage as well as religion, namely Hinduism. In Savarkar’s
definition, a Hindu is a “person who regards the land of Bharatvarsha from
Indus to the East as his Fatherland as well as his Holyland – that is the cradle
of his religion.”17 Through this elision of the fatherland and the Holyland,
Savarkar constructs the political category of Hindu in opposition to non-
Hindus, particularly Muslims and Christians, who shared a common father-
land but located their Holyland outside India. A Hindu race was constructed
by continuously posting a conflict between the Hindu and others, most
notably the “Muslim invader.” Thus, while Savarkar was emphatic that
Hindutva was distinct from Hinduism, his writings make clear that Hinduism
was an important part of being Hindu. Despite the emphasis on racial
distinctions, the difference of religion remained as a constituting moment of
the oppositional identities. This position is similar to how the Bandung Final
Communiqué blends religion and civilization. Both Hindutva and Bandung
had a cultural other: Muslims and the West, respectively.
M. S. Golwalkar further articulated the definition of the Hindu Nation
(Hindu Rashtra).18 Golwalkar’s vision of a Hindu nation included five
15 16 17
Savarkar, Hindutva, pp. 3–4. Ibid., p. 115–116. Ibid., p. 116.
18
Madhav Sadhashiv Golwalkar was an active member of the RSS, the ideological wing of the
Hindu Right. He became the second Supreme Chief (Sarsangchalak) of the RSS from 1940 to
316 Ratna Kapur
components: geography or country, race, religion, culture, and language.19 He

argued that the Hindus qualified under each of these categories and thus
constituted a nation. “Hindustan, the land of the Hindus . . . a definite
geographical entity” constitutes a country. “[T]he Hindu Race is united
together by common traditions . . . memories . . . culture . . . language . . .
[and] customs,” and thus constitutes a race.20 On religion and culture he
stated that Hinduism is the “only religion in the world worthy of being so
denominated, which in its variety is still an organic whole.”21 Through this
religion, “the Race evolved a culture which despite the degenerating contact
with the debased ‘civilisations’ of the Mussalmans and the Europeans, for the
last ten centuries, is still the noblest in the world.”22 Golwalkar concluded,
“this country, Hindustan, the Hindu Race with its Hindu Religion, Hindu,
Culture, and Hindu Language, complete the Nation concept.”23
While Hindutva is, at one level, a project of cultural, racial, and linguistic
homogenization, it is also articulated as a geographical project. “Hindustan,
the land of the Hindus, is a definite geographical unity” that constitutes a
country.24 While Bandung can be understood as a state-building project to
seize power from the West, Hindutva is a state-building project designed to
exclude or erase the Muslim other.
Despite Golwalkar’s insistence on the distinct nature of the five categories,
the entire definition of the Hindu Nation is derived from the common
religion of Hinduism. Race is defined in terms of a common culture. And
culture is in turn defined almost wholly in terms of a common religion, since
in Golwalkar’s view religion and culture for the Hindus are virtually indistin-
guishable. Country is simply the geographical territory occupied by people
united by religion, culture, and race. Language, similarly, is spoken by people
united by religion, culture, and race. The priority of religion within this
construct reveals that the appeal for a Hindu Nation is very much an appeal
to religion.
In Golwalkar’s discussion, those who were not a part of the Hindu Race still
had a chance to be a part of the Hindu Nation if they abandoned their
differences; adopted the religion, culture, and language of the Hindu Nation;
and completely merged themselves in the national race.25 Thus the call for
1973 and a major exponent of the ideological doctrine to establish India as a Hindu State
(Rashtra). He called on the religious minorities to give up their “foreign mental complexion
and merge in the common stream of our national life.” M. S. Golwalkar, We or Our
Nationhood Defined (New Dehli: Bharat Prakashan, 1939); J. Sharma, Terrifying Vision:
M.S. Golwalkar, the RSS and India (New York: Penguin, Viking, 2007).
19 20 21
Golwalkar, Nationhood Defined, p. 18. Ibid., p. 40. Ibid., p. 41.
22 23 24 25
Ibid., p. 43. Ibid., pp. 45–46. Ibid., p. 40. Ibid., p. 130.
assimilation was, first and foremost, a call for religious assimilation, for
minorities to return to the folds of Hinduism. It was only a secondary call to
assimilate into the culture and race, insofar as this culture and race is
derivative of the religious category. Golwalkar makes clear that those religious
minorities who failed to assimilate must “lose their separate existence to merge
in the Hindu race, or may stay in the country, wholly subordinated to the
Hindu Nation, claiming nothing, deserving no privileges, far less any prefer-
ential treatment – not even citizen’s rights.”26 The Hindu Nation was thus
constituted in the writings of Golwalkar through an expression of enmity to
religious minorities.
These conceptualizations of the Hindu Nation continue to inform the
political agenda of the Hindu Right today. The contemporary ideologues of
the Hindu Right continue to emphasize a distinction between Hindu and
Hinduism, and to insist that Hindu is an attitude of allegiance. The supremacy
of Hinduism remains the basis of the political claims against the minorities,
who follow religions that allow neither toleration nor secularism. And in the
process, Hindu majoritarianism comes to constitute the basic scaffolding of
the right to equality. Within this context, the campaign to construct a Ram
temple in Ayodhya has acquired such importance and the religious nature of
the political rhetoric of the Hindu Right has become most evident.
confluence of equality and religious majoritarianism

In the Ayodhya campaign, the Hindu Right sought to have the sixteenth-
century Babri Masjid mosque replaced with a Hindu temple. This campaign
has proved to be enormously successful in generating broad-based support for
the Hindu Right. The Hindu Right alleged that the mosque was built on the
site of the birth of the Hindu god Ram and demanded that it be removed, and
that a temple commemorating the birth of Ram be built in its place. The
campaign succeeded in mobilizing thousands of supporters, some of whom
followed the marchers to Ayodhya, while many others sent money and bricks
to help construct the new temple. On December 6, 1992, mobs of the Hindu
Right destroyed the Babri Masjid, triggering massive communal riots around
the country in which thousands of people were killed.
Despite the national outcry condemning the Hindu Right, and the role of
the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) in the destruction and the violence that
followed in its wake, the political momentum of the BJP continued to grow.
26
Ibid., pp. 47–48; emphasis added.
318 Ratna Kapur
In the 1996 national elections, the BJP emerged as the largest single political
party and was invited to form the government. Unable to secure the support
required to form a coalition government, the BJP government fell within two
weeks. But the enormous increase in its popularity among the Indian elector-
ate could not be ignored. In the 1998 elections, following the collapse of the
United Front government (an unstable alliance of India’s regional parties and
the Left, with Congress supporting the coalition from the outside), the BJP
again emerged as the largest single party and successfully formed a coalition
government (the National Democratic Alliance) that governed from 1999 to
2004. The BJP was again voted out of power in the 2004 elections, after
presiding over the worst communal riots since independence, in Gujarat in
2002, where Narender Modi was the state’s chief minister. However, in May
2014, the BJP was elected with a majority government after ten years of rule
by the United Progressive Alliance, a coalition led by the Congress Party.
Narender Modi, a former lobbyist (pracharak) of Hindutva and member of the
Rashtriya Swayam Seva (RSS),27 the Hindu Right’s ideological wing, was
appointed the new prime minister.
The 2014 elections signaled a major shift in the political and cultural
constellation of India in the direction that early ideologues of the Hindu
Right envisioned. The BJP’s successful political inroads must be seen in the
broader context of the discursive struggles of the Hindu Right, in which
they have attempted to establish their vision of Hindutva as ideologically
dominant – partly by using the very principles of equality as well as cultural
distinction embraced by the Bandung Conference. Through their collective
efforts, they have sought to naturalize the ideas of Hindutva by making them a
part of the common sense of an increasingly large segment of Hindu society as
well as by making inroads into the constitutional definition of equality and
secularism, which has received judicial sanction.
In the contemporary political terrain, Hindutva continues to be a political
category that is distinct from the religion of Hinduism but that relies on
religion in constituting the political category of Hindu. It is opposite to the
Nehruvian vision of the state as the sum of its fragments and one committed
to a secular ideal based on a model separation of state and religion and state
neutrality in all matters of religion. This model, based on the idea that
religion could be exorcised from the body politic of a nation, seemed to
contradict the underlying and unifying idea of the Bandung Conference,
where those present sought to distinguish themselves from the West, partly
27
National Volunteer Organization.
through the reassertion of their distinct cultural and religious values as set out
in the Final Communiqué. Both Hindutva and Bandung draw on the logic of
formal equality (read as: sameness under the unifying banner of a culturally
distinct national identity) as well as difference (read as: distinction from the
West as well as a religious other). This understanding of equality has also
influenced the Hindu Right’s understanding of secularism within the Indian
context.
At the point of Independence, the Hindu Right endorsed the Gandhian
model of secularism based on the equal treatment of all religions.28 Like the
liberal democratic vision of secularism, the Indian model is based on equality
and freedom of religion. However, toleration displaces the third principle of
the liberal vision, neutrality, in the Indian model.29 The Hindu Right has
used this model of secularism based on the equal treatment of all religions to
argue in favor of a formal model of equality based on sameness; that is, to treat
all of India’s religious communities the same. This model is used to attack
so-called special treatment accorded to the religious minorities under the
Indian Constitution as appeasement and a violation of the principle of
equality, while simultaneously using the right to entrench Hindu majoritar-
ianism. The Hindu Right has sought to cast themselves as the true inheritors
of India’s secular tradition or the promoters of genuine secularism that
demands “justice for all and appeasement for none.” Its success in infusing
the constitutional principles of equality and secularism in ways that have
been consistent with its vision of Hindutva was evident in the Hindutva cases
(1996) of the Indian Supreme Court as well as the Allahabad High Court’s
decision (2010) in suits filed with respect to a disputed area of land in
Ayodhya, where the Hindu Right parties have sought to construct a Ram
temple. These judgments need to be situated within the broader context of
the discursive struggles of the Hindu Right and its efforts to legitimize its
vision of Hindu supremacy as well as the articulation of the free and inde-
pendent India as a Hindu nation-state.
28
The “equal treatment of all religions” is a model of secularism that does not require a wall of
separation between religion and politics. Engineer Asghar Ali, “Secularism in India – Theory
and Practice,” in Rudolf C. Heredia and Edward Mathias (eds.), Secularism and Liberation:
Perspectives and Strategies for India Today (New Delhi: Indian Social Institute, 1995), p. 40.
29
The separation thesis was rejected partly on the grounds that it was a distinctly Western
concept. At the same time, the secularism project was also deeply implicated in the
formulation of nationalism, which provided a counter to the challenges posed by Muslims and
other disadvantaged groups as well as to British colonial discourses. Shabnum Tejani, Indian
Secularism: A Social and Intellectual History, 1890–1950 (Ranikhet: Permanent Black, 2007).
320 Ratna Kapur
The Indian Supreme Court has played a critical role in defining the
content of religion, where ideas of nationalism as well as Hindu majoritarian-
ism increasingly converge, and in the process establish the contours of secu-
larism and the formal model of equality on which it is based. The most famous
decisions the court delivered in 1996 were in the Hindutva cases.30 In these
cases, several speeches of Shiv Sena/BJP candidates during a state election
campaign in 1987 were challenged as appealing to religion to gain votes and in
the process promote religious enmity in violation of the provisions of the
Representation of the People Act of 1951. Although the court found several
of the accused guilty, it also held that Hindutva – the ideological linchpin of
the Hindu Right – simply represented “a way of life of people of the
subcontinent.”
According to the court, Hindutva could not be equated with or understood
as religious fundamentalism or as a depiction of an attitude hostile to persons
practicing other religions. Rather, Hindutva was used to promote secularism
by emphasizing the way of life of the Indian people and the Indian culture, or
to criticize the policy of any political party that was discriminatory or intoler-
ant. It held that appealing to Hindutva was neither an appeal to religion nor a
promotion of religious hatred, and thus was not a violation of the Act.
The decision illustrates how secularism comes to be equated with major-
itarianism through Hindutva. The court’s conclusion on the meaning of
Hindutva is legally, historically, and politically unsupportable. The writings
of the ideological leaders discussed previously reveal how Hindutva is the
mental state or attitude of the Hindu race and the Hindu nation – a race and a
nation that are, at their very core, about religion. And the minorities are
constructed as the enemies or threat to this Hindu nation.
Fourteen years later, on September 30, 2010, the Allahabad High Court
decided largely in favor of the Hindu parties in a series of suits filed to
determine the legal title to a plot of land on which they have sought to build
a Ram temple – precisely on the spot where the Babri mosque once stood.
While the case is complicated,31 all the judges seemed to agree that worship at
the site constituted a core ingredient for the Hindu faith, and, in the words of
one judge, to disallow prayer would be “to extinguish the very religion.”32
30
For the purpose of brevity I refer to the lead case, Dr. Prabhoo v. Prabhakar Kasinath Kunte
and Ors. (1995) S.C.A.L.E. 1.
31
R. Kapur, “A Leap of Faith: The Construction of Hindu Majoritarianism through Secular
Law” (2014), 113 South Atlantic Quarterly at 109–128.
32
Visharad v. Ahmad, O.O.S., No. 1 of 1989, All. H.C., 4 (2010) (opinion of Sharma, J.,
volume 4), p. 121.
conclusion
The principles of equality and recognition of cultural and civilizational
differences set out in the Bandung Final Communiqué are inherently in
tension. Bandung employed a universalism that was expressed in terms of an
imagined “renewal” of a pre-imperial cultural and spiritual alliance among
African and Asian nations, despite their differences, to distinguish themselves
from the West and former colonial powers. Yet, the Bandung principles (and
international law) also recognized the equality of all races and people. How
was this tension between cultural universalism and the principle of equality to
be resolved? This paradox of Bandung foregrounds the possibility of a Hindu
state through its adoption of the universal principles of human rights, includ-
ing the right to equality, while also recognizing the cultural and civilizational
distinction of those countries present from the West as well as from the
Muslim other.
The Hindu Right has secured an ideological grip within legal discourse
where their successful engagements with the discourses of equality and secu-
larism have been powerful and persuasive. And the judicial decisions are
increasingly reflecting the influence of this discursive strategy, where secular-
ism has come to be equated with Hindutva, the ideological core of the Hindu
Right, and equality with sameness in treatment. This narrowing of the under-
standing of equality has enabled more violence against religious minorities,
justified in terms of self-defense, and has set up such minorities as opposed to
the secularism, equality, and basic values of the constitution.
The chapter highlights some of the less perceptible effects of the colonial
encounter, which operated through the ecologies of governance in and
through liberal rights. These effects do not amount to a wholesale embrace
of colonial technologies,33 but rather a reformulation and reordering of the art
of governance in the management of religious minorities, while also consti-
tuting the very identity of the modern nation-state. The durabilities of these
forms of governance are mutated in the postcolonial present, and are less
visible and hence more insidious in remaining less identifiable.
33
A. Mbembe, On the Postcolony (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001).
19
From Bandung 1955 to Bangladesh 1971

Postcolonial Self-Determination and Third World
Failures in South Asia
cyra akila choudhury
“What did we get? The weapons bought at the expense of our money to protect the
country from invasion of foreign enemies is now being used against the poor and
unarmed people of our country; they are being shot down. We are the majority people
of Pakistan. Whenever we Bengalis tried to gain power, tried to rule this country as our
own, they assaulted us.”1
“Millions of souls nineteenseventyone

homeless on Jessore road under grey sun
A million are dead, the million who can
Walk toward Calcutta from East Pakistan. . ..”
“Two children together in palmroof shade

Stare at me no word is said
Rice ration, lentils one time a week
Milk powder for warweary infants meek.”2
introduction
If the politics of pre-independence India are any indication, Pakistan and
India were destined to be antagonists from the moment of their emergence as
independent states. It is unsurprising that hostilities broke out before the first
anniversary of independence had passed. Yet, despite their animosity, the
countries cooperated diplomatically as two principal participants in the
1
Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, speech of March 7, 1971, at the Dhaka Race Course. Available at
www.youtube.com/watch?v=J9vUulq4tZI (last accessed August 31, 2017).
2
Allen Ginsberg, “September on Jessore Road,” November 1971. Available at www.everyday-
beat.org/ginsberg/poems/jessore.txt. In the poem, excerpted here, Ginsberg recounts his visit to
a refugee camp in Calcutta. He notes that the refugees are fed once a week and that children
die of malnutrition, cholera, and dysentery as their parents watch helplessly.
322
From Bandung 1955 to Bangladesh 1971 323
formation of the Third World at the first Afro-Asian Conference held in

Bandung in 1955. The Bandung Principles, articulated in the Final Commu-
niqué, set out the terms of mutual coexistence in a new postcolonial world.
Ideally, these principles espoused a vision in which each Third World state
would maintain peace and stability through mutual respect for sovereignty and
without aligning itself with a superpower.3 However, from the start, India and
Pakistan had very different visions of their respective places in global politics.
India was concerned with maintaining its anticolonial credentials by
remaining nonaligned, and hoped for a similarly nonaligned Third World;
Pakistan saw its security as assured only through leveraging its superpower ally,
the United States, against India. These competing and seemingly diametric-
ally opposed stances indicate the array of political arrangements available to
the newly independent states.
Although Bandung is to be celebrated as the beginning of a Third World
consciousness, the Conference did not settle the question of how best to
conduct international relations in this new world. Questions about the very
nature of the Third World state, moreover, remained extant. Participants’
preoccupation with superpower and Cold War politics, as well as colonial
legacies, obscured the internal governance and distributive problems of
member states. Bandung did not require participants to confront the fact that
many of their regimes were dominated by feudal elites who had held power
since precolonial times and were led by military dictators who repressed their
own populations. The dissonance between precolonial politics that allowed
anticolonial nationalist movements to demand independence on the basis of
liberal principles and self-determination did not follow into the
postcolonial state.
Once independence had been achieved, the theory of self-determination
was no longer applicable to internal populations, thus creating a tension
between statist ideals of sovereignty and the liberation (or self-determination)
of people within the state. Bandung’s aspirations, as articulated by the leaders
of postcolonial heterogeneous states, all of which had internally fractious
minorities, failed to reach the people of its member states in any meaningful
way and remained a matter of high state policy and diplomacy.4
This chapter examines the Bandung movement and principles as well as
the fantasy of a different world order through the lens of East Pakistan’s
3
Asian-African Conference of Bandung (24 April 1955),” Asia-Africa Speak from Bandung.
4
Christopher J. Lee, “Introduction,” in Making a World after Empire: The Bandung Moment
and Its Political Afterlives (Athens Ohio University Press, 2010), pp. 18–19.
324 Cyra Akila Choudhury
struggle for independence. Taking for granted that self-determination was

limited to colonial contexts, Bandung and its members were at odds with
the aspirations of internally colonized populations and, as such, were left
toothless in the face of humanitarian crises precipitated by state-sponsored
antidemocratic and human-rights abuses. The internal social, political, and
legal subordination of the Bengali majority population within Pakistan led two
of the most significant players at Bandung to breach the conference’s prin-
ciples. The Bangladesh conflict of 1971, in which West Pakistan used the
military to thwart a popular election and repress dissent through violence
against unarmed civilians, showed that, contrary to Bandung’s assumption, the
newly independent Third World state was not a reflection of its population.
The state was also unable to withstand the pressures of Cold War geopolitics
or guarantee justice to its own people. The ongoing intrastate human rights
abuses and political repression eventually gave rise to demands for redress,
sometimes for autonomy even within the state system, and, as a last resort,
claims for self-determination.5 The ideals espoused at Bandung, which were
primarily aimed at staving off interstate pressures from global powers, could
not address these challenges. In retrospect, they demonstrate limited success
for people in postcolonial states. The dominant international responses by
member states in the 1960s and 1970s to internal repression and violence
reflect these weaknesses, if not outright failures. The responses are now all too
familiar: military intervention under the auspices of humanitarian law to cope
with the problem of internal conflict or noninterference and the acceptance
of the killing of large numbers of civilians.6
This chapter first discusses the geopolitical relationship between India and
Pakistan and their relationship to the broader Cold War dynamics in the
decades preceding the 1971 conflict. It then explores the tensions between
these political realities and the concurrent emergence of the Non-Aligned
Movement, which demanded particular forms of third-world relations and
imposed norms of behavior between newly decolonized states. These ideals
were ultimately put to a test that proved their weakness, as internal minority
5
In both the Biafran and Bangladeshi cases, the demands for independence came after resorting
to other means, including regional autonomy. For a discussion of the Biafran crisis, see Pius L.
Okoronkwo, (2002) “Self-Determination and the Legality of Biafra’s Secession Under
International Law,” 25 Loyola of Los Angeles International and Comparative Law Review 63, at
66–73. For a discussion of East Pakistan’s road to independence, see Srinath Raghavan, 1971:
A Global History of the Creation of Bangladesh (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,
2013), p. 6.
6
See Brad Simpson, “The Biafran Succession and the Limits of Self-Determination” (2014) 16
Journal of Genocide Research 337, at 337–338.
populations began to press for recognition using the same anticolonial rhet-
oric of self-determination. The bases of the Bangladesh crisis are recounted to
demonstrate the extent of repression that the international community was
willing to countenance. Finally, the chapter argues that given the elevation of
the principles of sovereignty and noninterference over the rights and political
aspirations of citizens, both the United Nations and the Third World countries
represented in the General Assembly were ill equipped to respond to Paki-
stan’s killing of Bengalis.
1947–1968: india vs. pakistan

Two years after the conclusion of the Second World War, the Indian subcon-
tinent achieved its long-cherished dream of independence. After engaging in a
grueling war, for which the region provided troops and materials, saw action
on the Burmese front, suffered economic drain by the center, and endured the
human-made disaster of the 1943 Bengal famine, it then experienced the
nearly indescribable horrors of partition. The resulting states of India and
Pakistan emerged at odds with one another over territory and identity. The
residual territorial disputes over Kashmir and Hyderabad were interwoven
with the distinct identitarian visions of the states’ leaders. The Indians – led
by Gandhi, Nehru, and the Congress Party – asserted a Hindu-inflected
secularism in which all minorities would be welcome.7 Yet, at key moments,
they refused to share or to devolve power to Muslims in Muslim-majority
provinces.8 Pakistan, led by Jinnah and the Muslim League, advanced a two-
nation theory in which Muslims were reconstructed as an entirely different
people regardless of their regional and ethnic identities. The two-nation
theory was the basis for a demand for a separate homeland carved out of India
in the majority Muslim provinces of East Bengal and the Northwest areas
stretching from Sindh and Baluchistan, parts of Punjab to the Northwest
Frontier. Prior to decolonization, Bengali Muslims were fully supportive of
partition and vigorously pushed for a separate state.9 The result was an
improbable geographic space of two wings separated by 1,000 miles of Indian
territory. Furthermore, East Bengal, now reborn as East Pakistan, was cut off
from its Western counterpart, which contained the central government and
most of the institutions of power.10
7
See generally Ayesha Jalal, State and Sovereignty: Individual and Community in South Asian
Islam since 1850 (New York: Routledge, 2001).
8 9 10
Ibid. Ibid. Raghavan, A Global History, p. 6.
Between 1947 and 1968, India and Pakistan fought two wars, both initiated
by Pakistan.11 The first came hard on the heels of independence over the issue
of Jammu and Kashmir. Ruled by a Hindu royal family, Kashmir was a
majority Muslim state and contiguous to Pakistan. Under the two-nation
theory, Pakistan argued that Muslims were a separate nation, making Kashmir
and its majority Muslim Pakistanis. However, India’s secular state, which
never ascribed this theory, saw no reason for ceding the state to its neighbor.
Moreover, the population of Kashmir was divided about which state to join,
and a considerable contingent preferred an autonomous state altogether.
Through the fall and winter of 1947, a war raged between Pakistan and India
to settle the matter. As it progressed, when neither side could achieve a
conclusive victory, the two countries agreed to a cease-fire, and the cease-
fire line became the de facto border.12
Internationally, the Kashmir issue became an albatross at the UN. India’s
demands that Pakistan be labeled an aggressor state came to naught. From
January to August 1948, the Security Council passed three resolutions
attempting to resolve the conflict, to no avail.13 Neither India nor Pakistan
was willing to accede, and India was wary of leaving the fate of four million of
its citizens (or so it claimed) to the uncertainty of international arbitration.
The commission appointed by the UN was ultimately thwarted by the intransi-
gence of both parties. In 1957, Pakistan once again referred the case to the
Security Council, hoping India’s support of Egypt during the Suez Crisis and
its unequivocal support of the Soviet Union during the Hungarian uprising
would shift support in Western countries to Pakistan.14
As the Cold War intensified, the United States began to provide arms to
Pakistan. The 1962 Sino-Indian war, in which India received a thorough
trouncing at the hands of the Chinese, saw an escalation in modernization
of the Indian armed forces. While this was clearly a reaction to India’s
lackluster performance against China, it also placed Pakistan in a precarious
position, resulting in an arms race in the subcontinent.15
Between the Bandung Conference in 1955 and the Belgrade Conference in
1961, India and Pakistan, along with China, participated in the formation of
the Third World and the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM), which espoused
11
Sumit Ganguly, Conflict Unending: India-Pakistan Tensions since 1947 (New York: Columbia
12 13
Ibid. Ibid.
14
Ibid. One might note here the inconsistency of India’s position failing to support Hungary’s
attempt at independence from Soviet control as compared to East Pakistan.
15
Husain Haqqani, Magnificent Delusions: Pakistan, the United States, and an Epic History of
Misunderstanding (New York: PublicAffairs, 2013), pp. 106–122.
peaceful coexistence despite the fact that all three nations were engaged in
repeated hostilities. Yet, as the conference discussions made evident, there was
disagreement about nonalignment as envisioned by Nehru.16 From the start of
Bandung, there were tensions with regard to defense pacts and regional
balances of power. As noted, India and Pakistan were already in conflict over
Kashmir by 1955. Pakistan resisted Nehru’s attempts to fashion a regional
identity based on his interpretations of anticolonialism and anti-imperialism.17
Pakistan joined the Southeast Asia Treaty Organization (SEATO) and tried to
equate Soviet communism with imperialism.18 Even within the Colombo
powers – Indonesia, Burma, Sri Lanka, India, and Pakistan – Cold War
strategic positioning had already taken hold. Another reason to reject the link
between anticolonialism and the principles of nonalignment was that a
number of “the nascent nation-states saw other Asian countries as the primary
threats to their identity and security. The imperialism of ‘white’ Western states
was still a concern but ‘Asian’ imperialism was seen as a far greater threat by
certain smaller Asian states.”19 This was true for Pakistan, whose request for
military aid was based on the need to stave off India’s territorial ambitions in
Kashmir.
Within two months of the start of hostilities, the 1965 war between Pakistan
and India became a stalemate. In September of that year, both sides agreed to
a cease-fire. The settlement was brokered under the auspices of the Soviet
Union in the Tashkent Agreement. The United States evinced little interest in
the postwar situation. By 1965, the Afro-Asian moment in South Asia had
clearly passed. The attempt to hold a second conference in Algiers was a
disaster.20 Specifically, India’s relationship with China crumbled with the
Sino-Indian war of 1962. India’s role in bringing China into the Bandung fold
and China’s star turn at the Conference had not resulted in the kind of
relationship of mutual cooperation and world peace envisioned by the Final
Communiqué.21 Instead, the 1962 and 1965 conflicts pushed both India and
Pakistan into Cold War affiliations before the dust had even settled from the
16
See Seng Tan and Amitav Acharya (eds.), Bandung Revisited: The Legacy of the 1955 Asian-
African Conference for International Order (Singapore: NUS Press, 2008), pp. 7–10.
17
Sinderpal Singh, “From Delhi to Bandung: Nehru, ‘India-ness’ and ‘Pan-Asian-ness,’” (2011) 34
Journal of South Asian Studies 1, at 60–63.
18
Roland Burke, “Afro-Asian Alignment: Charles Malik and the Cold War at Bandung,” in
Derek McDougall and Antonia Finnane (eds.), Bandung 1955: Little Histories (Caulfield:
Monash University Press, 2010).
19
See Singh, “From Delhi to Bandung,” at 62.
20
See generally T. B. Millar and J. D. B. Miller, “Afro-Asian Disunity: Algiers, 1965” (1965) 19
Australian Outlook 306.
21
See Ministry of Foreign Affairs, “Final Communiqué.”
NAM conference in 1961. Indeed, the enmity provided a new opening for the
Soviet Union to become more involved in South Asia and as a counterweight
to China in the region. Both India and Pakistan maneuvered geopolitically
between the two global superpowers in order to secure support from the
United Nations. To complicate matters, the United States was looking for
an opening to China through Pakistan.22
1952 and 1968: restive majorities, the repressive

third world state, and self-determination in
east pakistan
While Pakistan was attempting to settle the Kashmir dispute with India,
whether by force of arms or negotiations, it also had internal problems. The
eastern and western populations of Pakistan, supposedly united by religion,
found that differences of language, ethnicity, and perhaps even political
ambitions mattered more. These became major sources of conflict between
the two wings. Shortly after independence, the government of Pakistan insti-
tuted Urdu as the official national language of Pakistan, which resulted in an
ongoing popular movement seeking to establish Bengali on equal footing.
This movement was met with increasing political repression and rising Ben-
gali nationalism.23
Between 1954 and 1971, democratic politics in Pakistan suffered serious
setbacks. The country continued to be ruled by military leaders – Ayub Khan
from 1958 to 1969 and Yahya Khan from 1969 to 1971. “There was complete
authoritarian rule in the country from 1958 to 1962; then came a period of
controlled or guided democracy under which the President and the same old
ruling elite dominated the political scene.”24
The period during Ayub’s rule was marked by neglect of the eastern wing.
The economic disparities between East and West indicate internal coloniza-
tion and exploitation. In the first two decades after independence, East
Pakistan earned 65–70 percent of Pakistan’s foreign exchange. However, the
central government invested only 30 percent of these earnings in the East.25 At
independence, West Pakistan’s regional income was less than that of the East,
22
See Haqqani, Magnificent Delusions.
23
Richard Sisson and Leo E. Rose, War and Secession: Pakistan, India and the Creation of
Bangladesh (Oakland: University of California Press, 1990), pp. 8–16.
24
G. W. Choudhury, “Bangladesh: Why It Happened” (1972) 48 International Affairs 242, at 244.
25
Ved P. Nanda, “Self-Determination Outside the Colonial Context: The Birth of Bangladesh in
Retrospect” (1979) 1 Houston Journal of International Law 71, at 76.
but in two decades it had risen to 25 percent higher.26 Furthermore, growth

was lower in the East, as was per capita income. In 1947, the West had very
little by way of manufacturing, but by 1960, 70 percent of the industrial
development was located in the West. “Almost eighty percent of Pakistan’s
budget and seventy percent of its development funds were spent in West
Pakistan.”27 In addition to economic exploitation, the East was systematically
discriminated against in terms of power.
After two decades of independence, Bengalis represented barely 15 percent
of the personnel in government services. In the armed forces, Bengalis never
constituted more than 10 percent of the officer corps, and only one achieved
the rank of major general or higher. In the cabinet, one Bengali minister was
appointed in fifteen years; he held office for only four days.28 Nothing was
done to promote East Pakistan’s development or inclusion into a unified and
equal whole; East Pakistan and its people were treated as vassals and exploited
for natural resources. Coupled with the attempts at imposing a national and
foreign language, it is easy to surmise the resentment and resistance that was
already fomenting by the time the December 1970 elections were held.
These elections were the first open and democratic elections held in
Pakistan. It was widely believed that no single party would gain an absolute
majority of seats and, therefore, a coalition government would have to be
formed. However, the main East Pakistani party, the Awami League (AL),
swept the election and gained all but two seats in East Pakistan.29 This gave
them a clear majority of seats nationwide, and technically would have allowed
them to form a government without coalition partners. It was a clear mandate
from East Pakistan in support of AL’s six-point program demanding a federal
system and autonomy for the region. But no party won significantly in both
wings. As such, the West Pakistani oligarchs were reluctant to allow an East
Pakistani party to form a government without input and partnership of a West
Pakistani party: that party would be the Pakistan People’s Party (PPP), led by
Zulfikar Ali Bhutto.
From the elections until March 1971, Yahya Khan did not allow AL to form
a government. Moreover, the National Assembly, Pakistan’s legislative body,
was not convened even as attempts were made to negotiate with AL to form
some sort of partnership with the PPP. By February, it was clear that neither
the AL nor Yahya Khan were going to come to an agreement. “On or around
26
Ved P. Nanda, “Self-Determination in International Law: The Tragic Tale of Two Cities –
Islamabad (West Pakistan) and Dacca (East Pakistan)” (1972) 66 American Journal of
International Law 321, at 328.
27 28 29
Ibid., at 330. Ibid., at 328. Raghavan, A Global History.
20 February, the army began preparations for the military option . . . The first
troop reinforcements began landing in Dhaka on 27 February.”30 On March 1,
Yahya Khan announced the postponement of the National Assembly, which
caused an immediate outpouring of Bengalis into the streets. Two days later, a
region-wide strike brought life to a halt. Between March 3 and March 25,
Mujib outlined the disenfranchisement and subordination of the East while
Yahya Khan failed to make any concrete proposals in talks held by the two
sides. By March 24, West Pakistani officials were told to leave the area. At 11:30
PM on March 25, 1971, Operation Searchlight commenced. Mujib was jailed,
AL was banned, and the army began to systematically kill East Pakistan’s
political leaders, its intelligentsia, and its student leaders.31 The military
slaughter of students in their dorms and killing of professors in Dhaka Univer-
sity has become infamous. What followed has been variously called a selective
genocide, a genocide, and a holocaust.32 The Pakistani army conducted a
campaign of rape, torture, and murder that left anywhere from 100,000 to
1 million people – a majority of them civilians – dead and countless others
injured and maimed.33 Toni Hagen, Swiss United Nations Chief in Dhaka,
observed that “the destruction suffered by Bangladesh was greater than that
suffered by Europe in World War II.”34
Within the month, it became clear that the Pakistani army was ethnically
cleansing Hindus from East Pakistan along with anyone in a position of
leadership in the East. By April, millions of refugees were fleeing into the
border states of India, which was absorbing up to 50,000 refugees a day in
states that were already impoverished and straining to feed their own popula-
tions. By September, India had 1.76 million children in the refugee camps,
and 4,300 perished every day.35 At the height of the civil war, India was home
to ten million East Pakistani refugees. For months, as the refugees continued
to pour in, Indira Gandhi’s administration made the rounds of the world’s
capitals in an effort to secure aid and to convince Pakistan’s allies to influence
the military regime to stem the bloodshed.36 At the UN, Pakistan and India
30 31
32
See generally Gary Bass, The Blood Telegram (New York: Vintage, 2013); see also Sydney
Schanberg, “Bengalis’ Land a Vast Cemetery,” New York Times, Jan. 24, 1972, at 1; Anthony
Mascarenhas, The Rape of Bangladesh (Delhi: Vikas, 1972); Cousin, “Genocide in Pakistan,”
Saturday Review, May 22, 1971, at 20.
33
The precise number of dead is impossible to pinpoint and has become a political hot potato. As
such, I give here a range taken from the most reliable sources. See Raghavan, A Global History,
p. 12 (eliminating the highest number of 3 million and the lowest of 26,000).
34
Ved P. Nanda, “A Critique of the United Nations Inaction in the Bangladesh Crisis” (1972) 49
Denver Law Journal 53, at 56 (1972).
35 36
Gary Bass, The Blood Telegram, at 235. Ibid.
exchanged heated accusations. Pakistan demanded that its sovereignty be

respected and that India desist from aiding the Bengali liberation forces.37
India repeatedly brought the plight of millions of refugees and the killing of
civilians to the attention of the Security Council.38 But “[n]ot until full-scale
war between India and Pakistan had erupted did the Security Council and the
General Assembly see fit to discuss the matter.”39 As for NAM, the UN
General Assembly vote reaffirming international ideals of sovereignty and
noninterference spoke volumes about its inadequacies in materially changing
the international relationships already in place by the time of Bandung, both
between the Asian states and the superpowers, as well as among Pakistan,
India, and China regionally.
failure to restrain: nonalignment, sovereignty, and

bandung as international fantasy
The insecurity born of regional hostilities led to many postcolonial states lining
up behind a superpower. Pakistan, Philippines, Thailand, Iran, Iraq, and
Turkey had already chosen sides by the time of the Bandung Conference. In
the India-Pakistan context, Pakistan, outgunned by India’s numerically super-
ior armed forces and weaponry, leveraged its relationship with both the United
States and China to protect itself. It also relied on the respect for sovereignty
and principles of noninterference in internal affairs to prevent incursions into
its territory in the 1971 conflict.40 Given that self-determination, noninterfer-
ence, and sovereignty were also some of the keystones of Bandung and its Final
Communiqué, it was foreseeable that the East Pakistan conflict and the
subsequent emergence of Bangladesh raised quandaries about how to deal
with internal populations with ideas of self-determination.41
The statist orientation of Bandung participants and the members of NAM
made it difficult to react to a full-scale civil war. The primary concerns for the
newly independent states were the depredations of the Global North and
regional hegemons, not the state itself. But almost every major conference
organizer had a dominant group that was actively subjugating internal popu-
lations.42 None could afford to recognize self-determination within the
borders of an existing state. Moreover, even if internal populations’ human
rights were being violated, the ideals of noninterference and peaceful coexist-
ence were meant to prevent any ideas of intervention by regional or Cold War
actors. The worry about intervention was well founded, given the
37
See Nanda, “Bangladesh Crisis.” 38
Ibid. 39
Ibid., at 57. 40
Ibid.
41
See Ministry of Foreign Affairs, “Final Communiqué.” 42
See Lee, Making a World.
interventions of the United States in Vietnam, Latin America, and the Carib-
bean and of the Soviet Union in Hungary and other Eastern European states.
In the context of the Bangladesh liberation struggle, the Bandung countries
and NAM were philosophically ill equipped to do much but reinforce the
need for respect for sovereignty and noninterference. The script had already
been rehearsed during the Biafra crisis in Nigeria. Preceding the Bangladesh
war by a mere four years, the Biafran attempt to secede from Nigeria in
1967 presents an interesting contrast in terms of outcome but also continuity
as another instance of the Bandung fantasy.43
Biafra’s claim to independence rested on similar factors to those of East
Pakistan. Both considered themselves distinct from the Western part of their
respective nations, each claimed political and economic repression and lack
of adequate democratic representation, and in both cases the decision to
declare a separate state was a last resort preceded by large-scale violence
against civilians.44 UN inaction with regard to the Pakistan crisis and the
Bandung states’ relative silence in the wake of Biafra reflects the dominant
notion that once independence was achieved from a colonial power, self-
determination no longer applied to internal populations of those postcolonial
states.45 In 1965, the UN General Assembly adopted the Declaration on the
Inadmissibility of Intervention in the Domestic Affairs of States and Protection
of their Independence and Sovereignty. Article 1 of the Declaration reads:
No State has the right to intervene, directly or indirectly, for any reason
whatever, in the internal or external affairs of any other State. Consequently,
armed intervention and all other forms of interference or attempted threats
against the personality of the State or against its political, economic and
cultural elements, are condemned.46
Bandung and nonaligned countries, which were heavily represented in

the General Assembly, did not depart from this principle of nonintervention.
Indeed, UN Secretary-General U Thant noted that none of the Bandung
or NAM countries referred the Biafran situation to the Security
Council.47 Very few recognized the state of Biafra after it declared
43
See Okoronkwo, “Self-Determination.”
44
Ibid.; see generally Lasse Heerten and A. Dirk Moses, “The Nigeria-Biafra War: Postcolonial
Conflict and the Question of Genocide” (2014) 16 Journal of Genocide Research, at 169.
45
See, e.g., Thomas M. Franck and Paul Hoffman, “The Right of Self-Determination in Very
Small Places” (1975) 8 New York University Journal of International Law and Policy 331.
46
See U.N. Docs, A/RES/20/2131, Dec. 21, 1965. Available at www.un-documents.net/a20r2131
.htm (last accessed Jan. 20, 2015).
47
Moses Moskowitz, International Concern with Human Rights (New York: Springer, 1974),
pp. 38–39.
independence.48 This posture with regard to both nonintervention and self-

determination did not change throughout the Bangladesh crisis.
As many have noted, there was no precedent for a state to unilaterally
intervene in another on the basis of internal human rights violations.49 India
repeatedly asserted that the refugees flooding into its border states no longer
made the killing in East Pakistan a sovereign matter. Rather, the swelling
foreign population was becoming a security threat and an economic drain on
India. Relief efforts by the United States and the UN were insufficient to solve
the problem, which originated in the relentless army campaign within
Pakistani borders. India argued that only when the conditions within the
eastern wing were stable and violence ended would people stop fleeing and
return to their homes.50 Pakistan resolutely held the position that the problem
was entirely domestic. The conflict was thus framed as national or inter-
national, requiring different legal responses depending on perspective. It was
only practically resolved by India’s unilateral, unsanctioned intervention and
the resulting fait accompli of Bangladeshi independence.
For the most part, India tried to abide by the international consensus. From
March to December 1971, the Indian government supported the refugees,
gave assistance to the liberation forces of Bangladesh, hosted the government
in exile, but did not encroach into the territory of Pakistan.51 In fact – and this
may be a technicality, but it is an important one – Pakistan was the first to
attack India in December. India’s reaction was swift and decisive. Only when
the Indian forces entered into Pakistani territory did the Security Council
change gears. However, Cold War political alliances prevented the Security
Council from being effective. As was expected, the United States and China
pressed the claims of their Pakistani clients, invoking Article 2(7) on territorial
integrity, while the Soviet Union took up Indian counterarguments. The
result was a deadlock and a failure to pass any resolution demanding that
Pakistan cease its genocide or that India remove itself from Pakistani territory.
The matter was then referred to the General Assembly.52
The text of General Assembly resolution 2793 and the vote was remarkable
because of the number of newly independent Bandung and NAM states that
48
See Simpson, “The Biafran Succession,” at 342 (only Haiti, Tanzania, Ivory Coast, Gabon, and
Zambia formally recognized Biafra).
49
Thomas M. Franck and Nigel S. Rodley, “After Bangladesh: The Law of Humanitarian
Intervention by Military Force” (1973) 67 American Journal of International Law 275, at
290–298.
50
See Nicholas J. Wheeler, Saving Strangers: Humanitarian Intervention in International Society
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), p. 64.
51
See Raghavan, A Global History, at 54–79. 52
See Nanda, “Bangladesh Crisis.”
were represented.53 It became clear that given India’s failure to gain support
for action in its diplomatic efforts and at the UN, concerns of territorial
integrity outweighed human rights or the independence claims of Bengalis.
The discussion before the vote reflects this preoccupation.
The overwhelming majority in favor of the resolution demonstrated the
concern of the members for territorial integrity and article 2(7). Pakistan
explained its interpretation of the resolution to mean that “no attempt would
be made to disrupt the national unity of Pakistan, and that any attempts by
the General Assembly to intervene in the situation would be within the
principle of the territorial integrity of Pakistan.”54
The General Assembly resolution in question calling for an immediate cease-

fire and troop withdrawal passed by a vote of 104 to 11. The eleven states voting
against were mostly Soviet Bloc countries.55 During the discussion, the repre-
sentative from Ghana remarked:
It is not for us to dictate to Pakistan what it should or should not do. We
can offer advice; we can offer friendly intimations and hints, but we have
to respect the sovereignty, and the territorial integrity of every State
Member of this Organization. This is one of the most fundamental
principles which have been accepted by the Organization of African
Unity.56
Between December 12 and December 21, the Council met seven times, with
the Soviet Union vetoing another resolution calling for an immediate cease-
fire and troop withdrawal. But by December 17, the Pakistani armed forces
had already surrendered to India and India had declared a cease-fire.
In a sense, Bangladesh was an anomaly because it was geographically
separated from West Pakistan. In most other ways, it was like other claimants
to self-determination: it had a different language, history, and ethnicity; its
majority population suffered under a system of internal colonization for
several decades evidenced by economic deprivation and racial bias; and it
was thwarted in all attempts at democratic representation. And, most import-
ant, the elected government of East Pakistan and the majority party in the
entirety of Pakistan had been targeted for extermination by a military dictator-
ship against which actions it had repeatedly requested intervention. Under
53 54
Ibid. Ibid., at 62.
55
See UN Voting Records for A/RES/2793(XXVI), Available at www.un.org/en/ga/documents/
voting.asp (last accessed May 16, 2014).
56
Ambassador Akwei (Ghana), UN Doc. A/PV.2002, Dec. 7, 1971 at 31.
these conditions, the principle of self-determination applied to the people of

East Pakistan as a majority and not a minority.57 Furthermore, even if self-
determination did apply, neither the East Bengali leadership nor the Biafrans
immediately demanded separation. Yet, in the absence of any real measures to
ensure their enfranchisement and security, the increasing violence done to
their people, both regions resorted to the claim.58
conclusion
While it is beyond the scope of this chapter to fully explore the relation-
ship and tension between Articles 2(4) and 2(7) and the Universal Declar-
ation of Human Rights as was posited by Pakistan and India, it is striking
that the international system and the Afro-Asian states in the Global
South were unable to respond effectively to the Bangladeshi crisis or the
Biafran crisis.
The very real quandary posed by the internal repression of subject
populations juxtaposed with the need to maintain the territorial integrity
of the newly independent states diminished the lofty goals of Bandung. The
Bandung states and the principles that were crafted from that conference
failed to take into consideration the reality that internally colonized minor-
ities or majorities could just as easily be subjugated and killed by their own
states, and it had no prescription or policy for this eventuality. The NAM
states were left mouthing pieties about sovereignty while masses were being
exterminated because they failed to place any emphasis on the internal
distributions of power, and physical safety of populations within their states.
Given that many newly independent states were authoritarian systems ruled
by military dictators and actively repressing their populations, the Bandung
principles remained more a fantasy of a different Third World reality than
that lived by the majority of the peoples of the Global South. After these
seismic disruptions in the 1960s and 1970s, the international community
came to appreciate the importance of democratic governance. In the 1990s,
scholars began to explore the emerging right to democratic governance.59
Yet, as history has shown, the tension between sovereignty and human rights
and the expansion of humanitarian crises within states actively subjugating
57
See Nanda, “Self-Determination in International Law,” at 336.
58
See A. Vajpeyi, Righteous Republic.
59
See, e.g., Thomas M. Franck, “The Emerging Right to Democratic Governance” (1992) 86
American Journal of International Law, at 46.
their citizens remains an enduring feature of international law and relations.

And the attempts to resolve the tension continue to yield the same out-
comes: nonintervention, as was the case in Biafra, or intervention based on
humanitarian justifications, as was the case in Bangladesh.60
60
The international community continues to vacillate between the poles of nonintervention
(Rwanda, Sudan, to some extent Syria) and intervention on the basis of humanitarian law
(Bosnia, Kosovo, Iraq, Libya). See Benjamin A. Valentino, “The True Costs of Humanitarian
Intervention,” Foreign Affairs (Nov. 2011).
20
Reimagining Bandung for Women at Work in Egypt

Law and the Woman between the Factory and the “Social Factory”
mai taha
introduction
“The family is not merely the first cell of society where the connection of the
man to the woman occurs to realize the operation of the perpetuation of
life . . . but it has become an institute where the child learns the traditions of
his people and their customs and their inclinations. . . . It is a factory in which
the generations of the future are manufactured and through it the operation
of social fusion of future generations begins.”1
This was Minister of Social Affairs Hikmat Abu Zayd, the first woman to be
appointed in the Egyptian Cabinet, speaking in 1964 at a conference on the
Egyptian family. She spoke of the home as a site of social reproduction and
reproductive labor, or as a factory. This “home factory” manufactured young
workers who would later join the new national labor force. The home was thus
part and parcel of the new vision of modernity and industrialization, reinforced
by anticolonial nationalism, Third World solidarity, and the “spirit of Bandung.”
Abu Zayd, like many other civil servants during this period, came from a
lower-middle-class background and a nationalist household. She was a com-
mitted Nasserist, and was active in women’s affairs at the Arab Socialist Union
(ASU), the only political party at the time. She moved to Libya in 1974, the
same year Anwar al-Sadat started his “Open-Door Policy” or Infitah, marking a
radical break from Gamal Abdel Nasser’s regime.2 Her appointment was part
1
Laura Bier, Revolutionary Womanhood: Feminism, Modernity, and the State in Nasser’s
Egypt (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 2011), p. 130, citing Hikmat Abu Zayd
(emphasis added).
2
Arthur Goldschmidt, A Biographical Dictionary of Modern Egypt (Boulder: Lynne Reiner
Publishers, 2000), p. 14.
337
338 Mai Taha
of the Nasser regime’s efforts to create a new modern Egypt, where women
took leading roles in government and participated in the postcolonial process
of building a modern nation-state.3 The Egyptian woman was to become
modern, educated, unveiled, and, most important, a workingwoman. This
chapter imagines the spirit of Bandung in light of Egypt’s modernization
process, which entailed an extensive program of including women in the
public sphere. As newly independent Egypt centered the factory as the
symbolic and material vehicle toward modernization and industrialization,
women started joining the workforce as part of the postcolonial state feminism
program.
Against the traditional narrative of the Bandung Conference of 1955, which
recounts the successes of a congress of strong, anticolonial, and revolutionary
men, this chapter looks at Bandung as more than a foreign policy affair, but as
a comprehensive postcolonial plan that encompassed all aspects of life, from
the factory to the “social factory,” reconstructing new versions of modernity
through the gendered division of labor. Domestically, Egypt’s participation in
Bandung represented an adherence to the new principles adopted at the
Conference that were not only of anticolonial roots per se, but of enlighten-
ment principles inherited into the United Nations Charter and the Universal
Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR). At the same time, the ideal of the
Egyptian woman as the loving mother, the exquisite cook, the respectable
wife, and the head of household affairs had to be maintained, if not sanctified.
Therefore, this program, guised in a rights-based and (admittedly) radical
anticolonial discourse, was effectively an added burden on Egyptian women.
The factory would thus depend on women’s material labor in the workplace
and reproductive labor at home through the reproduction of workers, “sex
work” at home, and housework. Along with a rejection of “racialism” and
imperialism, the Bandung delegates embraced the UN system of rights. In
Egypt, this was reflected in a new human rights discourse and gender-related
legislative changes. These legal innovations encouraged women’s participa-
tion in the workforce and maintained oversight over their bodies and repro-
ductive labor in the home.
modernity and human rights at bandung

Samir Amin, in recounting a prehistory of Bandung, argues that unlike most
narratives, the Conference did not originate from the nationalist Third World
3
Margot Badran, Feminists, Islam, and Nation: Gender and the Making of Modern Egypt
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995), p. 188.
Reimagining Bandung for Women at Work in Egypt 339
leaders who eventually organized it.4 Rather, it was the product of a radical
leftist critique that took place primarily within Third World communist
parties. The only way to fight imperialism was to bring together the victorious
social and political forces in the Third World, and thus open up possibilities of
global socialist advancements.5 Although Bandung perhaps went in a different
direction, it still aspired to create a new version of Third World modernity
through an alliance of Afro-Asian nations. After all, the Conference did create
a novel version of anticolonial modernity that challenged capitalism’s trad-
itional logic by aiming to industrialize the periphery.6 State-planned industri-
alization of the South was a new force challenging European and American
imperial capitalism.7
Undoubtedly there were contradictions in this version of modernity. While
the Conference took a decidedly unwavering stance on the adoption of radical
anticolonial principles and a rejection of white supremacy – or “racialism,” as
Bandung participants referred to it – it also embraced a liberal rights-based
discourse.8 Jawaharal Nehru, for example, had initially envisioned that the
UN, unlike its predecessor, would be a “world union” where independent
nation-sates would send their respective representatives to a “global legislator”
that would internationalize the principles of planned and socialized econ-
omy.9 Clearly, this was not how the UN was intended to be, or how it turned
out. Nehru later adjusted his view to a “wider commonwealth” that rejected
European leadership, and even supported instituting the veto power in the
Security Council.10 However, this did not necessarily mean abandoning the
anticolonial project at the UN, but forming new Third World diplomacy that
was conscious of the power politics that formal colonial powers deployed.11
At Bandung, delegates collectively endorsed the UDHR and emphasized
the UN’s role in achieving global peace.12 They demanded the formal equality
of nations through a call for UN membership of the countries it excluded
4
Samir Amin, “Beyond Bandung: The Awakening of the South: Challenging the Imperialist
Dimensions of Capitalism” Pan-African Voices for Freedom and Justice (pambazooka) 455,
Oct. 29, 2005. Available at: http://pambazuka.org/en/category/features/59826.
5
Ibid.
6
Samir Amin, “The Deployment of the Bandung Project (1955–1970),” part of a series of
lectures at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), “Samir Amin: Six Decades of
Development Debate.” Available at: www.youtube.com/watch?v=lOsmu8VqoIE.
7
Ibid.
8
Robert Vitalis, “The Midnight Ride of Kwame Nkrumah and Other Fables of Bandung (Ban-
doong)” (2013) Humanity 261, 265.
9
Mark Mazower, No Enchanted Palace: The End of Empire and the Ideological Origins of the
United Nations (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010), p. 168.
10
Ibid., p. 169. 11
Ibid. 12
Vitalis, “The Midnight Ride,” 265.
340 Mai Taha
(Cambodia, Ceylon, Japan, Jordan, Libya, Nepal, and a “unified Vietnam”).13

While the idea of human rights at Bandung was subsumed by the right to self-
determination of peoples, the Conference not only adopted the UDHR as a
whole but, more important, accepted the underlying logic and principles that
the UN system professed at the time.14 In fact, Bandung leaders embraced the
UN Charter and the UN declarations, and proclaimed that they created “a
common standard of achievement for all peoples and nations.”15
At the first anniversary of Bandung in 1956, Gamal Abdel Nasser gave a
speech reiterating the demand for formal equality through UN membership
and reaffirmed the Conference’s claim “that there shall be no security or
peace in the world unless the goals of the UN Charter, and human rights are
respected.”16 Nevertheless, the right to self-determination remained the pri-
mary concern and the defining feature of international human rights law for
the delegates at Bandung.17 After all, 1955 was the year the General Assembly
passed a resolution mandating that the right to self-determination be part of
any future human rights covenant.18 This was later manifested in a show of
African and Asian votes at the General Assembly in support of the Declaration
13
Ibid.
14
Partha Chatterjee, “Empire and Nation Revisited: 50 Years after Bandung” (2005) 6 Inter-Asia
Cultural Studies 4, 488. James Tully argues that the UN state system and public international
law cannot be taken together as “the unexamined constitutional basis for constructing a
nonimperial alternative to contemporary imperialism. The so-called ‘Westphalian’ system is
actually an imperial system of hegemonic and subaltern states constructed in the course of
‘interactions’ between imperial actors and imperialized collaborators and resisters.” Tully,
Public Philosophy in a New Key: Imperialism and Civic Freedom, Volume II (Cambridge:
15
16
Gamal Abdel Nasser, “Speech of the First Anniversary of the Bandung Conference” (8 April
1956) (translation is mine), available at: http://nasser.bibalex.org/Speeches/browser.aspx?SID=
456
17
However, James Tully argues that despite a seemingly anti-imperialist language of self-
determination, still it constitutes – along with the normative and juridical language if an
international system of constitutional states, and the narrative of world historical progress from
savagery to civilization through modernization – a hegemonic language. He notes that the
language of self-determination is part of another Western tradition, largely inspired by the
Wilsonian doctrine of military intervention and self-determination, or “gangster capitalism.”
Even postcolonial and constructivist legal scholars who aim to expose the imperialism of
international law, most vividly manifested in spaces, such as the UN, the World Bank, etc., end
up moving within “strategic and tactical logic of informal imperialism.” Tully, Public
Philosophy in a New Key, pp. 143, 154, 161, 162.
18
Mark Mazower, Governing the World: The History of an Idea (New York: Penguin Press, 2012),
p. 259.
on the Granting of Independence to Colonial Countries and Peoples in 1960,

and thus affirming the spirit of Bandung at the UN.19
There was, however, a remarkable omission in this grand assembly of
anticolonial leaders of the South at Bandung: the “women’s question.” There
was almost no mention of gender issues or women’s rights as part of this
wholesale embrace of the UN rights-based system. The UN Charter itself
made very vague references to women, all of which fell under the domain of
“identity politics.”20 These articles merely stated that there should be no
discrimination based on sex, among other factors. Article 76 on the Trustee-
ship Council, for example, stated that one of its purposes, like the UN, was to
encourage respect for human rights without discrimination based on sex,
among other categories.21 It was maintaining the old colonial tutelage of
trusteeship with the new individual human rights language. The latter was
embraced, and resistance to the former defined Bandung.
The UDHR, celebrated by Bandung delegates, made vague references to
women’s rights or gender more broadly.22 The only explicit mention of
women was in the context of marriage, motherhood, and family formation.
Still, the Charter and the Declaration constituted the backbone of the new
UN human rights systems developed in the 1960s.
Devaki Jain and Shubha Chacko argue that the spirit of Bandung, later
culminating in the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM), departed from the UN’s
path toward women’s equality.23 They argue that the UN system at the time
saw women’s rights only instrumentally as merely a question of social devel-
opment without connecting the issue to the larger context of international
development. NAM provided a space for women from former colonies to
reassert the idea that they were active agents in nation-building.24 Neverthe-
less, Jain and Chacko still see women’s agency largely through the familiar
nationalist perspective, shying away from facing patriarchy as an organizing
system.
19
Ibid., 263. See also Sally Engle Marry, Human Rights and Gender Violence: Translating
International Law into Local Justice (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2006), p. 50.
20
Charter of the United Nations, San Francisco (1945) (Articles 1, 8, 13, 55, and 76). Available at:
https://treaties.un.org/doc/publication/ctc/uncharter.pdf.
21
Ibid.
22
Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948) (Articles 2, 16, 25 (2)). Available at: www.ohchr
.org/EN/UDHR/Documents/UDHR_Translations/eng.pdf.
23
Devaki Jain and Shunha Chacko, “Walking Together: The Journey of the Non-Aligned
Movement and the Women’s Movement” (2009) 19 Development in Practice 895, 898.
24
Ibid. See also Christine Verschuur, “A History of Development Through a Gender Prism:
Feminist and Decolonial Perspectives,” in Christine Verschuur et al., Under Development:
Gender (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), p. 36.
342 Mai Taha
At the same time, the international human rights discourse at a time of

anticolonial, antiracist, and feminist movements had a depoliticizing effect
over many struggles fought in the Third World because it confined the space
of struggle to legal recognition. It was the “antipolitics,” a defensive mechan-
ism for the innocent abstract individual.25 Rights simultaneously inscribed
people’s lives within the state’s order.26 Mired in “fictions of neutrality and
universality,” this new language never escaped its colonial origins or its
Eurocentrism.27 In fact, as Balakrishnan Rajagopal argues, the UDHR did
not apply directly to the colonial territories; the UN Commission on Human
Rights rarely addressed anticolonial struggles prior to 1967; some anticolonial
revolts were characterized as “emergencies,” so human rights law was
inapplicable; and, finally, the strongest anticolonial aspect of the human rights
discourse – on Apartheid in South Africa and Israeli policies in Palestine –
remained on the margins of mainstream international human rights.28 Ban-
dung combined strong anticolonial politics with the UN’s depoliticized lan-
guage of human rights.
What Bandung embraced from the UN system was not necessarily substan-
tive, and some have argued it was marginal.29 Nevertheless, the language of
human rights seemed consistent with the new kind of modernity fashioned at
the Conference. Perspectives countering this move came from subaltern
studies. Narratives of R. Radhakrishnan and Partha Chatterjee argued against
the Nehru regime in India through a traditionalist and an antimodernist
critique.30 This chapter’s argument, however, is not to make an antimodernist
25
Wendy Brown, ‘“The Most We Can Hope For . . .’: Human Rights and the Politics of
Fatalism” (2004) 103 The South Atlantic Quarterly 2/3, 453. On the depoliticizing role of
human rights, see Slavoj Žižek, “Against Human Rights” (2005) 35 New Left Review 115, 128.
26
Georgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life (Palo Alto: Stanford University
Press, 1998), p. 79.
27
Makau Mutua, “Savages, Victims, and Saviors: The Metaphor of Human Rights” (2001) 42
Harvard International Law Journal 201, 204, 206. Mutua, however, argues that although
international human rights law is Eurocentric, it can still be redeemed through
multiculturalism and Third World participation. This is where I depart from Mutua and
others. See Mai Taha, “Review Essay: The Mystic Wand of Participation: Appraisal of Mark
Mazower’s ‘No Enchanted Palace: The End of Empire and the Ideological Origins of the
United Nations,’” (2011) 12 German Law Journal 1529.
28
Balakrishnan Rajagopal, “Counter-Hegemonic International Law – Rethinking Human Rights
and Development as a Third World Strategy” (2006) 27 Third World Quarterly 767, 769.
29
Reza Afshari, “On Historiography of Human Rights Reflection on Paul Gordon Lauren’s
The Evolution of International Human Rights: Visions Seen” (2007) 29 Human Rights
Quarterly 1.
30
See R. Radhakrishnan, “Nationalism, Gender, and the Narrative of Identity,” in Andrew Parker
et al., Nationalism and Sexualities (New York: Routledge, 1992), p. 90; See generally Partha
Chatterjee, “The Nationalist Resolution of the Women’s Question,” in Kumkum Sangari and
critique of the Conference, but it is an invitation to reflect on the lost

opportunity of the Bandung moment. The Bandung moment treaded a thin
line between modernity and its discontents. The issue is not to return to the
traditionalist and antimodernist subject-positions, but to present a critique of
how modernity was infused with nationalist patriarchy through both ideology
and lived experience.
In Egypt, “women’s rights as human rights” became a rallying call of the
regime in an attempt to include women in the public sphere, and, more
important, in the workforce. By 1967, Egypt had already signed the two
human rights covenants and adopted domestic legislation consistent with
international human rights principles.31 The rights-based discourse became
one of the vehicles through which Egypt could construct its version of
modernity. During this period, modernity itself became so easily translatable
to progress and a specifically nationalist emancipation of women.32
bandung in egypt: state feminism through legal

modernization
Inspired by . . . the revolution of 1919, Mahmoud Mukhtar sculpted a work called
Nahdet Misr (The Awakening of Egypt), which shows a peasant woman lifting her veil
from her face with her left arm and placing her right arm on the back of the sphinx as it
rises up on its forelegs. Juxtaposing Egypt’s ancient pharonic glory with her modern
awakening, Mukhtar’s sculpture depicts modern Egypt as a woman.33
Sudish Vaid (eds.), Recasting Women: Essays in Colonial History (New Brunswick: Rutgers
University Press, 1990), p. 233. For an excellent critique of the subaltern position, and of Partha
Chatterjee more specifically, see Himani Bannerji, “Projects of Hegemony: Towards a
Critique of Subaltern Studies’ ‘Resolution of the Women’s Question,’” (2000) 35 Economic
and Political Weekly 902, 909.
31
International Covenant of Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR), ratification status. Available
at: https://treaties.un.org/pages/viewdetails.aspx?src=treaty&mtdsg_no=iv-4&chapter=4&
lang=en.
32
For an important study on the relationship between modernity and women’s emancipation, see
Lila Abu-Lughod (ed.), Remaking Women: Feminism and Modernity in the Middle East
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998), p. vii. In a different vein of critique, Mervat
Hatem is critical of the modernization discourse as a particularly hegemonic and Western
discourse that orientalizes Middle Eastern women by its assumption that prior to
modernization, the Middle East was mired with multiple patriarchal systems (Mediterranean,
Middle Eastern, or Islamic). Therefore, it supports the idea that Middle Eastern women have
“the unenviable status of the ‘most oppressed’ in the world.” Hatem, “Review Essay: Toward a
Critique of Modernization: Narrative in Middle East Women Studies” (1993) 15 Arab Studies
Quarterly 117, 121.
33
Beth Baron, Egypt as a Woman: Nationalism, Gender, and Politics (Oakland: University of
California Press, 2005), p. 1.
344 Mai Taha
The Egyptian postcolonial national project entailed the traditional invocation

of maternal imagery in describing the nation. Nahdet Misr was sculpted as the
British government announced its unilateral declaration of Egyptian inde-
pendence in 1922.34 The sculpture represented Egypt’s cultural modernity and
postcolonial character. Domesticity, which included child rearing, house-
work, and other reproductive labor, signified “civic participation and
national/ist contribution.”35
After Egypt gained its actual independence three decades later, the Egyp-
tian woman was also invoked as the face of the nation. However, this time the
Egyptian woman was to be part of the new planned economy and the state-
managed gendered division of labor.36 Familial relationships, housework, and
sexuality within the family continued to be part of the national project to build
modern Egypt, but women were expected to move beyond those familiar
terrains and into the workplace through a comprehensive policy of state
feminism. Supported by state institutions, this policy was slowly implanted
into the legal system. Nevertheless, many of these legislative changes also
came out of the successes of Egyptian feminists, including the early twentieth-
century struggles for the right to vote, the right to work, or the right to remove
the veil. The two projects of state feminism and independent feminism often
collided, but during the 1950s and 1960s, many feminists embraced the new
Arab socialist state and its project of industrialization, and the regime consist-
ently targeted radical independent feminists.37 Nevertheless, women were not
merely co-opted by the new state project, but were able to constantly negotiate
their status with the state.38 As Laura Bier argues, women were “neither
unwitting dupes of the regime – puppet-like propagandists of Arab Socialism –
nor renegades working within the system in order to fundamentally challenge
its legitimacy.”39
Nasser’s state feminism was not merely legal and ideological state commit-
ment to women’s rights. It was a set of comprehensive state programs that
34
Ibid.
35
Marilyn Booth, May Her Likes Be Multiplied: Biography and Gender Politics in Egypt
(Oakland: University of California Press, 2001), p. 203.
36
On the relationship between the expansion of the waged labor market and its inclusion of
women, and the sexual division of labor in the household in the Middle East, see Mona
Hammam, “Labor Migration and the Sexual Division of Labor” (1981) 85 Middle East
Research and Information Project.
37
See generally Bier, Revolutionary Womanhood.
38
Ibid. pp. 11, 17. For a critique of Bier’s account, see Margot Badran, “Book Review:
Revolutionary Womanhood: Feminisms, Modernity, and the State in Nasser’s Egypt” (2014) 10
Journal of Middle East Women Studies 2.
39
Bier, Revolutionary Womanhood, p. 56.
sought to transform women’s reproductive and productive roles in society.40

This campaign was multifaceted: it included the funding of women’s organ-
izations, appointments of women in government, and media propaganda in
newspapers, television, film, literature, and commercial advertising. Bier’s
political contextualization of films, such as For Men Only and My Wife Is a
General Director, is instructive. These films were intended to mainstream the
ideas of the Egyptian National Charter to a broader Egyptian public:
“Women must be regarded as equal to men and must therefore shed the
remaining shackles that impede her free movement so that she might take a
constructive and profound part in shaping life.”41 My Wife Is a General
Director tells the story of a happily married middle-class couple whose
domestic and professional lives are disrupted by the wife’s appointment as a
general director, or the “boss,” in the institution where the husband is a
regular employee. The film opens with a night of drunken celebration of her
appointment. She tells him, “We got our rights as women. Now all we need
to do is to prove to you [men] that we can be successful in leadership
positions.”42
The campaign also included various popular and cultural depictions of
Third World women as symbols of Afro-Asian solidarity. Numerous
editorials appeared in the women’s press covering Yemini, Iranian, Yugo-
slavian, and Algerian women, appealing to this sense of solidarity
between anticolonial yet specifically modern Third World nation-states.43
At the 1961 Afro-Asian Women’s Solidarity Conference in Cairo, Karima
Sa’id, the United Arab Republic (UAR)44 delegate, iterated this
sentiment:
We, Afro-Asian women, meet today representing two-thirds of the world
population, tied by the unity of the great past, the struggling present and
the glorious future – a unity of pains and aims – a unity of struggle for the
rights and for the sake of freedom, peace and humanism.45
40
Mervat Hatem, “Economic and Political Liberation in Egypt and the Demise of State
Feminism” (1992) 24 International Journal of Middle East Studies 231, 231.
41
42
My Wife Is a General Director, directed by Fatin Abdelwahab (1966; Cairo: al-Sharikah al-
’amma li Tawzi’ al-aflam).
43
Laura Bier, “Feminism, Solidarity, and Identity in the Age of Bandung,” in Christopher Lee
(ed.), Making a World After Empire: The Bandung Moment and Its Political Afterlives (Athens:
Ohio University Press, 2010), p. 155.
44
In 1958, Egypt and Syria became one country, the United Arab Republic (UAR). The union
dissolved in 1961.
45
Bier, “Feminism, Solidarity, and Identity,” at 152.
346 Mai Taha
The cultural propaganda campaign situated the Egyptian woman, along with
other Third World women, as symbols of anticolonial development and
progress and as defining pillars of the new nation-state.
The popular campaign went hand in hand with structural changes in labor
legislation, including, for example, banning strikes and suppressing efforts to
create a workers’ confederation. Following a visit by a Yugoslavian trade union
delegation to Egypt, the Labour Bureau invited various trade union leaders to
create an informal organization, which would later become a confederation.46
Although backed by Nasser, the idea of a workers’ confederation remained
controversial, especially within the state’s security sector, because union locals
would have to mobilize politically to elect delegates for the founding conven-
tion.47 The Labour Bureau was also wary of a democratic trade union struc-
ture, given that their trade union confidants would risk losing their positions.
By 1956, it was decided that there would be no mass elections, but a core of
unionists and government representatives would select the delegates for the
founding convention.48 The state’s union remained the only trade union in
Egypt until the creation of the first independent trade union in 2009 following
a big wildcat strike by the tax collectors.49 Therefore, while Nasser’s project of
industrialization entailed an espousal of “Arab Socialism” – a unique brand of
socialism that rejected class struggle – it also centralized the trade union
system, creating what effectively became a puppet trade union for the govern-
ment. Through this trade union system, Nasser controlled workers’ politics
and prevented any deviations from state policy. Therefore, demands such as
equal pay, maternity leave, and day-care centers were all subject to the state’s
control through the ETUF. Through legislation, the state was able to inter-
vene in women’s networks of communal support by legalizing social life that
inhabited the public and private spheres, instead of allowing women to be
architects of their own working conditions.
While the Nasser regime consolidated power through the trade union
system and through a state-controlled and planned program of industrializa-
tion, it instituted a number of legislative reforms to encourage women to
become part of the public sphere and, more specifically, join the workforce.
The first major change was granting women’s suffrage one year after Bandung
46
Marsha Pripstein Posusney, Labor and the State in Egypt: Workers, Unions, and Economic
Restructuring (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997), p. 61.
47
Ibid., 62.
48
Ibid. In 1957 the confederation became the Egyptian Workers Federation, and by 1961 it took
the name of the Egyptian Federation of Trade Unions (EFTU).
49
Jean Lachappelle, “Lessons from Egypt’s Tax Collectors” (2012) 264 Middle East Research and
Information Project. Available at: www.merip.org/mer/mer264/lessons-egypts-tax-collectors-0.
in the 1956 Constitution. Women had fought many years for suffrage; efforts
by activists like Doriyya Shafik (who was targeted by the regime) contributed
to this long struggle.50 Therefore, while it was a top-down initiative, it was also
part of the constant negotiating process that took place between the state and
the feminist movement.51
In its preamble, the 1956 Constitution, which called for a democratic and
socialist cooperative society, granted women the vote and declared all Egyp-
tians equal under the law without discrimination on the basis of gender, racial
origin, religion, or belief.52 Article 52 stipulated that all Egyptians have the
right to work, and that the state would be responsible for realizing this goal.53
This was reaffirmed in Law No. 14, which guaranteed jobs in the public sector
for all men and women who earned an intermediate school diploma or a
college degree, thus asserting women’s specific right to join the workforce.54
New labor laws, such as Law 91, eventually combined in the 1959 Unified
Labour Code, granted women fifty days of paid maternity leave and forced
employers to provide on-the-job day-care facilities if 100 or more women were
employed.55 It became illegal to terminate the employment of a pregnant
woman or a woman taking maternity leave.56 Other legislation mandated
women’s equal access to higher education, abolished discrimination in hiring
on the basis of sex, and fixed the workday for women to nine hours.57
All these legislative changes included women in the public sphere and the
waged labor market, were undeniably important and should be celebrated.
A more “flexible” regulatory labor regime would have incontestably put
women in more precarious conditions, forcing them to accept part-time
contracts with no maternity leave or other protections.58 Nevertheless, these
reforms came at the expense of depoliticizing the gendered division of labor
and the unwaged work performed within the household. It is also important to
note that while these changes came as part of an iron-fisted state feminist
program, Egyptian feminists had already struggled for all these issues for many
years. The state hijacked some of those old struggles. Women’s waged work
became essential to the state’s new nation-building efforts. At the same time,
women’s unwaged work at home remained a central tenet in the survival of
the state-planned economy. In fact, these legislations explicitly aimed at
50 51 52
Bier, Revolutionary Womanhood, p. 56. Ibid. 1956 Egyptian Constitution.
53
Posusney, Labor and the State in Egypt.
54
Hatem, “Economic and Political Liberation in Egypt and the Demise of State Feminism.”
55 56
Ibid. Ibid.; Posusney, Labor and the State in Egypt, pp. 59, 60.
57
Bier, Revolutionary Womanhood, pp. 3, 63.
58
Alvaro Santos, “Three Transnational Discourses of Labor Law in Domestic Reforms” (2010) 32
University of Pennsylvania Journal of International Law 123, 187.
348 Mai Taha
“protecting womanhood” by ensuring that the “role of the working woman

[would be] compatible with her role as a wife and mother.”59
bandung at home: egyptian women between waged and

unwaged work
Next to “Omo” [clothes detergent], lies a deodorant stick, birth-control pills, and the
holy trinity, indispensible to the modern Egyptian home that Abdel-Nasser made
accessible to everyone: the heater, the gas stove produced by the military factories, and
the ‘Ideal’ fridge. And this is how we arrive to his home: the nest.60
This setting introduced Abdel-Meguid, the main character of Sunn’allah

Ibrahim’s famous novel, ‘Thaat. The scene depicts the new consumer goods
of industrializing Egypt that were intended to support the modern working-
woman in her housework. The washing machine, the oven, and the refriger-
ator became accessible to the Egyptian public with relatively affordable prices
for a middle-class family.61 State feminism relied on the availability of these
products to ensure that women were able to maintain a balance between their
role in nation-building through their waged labor and their unwaged repro-
ductive work within the household. The state-sponsored “family planning”
program gave women full access to the birth control pill, which would both
reduce the rise in population rates and help women efficiently manage the
household.62 By 1965, “household management classes” became mandatory
for Egyptian female students in public education, which explained to young
women how to use new appliances, such as vacuum cleaners and electric
ovens.63 These classes provided the necessary tools for women to balance their
entrance to the waged labor market without disrupting their unwaged
housework.
Essentially, the progressive legislative changes instituted in post-Bandung
Egypt were couched in a constrained social imagination about the role of
59
Bier, Revolutionary Womanhood, p. 65, citing United Arab Republic, Al-Mar’a fi al-
Jumhuriyya al-’Arabiyya al-Muttahida, 35.
60
Sun’allah Ibrahim, ‘Thaat, (Dar Al-Mustakbal Al-’Araby, 1998) (translation is mine), p. 12.
61
See, e.g., the advertisement for the “Know the Products of Your Country” contest, depicted in
the main national daily newspaper, Al-Ahram, in August 1961. A picture is in Bier,
Revolutionary Womanhood, p. 84.
62
Kamran Asdar Ali, Planning the Family in Egypt: New Bodies, New Slaves (Austin: University
of Texas Press, 2002), p. 31. See also Beth Baron, “The Origins of Family Planning: Aziza
Hussein, American Experts and the Egyptian State” (2008) 4 Journal of Middle East Women’s
Studies 3.
63
women at home and the gendered division of labor. The new legislation
mainly benefited educated middle-class women, while women working in
low-skilled or unskilled factory or service sector jobs were not legally protected.
They suffered from lower pay and worked longer hours.64 By 1962, the “right
to day care” was reflected in only twenty-six day-care centers serving 57,000
workingwomen.65 Women interviewed at the Chubra el-Kheima textile fac-
tory in 1975 agreed “they would leave their jobs if they could, but they had no
alternative except to continue working.”66
At the same time, personal status legislation passed in the 1920s and 1930s
defined the woman as the economic dependent of the man, as an unstable,
emotional being who could not be trusted with the right to divorce, unless her
husband was incurably ill or impotent.67 These laws remained in force during
the Nasser years, after a struggle with the religious elite who wanted to
maintain the old personal status laws. Even though the multiple-court system
instituted in Egypt since the nineteenth century was unified in the 1950s, the
dual legal systems – civil and Shari’a – remained in force.68 Therefore,
women under the Nasser regime could aspire to become members of Parlia-
ment but could not leave the country without their husbands’ permission.69
The state also saw independent feminism as a threat to the coherence and
consistency of its own feminist and modernizing program. It targeted inde-
pendent feminists and communists in the women’s movement. Independent
and charitable women’s organizations that provided spaces for women’s activ-
ism were put under the control of the Ministry of Social Affairs in 1964.70
Many independent feminists – such as Duriyya Shafiq, founder of Bint al-Nil
64 65
Ibid., 62, 66. Ibid., 78.
66
Mona Hammam, “Egypt’s Working Women: Textile Workers of Chubra el-Kheima” (1979) 82
Middle East Research and Information Project 3, 7.
67
Hatem, “Economic and Political Liberation in Egypt and the Demise of State Feminism,”
at 232.
68
Amira El Azhary Sonbol, The New Mamluks: Egyptian Society and Modern Feudalism
(Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2000), p. 183.
69
Ibid. See also Nadia Hijab, Womanpower: The Arab Debate on Women at Work (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1988), p. 29. For a comprehensive study of family law in Egypt,
see Lama Abu-Odeh, “Modernizing Muslim Family Law: The Case of Egypt” (2004) 37
Vanderbilt Journal of Transnational Law 1043. This was also combined with a crackdown on
arts and cultural projects that threatened this particular interpretation of Shari’a on familial
relationships within the household. For example, Fawziya Mahran’s one-act play, Al-Buyut
(Homes), was banned from viewing because it metaphorically depicted the old family home
that the woman’s father had built to protect her as her prison, or her tomb. The metaphor
could have been also intended to draw parallels between the woman’s oppression at home and
totalitarianism under Nasser. See Nahed Selaiha and Sarah Enany, “Women Playwrights in
Egypt” (2010) 63 Theatre Journal 627, 630.
70
350 Mai Taha
journal – were targeted. Nasser also ordered the closure of the Bint el-Nil
Union, put Shafiq under house arrest, and banned her name from public
print.71 Others in the feminist movement saw the liberation of women as part
and parcel of the struggle for social equality and justice, whereas Shafiq
focused on women’s civil and political rights.72 Inji Efflatoun, for example,
refused the reformist state feminism program. She saw that the patriarchal
system had to be radically attacked from the outside, as opposed to reformed
from within the state’s internal structures.
The early 1950s was also the first time that socialist women organized
around feminist demands, as opposed to focusing exclusively on class issues.73
In 1959, the state passed the Decree of Detention, which sanctioned arrests
with no proof if the suspect was considered “a danger to society.”74 This year
saw a massive roundup of communists and socialist feminists. After hiding
under a veil and dressing as a peasant woman for months, Efflatoun was
secretly arrested by a Republican Decree for her association with the Com-
munist Party, along with twenty-five other women.75 They were the first
female political prisoners, and the media was not allowed to mention their
detention.76
State feminism, despite yielding significant gains, remained confined to a
very narrow idea of women’s liberation. The rights-based approach the state
adopted after Bandung depoliticized gender, class, and work. The presentable
picture of the modern workingwoman remained separate from the traditional
overworked housewife. The logics of family law and the new gender-related
legislative changes sustained patriarchy at home and in the factory. This did
not threaten the formation of a modern society, where women worked in
factories and visibly participated in the public sphere. In fact, it sustained it.
Labor performed by women at home would simply remain outside of the
contested terrains.
housework: beyond identity and the rights discourse

For such a demand [women’s work outside the home] can be confusing and even
misplaced if we forget that . . . the vast majority of women toil increasingly in their
homes to serve their husbands and children but receive no pay. . . . Putting forward the
71
Akram Khater and Cynthia Nelson, “Al-Harakah Al-Nissa’iyah: The Women’s Movement and
Political Participation in Modern Egypt” (1988) 11 Women’s Studies International Forum 5, at 472.
72 73
Ibid., 473. Ibid.
74
Betty LaDuke, “Egyptian Painter Inji Efflatoun: The Merging of Art, Feminism, and Politics”
(1989) 3 National Women’s Association Journal 465, 480.
75 76
Ibid. Ibid.
demand “work for women” within a system that treats women as objects owned by the
man inevitably leads to a double form of exploitation. . . . [T]his freedom [of waged
work] remains only partial and does not extend to other social, psychological, moral
and cultural aspects of their lives.77
Nawal El Saadawi, Egyptian feminist and thinker, wrote about the effects of
the 1950s and 1960s state feminism programs on the realities of Egyptian and
Arab women working both at home and in the factory throughout the 1980s
and 1990s. El Saadawi emphasized the intersection between class and gender,
noting the close relationship between patriarchy at home and patriarchy in the
workplace. Similarly, autonomist feminists – such as Mariarosa Dalla Costa,
Selma James, and Silvia Federici, among others – argue that the reproduction
of the labor commodity (that is, human beings) is an essential aspect of
capitalist society.78 The term “working class” moves beyond the traditional
industrial waged work and encompasses other unwaged work, such as house-
work and the work done by children, students, and peasants, which collect-
ively sustain the capitalist system.79 Black feminists have also explored the
exploitation of women’s unpaid labor in the African-American family, specif-
ically arguing for a feminist analysis that can account for race, class, and
gender. Some have argued that black women see their unwaged reproductive
labor as a form of resistance, and not necessarily as an outcome of their
exploitation.80 The specificities of race in the American context, however,
are hard to generalize to Egypt. Nevertheless, lessons learned from radical
black feminist thought – where race and gender are seen not as mere
“identity” issues, but as constitutive of property relations and capitalist accu-
mulation – remain important in the context of Egypt. Black feminist thought
is instructive in framing a methodology to analyze the transformation of
women’s position in the state’s imagination and its discourse, as well as the
material and lived experiences of Egyptian women after Bandung.
77
Nawal El Saadawi, The Nawal El Saadawi Reader (London: Zed Books, 1997), p. 252.
78
See, e.g., Mariarosa Dalla Costa, “Capitalism and Reproduction” (1996) 7 Capitalism Nature
Socialism 4; Selma James, Sex, Race, and Class: The Perspective of Winning (Oakland: PM
Press, 2012).
79
Harry Cleaver, Reading Capital Politically (Oakland: AK Press, 2000), p. 23, note 1. In
discussing the family in Egypt, Diane Singerman, using Gramsci, argues that the family is part
of the civil society, and could be a form of organization of the exploited classes. Therefore, the
struggle against bourgeois oppression must be developed through a counterhegemony of the
exploited classes. See Diane Singerman, “Restoring the Family to Civil Society: Lessons from
Egypt” (2006) 2 Journal of Middle East Women’s Studies 1.
80
Patricia Hill Collins, Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of
Empowerment (New York: Routledge, 2000), p. 46. See also Himani Bannerji, “Building from
Marx: Reflections on Class and Race” (2005) 32 Social Justice 144, 153.
352 Mai Taha
Silvia Federici and Selma James also give a compelling account of how
race, gender, and class shape property relations in capitalist society. They
argue that our community is not an area of freedom and leisure outside the
factory.81 Rather, the community is the other side of capitalist exploitation;
“the other, hidden, source of surplus value.”82 The community, therefore, is as
regimented as a factory, or the “social factory,” a concept borrowed from the
Italian operatist movement.83 Italian autonomist thinker Mario Tronti argues
that at a certain stage of capitalism, capitalist relations eventually subsume
social relations, collapsing the distinction between the factory and the society
outside it. Social relations become relations of production.84 Women’s house-
work that reproduces labor power as a commodity is at the heart of this social
factory.85 The reproductive labor of women has a much greater reach than the
mere consumption of commodities given that “food must be prepared, clothes
have to be washed, bodies have to be stroked and cared for.”86 In fact, if
unwaged labor – most of which occurs within the household – were
accounted for in the national income, the average GDP would increase by
approximately 50 percent.87 The household is a site of not only consumption
but also production and reproduction, and is indispensible to capitalist accu-
mulation, traditionally confined to the factory gates through the extraction of
surplus value.88 Therefore, the commodity infiltrates the domestic sphere
through family, sexuality, motherhood, and love.
Extraction of surplus value from a large population of workers who appear
to be outside the wage relations – such as colonial subjects, prisoners, house-
wives, and students – is one of the methods by which capitalism maintains its
power and divides the working class.89 In a sense, Nasser’s state feminism
created an odd situation where the government recognized childcare as work
81 82
James, Sex, Race, and Class, p. 51. Ibid.
83
Silvia Federici, “Preface,” in Silvia Federici (ed.), Revolution at Point Zero: Housework,
Reproduction and Feminist Struggle (Oakland: PM Press, 2012), p. 7.
84 85
Ibid. James, Sex, Race, and Class, p. 52.
86
Silvia Federici, “The Reproduction of Labour-Power in the Global Economy, Marxist Theory
and the Unfinished Feminist Revolution” (2008), in Revolution at Point Zero, p. 96.
87
Kerry Rittich, “Black Sites: Locating the Family and Family Law in Development” (2010) 58
American Journal of Comparative Family Law 753, 1030.
88
For a legal analysis of the scope of the household, and the family as an “economic unit,” see
Janet Halley and Kerry Rittich, “Critical Directions in Comparative Family Law: Genealogies
and Contemporary Studies of Family Law Exceptionalism” (2010) 58 American Journal of
Comparative Family Law 753, 759.
89
Federici, “Preface,” p. 8. For a detailed discussion of the different strands of socialist feminism,
and whether domestic work could be classified as “productive” versus “unproductive” labor in
a Marxian sense, see Terry Fee, “Domestic Labor: An Analysis of Housework and its Relation
to the Production Process” (1976) 8 Review of Radical Political Economics 1, 7.
only when it involved caring for other people’s children, and put mothers to
work in the industrial or service sectors.90 Identity politics subsumed liberal
feminism, which largely took the form of gaining equal status with men in the
workplace. However, formal laws of nondiscrimination would not have been
enough to mitigate a patriarchal system.91 Even socialist feminists saw
women’s participation in productive waged labor as important because they
would join the struggle of the working class.92 Waged employment, however,
cannot be considered a coherent, targeted strategy against the oppression of
women.93 Women’s right to waged work, although necessary, transforms the
feminist struggle from one that is “against capital, [to] a struggle for capital, in
a more rationalized, developed, and productive form.”94
conclusion
The women’s revolution is capable of destroying the classist, and patriarchal system
because it encompasses the body, the mind, the soul, the principles, the politics, sex,
history, religion, philosophy, and everything that inhabits the family and the state.95
As El Saadawi argues, a women’s revolution would encompass the public and

the private, the material and the affective, and the productive and the repro-
ductive. The Nasser regime suppressed the seed of this kind of revolution.
Bandung provided the regional and ideological legitimacy for this process.
The new type of modernity adopted after Bandung represented a break from
the modernization processes initiated at the turn of the century by people such
as Tal’at Harb, founder of Banque Misr.96 These processes, according to
Abdel Nasser, were mired in elite politics and complicit with the colonial
90
Federici explains the similar situation faced by the welfare mothers’ movement in the 1960s in
the United States. See Silvia Federici, “The Restructuring of Housework and Reproduction in
the United States in the 1970s” (1980), in Revolution at Point Zero, p. 43.
91
Kerry Rittich, “Feminization and Contingency: Regulating the Stakes of Work for Women,” in
Joanne Conaghan, Richard M. Fischl, and Karl Klare (eds.), Labor Law in an Era of
Globalization: Transformative Practices and Possibilities (New York: Oxford University Press,
2001), p. 132.
92
Silvia Federici, “Putting Feminism Back on its Feet” (1984), in Revolution at Point Zero, p. 56.
93
Silvia Federici, “The Reproduction of Labor Power in the Global Economy and the
Unfinished Revolution” (2009), in Revolution at Point Zero, p. 110.
94
Silvia Federici, “Counterplanning from the Kitchen” (1975), in Revolution at Point Zero, p. 29.
95
Nawal El Saadawi and Aida El Gohary, al-’Onutha, wa al-’Thukura, wa al-Ibda’ (Sharikat al-
Matbou’aat lel-tawzee’ wa al-nashr, 2013) (translation is mine), 98.
96
Banque Misr was “the major financial arm of . . . [the] Egyptian bourgeoisie and the hub of a
far-flung industrial and commercial empire.” See Robert L. Tignor, “Bank Misr and Foreign
Capitalism” (1977) 8 International Journal of Middle East Studies 161, 161.
354 Mai Taha
presence in Egypt. Bandung symbolized a rejection of this kind of moderniza-

tion in favor of a new anticolonial, industrial, and Third World modernity,
where women removed the veil, worked on the assembly line, and appeared to
be as liberated as Western women – while maintaining their traditional roles
at home.
Liberal legality and rights reforms were a central tenet in creating the new
Egyptian workingwoman. Clearly, women’s rights to vote and work in the
public sphere were important developments that should be celebrated and
defended. However, these legislative reforms effectively depoliticized women’s
struggles through a singular rights-based discourse, maintaining the reliance
on unwaged work at home. Housework was central to the success of these
reforms because any radical restructuring of the system, such as socializing
housework, would have challenged the vacant class analysis of Nasser’s
regime, and the underlying socioeconomic conditions and capitalist relations
embedded within Arab socialism. Therefore, the Bandung moment in Egypt,
instead of opening the door for a more radical postcolonial transformation of
society, became a lost opportunity. It failed to challenge the underlying root
causes of women’s exploitation; in fact, it relied on this exploitation to sustain
its postcolonial and modern project.
21
Rethinking the Concept of Colonialism in Bandung and

Its African Union Aftermath
luwam dirar
introduction
This chapter explores the concept of colonialism at the Bandung Conference.
The central argument is that the Conference focused solely on Western
colonialism, and in doing so failed to explore other forms of oppression.
The delegates were focused on Western and Soviet colonialism.1 This practice
directly and indirectly excluded Third World colonialism from public
speeches and discussions at the conference, and affected the decolonization
process for victims of Third World colonialism. For the purposes of this
chapter, Third World colonialism refers to an Asian or African state’s colonial
ambitions over another state.
Bandungian understandings of colonialism responded to international law’s
colonial legacy and defined international and regional law’s decolonization
project. By treating imperialism strictly as an external threat, international and
regional laws provided effective aspirations only for victims of a particular type
of colonialism. For example, Ethiopia’s claim over Eritrea is a typical example
of Third World colonialism that was excluded from the discussions at Ban-
dung and the African Union. By interpreting colonialism narrowly, inter-
national and regional actors failed to condemn Ethiopia’s colonization of
Eritrea and Morocco’s colonization of Western Sahara.2 Therefore,
1
See, e.g., Guy J. Pauker, The Bandung Conference 7 (1955) Center for International
Development MIT, Paper No. C 55–20. Pauker noted that there were four central themes of
discussion: nationalism, national independence, colonialism, and underdevelopment.
2
For a brief history of Eritrean colonization and decolonization, see, e.g., L. I. Griffiths, The
Atlas of African Affairs, 2nd ed. (New York: Routledge, 1993), pp. 110–113. For history of the
colonization and decolonization efforts of the Sahrawi Arab Democratic Republic, see
generally Laura E. Smith, “The Struggle for Western Sahara: What Future for Africa’s Last
Colony?” (2007) 10 Journal of North African Studies 545, 545–563.
355
356 Luwam Dirar
application of international and regional rules of decolonization became

reductive, deterministic, politicized, and inherently flawed. The African col-
onizing powers were able to legally characterize the pursuit of independence
as acts of terrorism, rebellion, and secession instead of decolonization.3 Char-
acterizing independence movements as terrorist has legal consequences that
continue today and diminish the impact of decolonization for victims of Third
World colonialism.
The examination of Bandung in this chapter is based on two interrelated
understandings of colonialism. The first is Rupert Emerson’s famous defin-
ition of colonialism as a practice associated with pigmentation and saltwater
test.4 Emerson’s characterization takes a simple view of colonialism as the
oppressive practice of the white man who crosses the ocean to the detriment of
the natives. Reflecting Emerson’s reasoning, the Final Communiqué men-
tions five areas of conflict. These are: Apartheid South Africa, West Irian,
Region of Aden, Palestine, and French possessions in North Africa.5 Emer-
son’s theory situated sources of colonial and racial oppression outside Africa
and Asia and displayed an exaggerated solidarity and harmony among, for
example, African societies, which ignored African solidarity’s fraught and
complex tensions.6 For example, Ethiopia’s normative support for anti-
3
When Ethiopia and others dubbed the Eritrean Liberation Movement as a terrorist
organization, former fighters or civilian supporters of independence were characterized as
members of a terrorist group and were not admitted into several Western states. For example,
Canada denies former Eritrean independence movement members entry to the country, as
they are considered members of a terrorist group. See, e.g., Canadian Council for Refugees,
From Liberation to Limbo, available at http://ccrweb.ca/files/from_liberation_to_limbo.pdf (last
accessed November 4, 2014). Similarly, see also Mimi Hall, U.S. Has Mandela on Terrorist List,
available at http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/news/world/2008-04-30-watchlist_N.htm (last
accessed November 4, 2014) (discussing how Nelson Mandela as a member of a movement the
United States dubbed terrorist had to get special clearance to enter the country).
4
For a definition of Western colonialism, see Rupert Emerson, “Colonialism and
Decolonization” (1969) 4 Journal of Contemporary History 3. Emerson defines colonialism as
“the imposition of white rule on alien peoples inhabiting lands separated by salt water from the
imperial center.” His use of the terms “pigmentation” and “salt-water test” whitewashes Third
World colonialism. For Bandung participants, defining colonialism as only a Western imperial
ambition meant ignoring the apologetic presence of Japan at the Conference. Richard Wright,
The Color Curtain: A Report on the Bandung Conference (Cleveland: World Publishing Co.,
1956), p. 149, which discusses how Japan was apologetic for persecuting other Asians.
5
See generally The Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Republic of Indonesia (ed.), “Final
Communiqué of the Asian-African conference of Bandung (24 April 1955),” Asia-Africa Speak
from Bandung.
6
Of course, the idea of solidarity among Asian and African states in Bandung was also complex,
fraught, and contentious. The common denominator of Western imperialism brought together
the twenty-nine states at Bandung. The participants were not of the same political or
ideological persuasion. At the Conference there were outright communist states, allies of
Rethinking Colonialism and the African Union 357
apartheid movements was not mirrored at the domestic level.7 Ethiopian Jews
and Oromos suffered discrimination because of their religious and ethnic
identities, respectively.8
The second understanding, which flows from the first, takes Asian-African
solidarity as a starting point and considers disagreements over the meaning of
colonialism as an internal debate within this bloc. The disagreements between
Sir John Kotelawala and Premier Zhou Enlai at Bandung – prime ministers of
Sri Lanka and People’s Republic of China, respectively – exemplifies this
tension. Each provided an imaginable understanding of colonialism with the
same assumption that only a foreign or western ruler from across the ocean
qualifies as a colonist. They disagreed over who counted as the colonist.
Kotelawala used the term “forms of colonization,” which treated the identity
of the colonialist as a predefined actor drawing from the white man who
comes across the ocean narrative. As explained below, this constructed the
Soviet Union as a “contemporary ideological” colonist over its neighbors.
Whereas for Enlai, colonialism was more amorphous and pervasive, and
therefore one had to look for “manifestations of colonialism” and take ser-
iously how states chose to politically resist colonialism. This had the effect of
delinking communism from colonialism.
This chapter explores how the distinction between forms versus manifest-
ations of colonialism affected broader conceptualization of colonialism.
Although Bandung was a frontier for decolonization, it indirectly failed to
address Third World oppression, whether of political, social, legal, or eco-
nomic nature. In thinking about the contemporary impact of such omission, it
is easy to notice similarities, continuity, and shared conceptualization of
“colonization” between the Bandung Conference and the African Union.
During the formative years of African unity, the post-independence states
Western powers, states friendly to the West, and aggressively neutralist states. Carlos P.
Romulo, The Meaning of Bandung (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1956).
7
Ethiopia’s international policy on racial discrimination and its support for the anti-apartheid
movement in South Africa was eloquently summarized by Yilma Deressa, Chairman of
Ethiopian delegation to Bandung Conference. Deressa stated, “Ethiopia’s attitude toward
theories of racialism is well known. We have opposed attempts to force these inhuman,
scientifically discredited theories to accomplish restrictive social, economic, and political ends
in defiance of the provisions of the United Nations Charter and the Declaration of Human
Rights.” Wright, The Color Curtain, p. 148.
8
See, e.g., Human Rights Watch, “Africa Watch Report, Evil Days: 30 Years of War and Famine
in Ethiopia” (1991), 368, discussing discrimination against Ethiopian Jews. See also Asafa
Jalata, “Ethiopia and Ethnic Politics: The Case of Oromo Nationalism” (1993) 18 Dialectical
Anthropology 381, 383, discussing how history of discrimination against the Oromos led to
Oromo national struggle for self-determination.
358 Luwam Dirar
put into place a form of political statehood that precluded victims of Third
World colonialism from defining their political future.
colonialism: forms and manifestations

In the 1950s and 1960s, decolonization movements were charged with nature
and roots of colonialism. Bandung participants, as incorporated in the Final
Communiqué, unanimously condemned colonialism and its manifestations.
Kotelawala and Enlai exemplify Bandung’s conceptual and at times ideo-
logical understanding of colonialism.
Kotelawala opened by treating colonialism as a contested term that gener-
ated a discussion within the Political Committee of the Conference.9 He
elaborated an account of colonialism as violent physical subjugation in the
narrow sense, which extended to ideological oppression. For him colonialism
took several forms: “The first and most obvious form is Western Colonialism,
which has kept large areas of Asia and Africa in subjection for generations, and
has not yet relaxed its hold in the remaining colonies of the European powers
in both continents.”10 He noted that all participants of Bandung were familiar
with and opposed to European colonialism. In addition, he reasoned that
there is a “new form of colonialism.” He argued:
Think, for example, of those satellite states under Communist domination in
Central and Eastern Europe – of Hungary, Rumania, Bulgaria, Albania,
Czechoslovakia, Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia and Poland. Are not these col-
onies, as much as any of the colonial territories in Africa and Asia? And if
we are united in our opposition to Colonialism, should it not be our
duty openly to declare our opposition to Colonialism, should it not be
our duty openly to declare our opposition to Soviet colonialism as much as
Western imperialism?”11
9
“You may say that Colonialism is a term generally understood, and capable of, only one
meaning. I cannot agree.” Excerpt of Kotelawala’s speech in Amal Jayawardane, Documents on
Sri Lanka’s Foreign Policy, 1947–1965 (Regional Centre for Strategic Studies (RCSS), 2005),
p. 38. Kotelawala’s colleagues in Sri Lanka debated his statement at Bandung. A motion was
introduced for vote of no confidence against the Government of Sri Lanka. After extensive
debate, the motion against Kotelawala’s speech was defeated. Although one might argue that
Kotelawala’s engagement with the question of colonialism was driven by interest, the question
that emanates from his speech is relevant in understanding Bandungian conception of
colonialism. See, e.g., Bandung Conference: Motion 27 April 1955, available at www
.swrdbandaranaike.lk/files/speeches/international-affairs/bandung_conference.pdf (last
visited February 28, 2015).
10 11
Ibid. Ibid., 39.
Kotelawala called upon Bandung participants to stand against colonialism,

both in its conventional and new forms. He declared, “[I]f we are against both
these forms of Colonialism we must also make it clear that we are opposed to
any form of colonial exploitation by any power in this region, now or in the
future.”12
According to Roselan Abdulgani, secretary-general of the Conference,
Enlai pointed his finger at Kotelawala and responded, “[W]hat do you want,
Sir John, by proposing a discussion of that Soviet colonialism? Is that to
provoke the People’s Republic of China? To split us apart and make the
Conference fail?”13 Enlai reasoned:
[P]ointing to his hand, he likened the whole hand and its five fingers to
colonialism. The five fingers were like the manifestations. There were mani-
festations in the political field, in the military field, in the economic field, in
the social field, in the cultural field. And not in “the form of the colonialism
of the Soviet Union” or the like.14
While for Kotelawala, “forms of colonialism” provided a clear identification

of the colonizer, Enlai’s understanding of “manifestations of colonialism”
was a broader platform for the struggle against colonialism. Nonetheless,
Enlai’s conceptualization of colonization was not simply analytical and was
also an attempt to separate the link between communism and colonization.
For Enlai, communism, unlike colonialism, was a decision the Chinese
people made. What matters is that the “Chinese people have chosen a
political system which is socialist in nature and led by the Chinese Com-
munist Party and that the Chinese people are no longer under the rule of
imperialists.”15
A committee composed of representatives from Burma, China,
India, Indonesia, Lebanon, Pakistan, Philippines, Sri Lanka, Syria, and
Turkey debated and made a determination over the question of coloni-
alism. The consensus, articulated in the Final Communiqué, was that
“colonialism in all its manifestations is an evil which should speedily be
brought to an end.”16 For Enlai, this was an ideological and political
success.
12
Ibid.
13
Roeslan Abdulgani, Bandung Spirit: Moving on the Tide of History (Djakarta: Prapantja, 1964),
pp. 116–117.
14
Abdulgani, Bandung Spirit, p. 119.
15
Zhou Enlai, “At Bandung” (1955) 36 The Labour Monthly 262, 263.
16
The Ministry of Foreign Affairs, “Final Communiqué.”
360 Luwam Dirar
the african union

The African Union – and its predecessor, Organization for African Unity – was
established in 1963 to institutionalize and strengthen continental emancipa-
tory projects. Among founding members of African unity there was a consen-
sus and focus on western colonial practices. Looking at the thoughts of African
thinkers and their discussions in the formative years of African Union shows
how African states condemned colonization unanimously, yet they were not
concerned with the distinction between forms and manifestations of colonial-
ism. In the African context, ideological tensions about the meaning and
nature of colonialism present at Bandung between Kotelawala and Enlai were
absent.
This is not to argue that there was ideological homogeneity in Africa.
Rather, ideological differences and heterogeneity failed to take center stage
in the formative years of African unity.17 African thinkers imagined and
articulated Africa’s integration as a continental emancipatory project. The
debate was not over the conceptual understanding of colonialism, but rather
the modality of the integration project. African thinkers adopted “forms of
colonialism” as their phrase of choice in their decolonization efforts.18 The
debate was mainly between two blocs, one advocating for a federal approach
for African Unity and the other for an intergovernmental one.19
Colonialism was discussed from three basic perspectives. First, there was a
consensus among African thinkers that common colonial and racial experi-
ences brought African states together. For example, Farik Abboud, prime
minister of the Republic of Sudan, noted that African states “gathered here
today to strive for the liberation of those parts of this dear Continent where
colonialism wages its last desperate battle.”20 Yet these experiences of coloni-
alism and racial domination were narrated in line with Emerson’s conception
of colonialism.21 African thinkers, much like their Bandung colleagues,
17
Farik I. Abboud, President of the Supreme Council and Prime Minister of the Republic of
Sudan, “Address at the 1963 African Summit (May 23, 1963)” in Celebrating Success: Africa’s
Voice Over 50 Years 1963–2013 (Corporate Research Foundation, 2012), pp. 97–100, discussing
how ideological heterogeneity was a problem that Africa needed to solve.
18
O.A.U. Charter art. 2, para. 1 (d) states, “The organization shall have the following purpose . . .
to eradicate all forms of colonialism in Africa.”
19
For debates on federal vs. intergovernmental approach for African unity, advocated by Kwame
Nkrumah and Julius Nyerere, respectively, see Kwame Nkrumah, President of Ghana,
“Address at the 1963 African Summit (May 23, 1963)” in Celebrating Success, pp. 37–39. See
also Julius K. Nyerere, President Tanganyika, “Address at the 1963 African Summit (May 23,
1963)” in Celebrating Success, p. 101.
20
Abboud, “Address.” 21
Emerson, “Colonialism and Decolonization.”
situated sources of colonialism and racism outside Africa. In short, for African
thinkers colonialism became synonymous with Western imperial ambition. In
his address at the first summit of African heads of states in 1963, Emperor of
Ethiopia Haile Selassie noted that colonialism existed in Angola, Mozam-
bique, Rhodesia, and South Africa, all of which were examples of European
colonialism and/or white domination.22 President of Ghana Kwame Nkrumah
likewise echoed Selassie’s focus on European colonialism and white domin-
ation by contrasting it with Portugal’s invasion of Senegal and white domin-
ation in Southern Rhodesia.23
Second, colonialism was debated in the context of neocolonialism.24 Some
African thinkers understood how the end of colonialism and physical subju-
gation could be the beginning of neocolonialism. For example, Nkrumah
emphasized the importance of unified economic planning in order to limit
and/or stop dependency on access to European markets.25 Nevertheless, the
focus on neocolonialism was narrow and limited; his analysis drew continuity
and kinship between colonial and neocolonial powers only as European
powers.
Third, African thinkers debated the role of the UN in the continents
decolonization project. Gamal Abdel Nasser, president of the United Arab
Republic, critically noted that the UN, under the guise of international aid, is
a tool for the expansion and retention of colonial practices.26 Nasser declared
22
Haile Selassie, Emperor of Ethiopia, “Address at the 1963 African Summit (May 23, 1963),” in
Celebrating Success, pp. 2–3. Selassie stated: “Our brothers in the Rhodesia’s, in Mozambique,
in Angola, in South Africa cry out in anguish for our support and assistance. We must urge on
their behalf their peaceful accession to independence.”
23
Nkrumah, “Address.” He argued:
When Portugal violates Senegal’s border, when Verwoed allocated one-seventh of South
Africa’s budget to military and police, when France builds as part of her defence policy
an interventionist force that can intervene, more especially in French speaking Africa,
when Welensky talks of Southern Rhodesia joining South Africa, it is all part of a
carefully calculated pattern working towards a single end: the continued enslavement
of our still dependent brothers and an onslaught upon the independence of our
sovereign African States.
24
Kwame Nkrumah, Neo-Colonialism: The Last Stage of Imperialism (Bedford: Panaf Books
Limited, 1966), p. ix, defining neocolonialism as “that the State which is subject to it is, in
theory, independent and has all the outward trappings of international sovereignty. In reality its
economic system and thus its political policy is directed from outside.”
25
Nkrumah, Neo-Colonialism, p. 38.
26
Gamal Abdel Nasser, President of United Arab Republic, “Address at the 1963 African Summit
(May 23, 1963)” in Celebrating Success, p. 111. “There exists those attempts at forging new
colonialist tools which infiltrate under the banner of the United Nations and which brought to
the Congo, during its violent crisis that appalling tragedy whose victim was that African
362 Luwam Dirar
that Africa’s colonialism “has not totally and fully been eradicated from all
parts of the continent and . . . clings stubbornly and brutally to some of these
parts, and in others, attempts to disguise itself behind false masks.”27 Contrary
to Nasser, Joseph Kasa-Vubu, president of Congo Leopoldville, praised the
UN’s role in his country and further argued for strengthening the UN as an
instrument of decolonization.28 Similar to Kasa-Vubu’s opinion, several other
founders of African unity portrayed positive attitudes on the UN’s role in the
continents decolonization project.29
In sum, African thinkers underscored the role of the continent’s integra-
tion project in decolonization projects, but focused only on how to end
and facilitate the process of decolonization from European colonists.
Additionally, post-independence African states examined the UN separately
from former European colonial powers. Consequently, African thinkers
legalized the perception that sources of colonial oppression are external
to the continent.
One result of limiting self-determination and independence to victims of
European colonialism was the solidification of postcolonial boundaries
through law. African leaders favored maintaining the integrity of the post-
colonial state, regardless of how artificial the respective borders, to the
detriment of victims of intra-African oppression. This is exemplified by the
interaction between President Osman of the Somali Republic and Prime
Minister Habte-Wold of Ethiopia at the African Summit. Osman argued
before African heads of state that the Somali people had a right to nation-
hood and deserved reunification regardless of the colonial boundaries that
divided them into different states. Habte-Wold argued against the quest for
nationhood of Somalis. For him, Ethiopia’s territory – before European
revolutionary martyr Patrice Lumumba; even in the guise of offering aid to the peoples of the
continent, infiltration attempts took place.”
27
Ibid.
28
Joseph Kasa-Vubu, President of Republic of Congo Leopoldville, “Address at the 1963 African
Summit (May 23, 1963)” in Celebrating Success, p. 29. He stated:
The reinforcement of the United Nations Organizations is another effective way of
permitting us to attain this objective. I believe the Congo is well placed to speak of this
Organization, which has conducted an unprecedented experiment in our country. The
experience has been difficult, but its success has proved the effectiveness of the UN,
despite all the obstacles, which it may have encountered.
29
See, e.g., Habib Bourguiba, President of Tunisia, “Address at the 1963 African Summit (May
23, 1963)” in Celebrating Success, p. 104. He stated, “We must strengthen, by every possible
means, action taken under the aegis and auspices of the United Nations, provide sufficient
continuous aid to the peoples who are fighting for their freedom, and, made untenable the
position of the last colonial enclaves in Africa, until liberation is achieved.”
colonization – encompassed Somalia and Eritrea. In short, Prime Minister

Habte-Wold argued, “there is no record in history either of a Somali State or
a Somali nation.”30 Despite their disagreements over legal boundaries, both
argued in similar terms and legitimized their position by reference to
precolonial time and space.
toward a broader conceptualization of colonialism

Redressing Third World colonialism may draw from two principles of
international law: territorial integrity (and to some degree sovereignty) and
claims of self-determination.31 In the African context, particularly in the
1960s, the right of self-determination was associated with decolonization
movements of victims of European imperialism and the right to independ-
ence.32 African Union channeled military, financial, and moral support to
decolonization movements through its Liberation Committee. The func-
tions of this committee were limited to liberation movements – for example,
in Angola, Guinea-Bissau, Mozambique, Namibia, South Africa, and
Zimbabwe – which were official recognized by the African Union.33 The
30
Tezaz Aklilou Habte-Wold, Prime Minister of Ethiopia, “Address at the 1963 African Summit
(May 23, 1963)” in Celebrating Success, p. 95. See also Aden Abdulla Osman, President of
Somali Republic, “Address at the 1963 African Summit (May 23, 1963)” in Celebrating Success,
pp. 90–94.
31
Gebre Hiwet Tesfagiorgis, “Self-Determination: Its Evolution and Practice by the United
Nations and Its Application to the Case of Eritrea” (1987) 6 Wisconsin International Law
Journal 75, 79, discussing two prongs of self-determination: (1) the right to self-determination of
people and (2) the right to self-determination of nations. See generally S.K.N. Blay, “Self-
Determination versus Territorial Integrity in Decolonization” (1986) 18 NYU Journal of
International Law and Politics 441, 441–472, discussing self-determination and territorial
integrity under international law.
32
Dr. Sam Blay, “Self-Determination: A Reassessment in the Post-Communist Era” (1994) 22
Denver International Law and Policy 275, 275–276, discussing the concept of self-determination
in Africa. Similarly, see also Lea Brilmayer, “Secession and Self-Determination: A Territorial
Interpretation” (1991) 16 Yale Journal of International Law 177, 181, discussing how Leninist
self-determination shared common understanding with Wilsonian self-determination.
Brilmayer notes that Leninist movements for self-determination encouraged overthrow of alien
and not capitalist domination.
33
The process of recognition of liberation movements in Africa highlighted the difficulties faced
by the African Union and its Liberation Committee. At times the Liberation Committee made
a principled stand not to recognize the independence movement of, for example, Eritrea. This
is despite the fact that the Eritrean independence movement was not different from, say, the
Namibian independence movement. Second, the existence of multiple independence
movements with the identical objective of liberating the same territory made it difficult to pick
and bestow recognition into rival independence movements. Organization of African Unity,
Report on the Liberation Committee, Resolution AHG/Res.7(I) (July 1964). See also
364 Luwam Dirar
recognition of liberation movements was weighed against the maintenance

of the postcolonial State as a political unit.34 This is not to doubt the
commitment of the African Union and its members for liberation of colon-
ized people. But the result of its particular approach was that the African
Union created a new African elite that employed concepts of territorial
integrity to determine the legitimacy of independence or secessionist
movement.
In other words, while decolonization from European colonists was associ-
ated with self-determination, decolonization from African imperialism was
considered a threat to territorial integrity of members of the Union. As a
result, the African Union did not recognize independence movements in
Eritrea and South Sudan.35 The African Union became “the modern (post-
colonial) equivalent of the Berlin Treaty of 1885.”36
The following questions therefore remain: Is self-determination limited to
victims of Western colonialism? And what is the relationship between
territorial integrity and self-determination in the context of Third World
colonialism?
In one particular exception, the Saharan Democratic Arab Republic, the
African Union and the Liberation Committee actively dealt with questions
of Third World colonialism. In 1976 African Union member states debated
the recognition of the Liberation of Saguiet el Hamra and Rio de Oro
(POLISARIO) and the Saharan Democratic Arab Republic (SDAR).
Members of the African Union and Algeria, Mauritania, and Morocco
Mohamed A. El-Khawas, “Southern Africa: A Challenge to the OAU” (1977) 24 Africa Today
25, discussing how the Liberation Committee withdrew its recognition of the Pan-African
Congress. See also Amare Tekle, “The Organization of African Unity at Twenty Five Years:
Retrospect and Prospect” (1988) 35 Africa Today 7, 16, discussing how lack of recognition for
the Eritrean independence movement was one example of the African Unity legitimating of
oppression.
34
Zdenek Červenka, The Unfinished Quest for Unity (Teaneck: Holmes and Meier, 1977), p. 70,
discussing the reasons behind African Union members’ decision of refusal to recognize
independence movement. See generally El-Khawas, “Southern Africa,” 25–41, discussing the
role of the Liberation Committee in several anti-decolonization movements in Southern
Africa.
35
See Paul D. Williams, “From Non-intervention to Non-indifference: The Origins and
Development of the African Union’s Security Culture” (2007) 106 African Affairs 253, 267,
discussing the irony of African Union and its predecessor the Organization for African Unity
with particular focus on independence movements and how support was limited to
independence movements from European colonists.
36
Bereket Habte Selassie, “The OAU and Regional Conflicts: Focus on the Eritrean War” (1988)
35 Africa Today 61, 61.
strongly debated the future of Sahrawi people.37 Despite the tensions, the
African Union recognized POLISARIO and, by the same token, SDAR.
Consequently, SDAR became a full member of the African Union.38 How-
ever, the Liberation Committee was dissolved without ending Moroccan
occupation of SDAR.39 Hence, at the African Union level, the question of
SDAR’s statehood was left in limbo.
Third World colonialism was based on its own matrix of interests and
ideologies that further complicated decolonization processes. For example,
on the question of Eritrea several Northern African governments, including
Algeria and Libya, recognized and supported the Eritrean independence
movement against Ethiopia. For some, the support for Eritrea’s independ-
ence movement by Arab or Northern African states was based on religious
kinship; that is, Muslim identity.40 Others supported Eritrea’s independence
as a result of unfriendly relations with Ethiopia.41 Others used their support
and relationship with the Eritrean independence movement as a bargaining
chip. For example, the Algerian government offered to stop support and
recognition for Eritrea’s independence movement if Ethiopia halted its
relations with Israel.42
37
See Claude Bontems, “The Government of the Saharawi Arab Democratic Republic” (1987) 9
Third World Quarterly 168, discussing how after the Madric Accord, Moroccan and
Mauritanian occupied SADR. See also Anthony G. Pazzanita, “Morocco versus Polisario:
A Political Interpretation” (1994) 32 Journal of Modern African Studies 265, 265–278, discussing
how Morocco’s occupation of SADR was followed up by strategic diplomatic investments with
other members of African Union and powerful states such as the United States. See also
J. Naldi, “The Organization of African Unity and the Saharan Arab Democratic Republic”
(1982) 26 Journal of African Law 152, 152–162, discussing recognition of the Sahrawi Arab
Democratic Republic by Organization for African Unity.
38
AU Member States, available at www.au.int/en/member_states/countryprofiles (last accessed
12/06/2014), showing profile of the SADR.
39
Organization of African Unity, Resolution on Dissolution of the OAU Liberation Committee,
Resolution AHG/Res.228 (XXX) (June 1994). In dissolving the Liberation Committee, the
member states of African Unity reasoned “that the mandate given to the Liberation Committee
in 1963 has been satisfactorily accomplished.”
40
See Ali A. Mazrui, “Black Africa and the Arabs” (1975) 53 Foreign Affairs 725, 737–738,
discussing support of Arab states for Eritrea’s independence movement. Mazrui’s piece
exemplifies how support for Eritrea’s independence movement was based on kinship of
religious Muslim identity.
41
See, e.g., Seifudein Adem, “Imperial Ethiopia’s relations with Maoist China” (2012) 1 African
East-Asian Affairs 31, 34–36, discussing how and why China and Egypt supported Eritrea’s
independence movements. Kidane Mengisteab, The Horn of Africa (Cambridge: Polity Books,
2013), p. 22, discussing how Sudan supported Eritrea’s independence movement to retaliate
Ethiopia’s support for the Southern Sudan independence movements.
42
Červenka, The Unfinished Quest for Unity.
366 Luwam Dirar
conclusion
In marking Bandung’s sixtieth anniversary and examining the the discourses of
colonialism it raised, it is relevant to proffer a broader conceptualization that
encompasses not only western colonialism, but also Third World colonialism,
which continues and arises anew in the political, social, legal, and economic
spheres. The future may be an opportunity to extend this analytic to encom-
pass social emancipatory movements deriving from ethnic minorities or gay
and lesbian groups, among others. In the contemporary period, it seems time
to move beyond pigmentation and salt-water tests, or a preoccupation with
self-determination and territorial integrity. In moving beyond colonial debates,
it may be time to stand against oppression irrespective of its forms and
manifestations.
22
China and Africa

Development, Land, and the Colonial Legacy
sylvia wairimu kang’ara
introduction
Africa has made a new best friend or its worst enemy. This is the impression
you may get when you survey reviews of China’s economic engagements with
African governments. This chapter explores the compulsory acquisition of
land that African governments are engaged in to facilitate Chinese-funded
infrastructure projects, and uncovers three interconnected problems. The first
is a historical bias that international law, as well as domestic law, manifests
toward the idea that African landowners have cognizable and compensable
interests in land. This bias hinders the full protections of the liberal underpin-
nings of compulsory acquisition doctrine from benefiting private landowners
in Africa, especially because mega-infrastructure projects, which aim to open
up remote parts of the continent, take over disvalued peasant land. The
creation of peasant land is obviously a factor of well-documented historical
development of land laws in Africa through colonial and postcolonial eras.1
The second problem is the urge to give Chinese investors a blank check
based on the argument that Africa badly needs infrastructure expansion in
order to develop. This compromises the protections of compulsory acquisition
doctrine to the extent that its justification lies in the idea of public-interest
1
H.W.O. Okoth-Ogendo, Tenants of the Crown: The Evolution of Agrarian Law and Institutions
in Kenya (Nairobi, Kenya: ACTS Press, African Centre for Technology Studies, 1991). H.W.O.
Okoth-Ogendo, “The Imposition of Property Law in Kenya,” in Sandra Burman and Barbara
Harrell-Bond (eds.), The Imposition of Law (New York: Academic Press, 1979), p. 147. Martin
Meredith, The Fortunes of Africa: A 5000-Year History of Wealth, Greed and Endeavour (New
York, Simon & Schuster, 2014). Joel Ngugi, “Rethinking the Role of Private Property in Market
Democracies: Problematic Ideological Issues Raised by Land Registration” (2003–2004) 25
Michigan Journal of International Law 467. Joel Ngugi, “The Modernization-Decolonization
Interphase: The Plight of Indigenous Peoples Rights in Post-Colonial Africa: The Case of the
Maasai People” (2002) 20 Wisconsin Journal of International Law 297.
367
368 Sylvia Wairimu Kang’ara
advancement. In a setting of dire economic need, it is difficult to challenge

the public-interest component in Chinese infrastructure projects.
Third, the conversation is happening in the context of heightened diplo-
matic concern about China’s engagement with African governments, as well
as African states’ heightened embrace and projection of sovereign power. This
context can muzzle the quest for legitimate review of Sino-African economic
engagement. Given the scale of the infrastructure projects, the secrecy
involved in contracting Chinese companies, the potential for displacement
and environmental degradation, and heightened taxation of citizens by their
governments, we should demand more review than is currently possible.
The Bandung Conference anticipated this unfolding scenario with only
slight variations – namely, we are in the post–Cold War era, not the era
following the Second World War, and China is no longer a Third World
state, but is contending for superpower status. The issues of national sover-
eignty over natural resources, of protecting hard-won political independence,
of noninterference with domestic matters of independent nations, of
appealing to international law to safeguard Third World interests in a bipolar
West-East divide, remain the same sixty years after Bandung. Then, as now,
Africa is at the center of geopolitical contests over global economic domin-
ance. These contests are taking place in the interlocking, often ideological,
crevices of noninterference, sovereign equality, human rights, resource sover-
eignty, foreign investment, and competing models of economic development.
bandung and after: 1955–2000

“The Chinese footprint in Africa” and “China’s scramble for Africa” are new
polemical phrases that academics, civil society, journalists, and government
officials use to convey a sense of urgency (in some cases, gratitude; in others,
alarm) over Chinese presence, influence, and economic engagement with
Africa.2 Reacting to an article by Timothy Webster, which uses the footprint
imagery and argues that China’s contribution to education, medicine, agri-
culture, and infrastructure is a human rights imprint equal if not superior to
that of the democratizing West,3 James Gathii has urged, in this context,
caution with regard to China’s posture of non-judgmental friendship and
2
See, e.g., Executive Research Associates, China in Africa: A Strategic Overview (October
2009); Deborah Brautigam, The Dragon’s Gift: The Real Story of China in Africa (New York:
Oxford University Press, 2009); Sanusha Naidu and Kweku Ampiah, Crouching Tiger, Hidden
Dragon? Africa and China (Scottsville: University of KwaZulu-Natal Press, 2008).
3
Timothy Webster, “China’s Human Rights Footprint in Africa” (2013) 51 Columbia Journal of
Transnational Law 626.
China and Africa 369
mutual partnership with African countries. Instead, he argues that China’s

engagement with Africa must be understood to be interventionist and imperi-
alist and, if it is so, Africa’s response should be equally self-interested in
incorporating knowledge transfer and trade advantages in agreements with
China.4
At street level, reactions to Chinese presence in Africa have also been
numerous and colorful. In a 2013 commentary, Aya Imai argues that Asian
countries are abandoning the Washington Consensus in their dealings with
Africa in order to keep up with China. Imai also asserts that China is attractive
to African leaders because of its stance of noninterference and because it
developed without adopting any of the prescriptions the West has imposed on
Africa. Other countries are adjusting their perception of Africa because of
China.5
Similarly, Thomas Friedman and Michael Mandelbaum have sounded the
alarm on the simultaneous decline of the United States and rise of China in
order to awaken Americans to a new era of globalization, climate change, and
digital technological revolution. These issues have changed the balance of
power in the world, and they may require leadership that China might not
provide as well as America could.6 In a speech given in Senegal on August 1,
2012, Hillary Clinton, then U.S. Secretary of State, got into a diplomatic spat
with China after commenting that regarding Africa, the United States is a
partner that insists on human rights and democracy, while other partners look
the other way in order to keep the resources flowing. In a veiled attack on
China’s interest in African natural resources, she commented that the United
States “was committed to a model that adds value rather than extracts it.”7 At
the time of Clinton’s speech, China had already surpassed the United States as
Africa’s trade partner, reporting US$166 billion in Sino-African trade in 2011.
Her comments were reported in leading newspapers around the world, some
outlets highlighting Clinton’s warning that China was practicing new coloni-
alism in Africa.8 In her view, taking resources without concern for the people,
4
James Gathii, “Beyond China’s Human Rights Exceptionalism in Africa: Leveraging Science,
Technology and Engineering for Long Term Growth” (2013) 51 Columbia Journal of
Transnational Law 664.
5
See http://africanbusinessmagazine.com/world-affairs/asia/how-the-sino-african-relationship-is-
influencing-the-rest-of-the-world/.
6
Thomas Friedman and Michael Mandelbaum, That Used to Be Us: How America Fell Behind
in the World It Invented and How It Can Come Back (New York: Picador, 2011).
7
See www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/78f5e794-dd7c-11e1-8be2-00144feab49a.html#axzz3gayw0gz9.
8
See www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-06-11/clinton-chastises-china-on-internet-african-new-
colonialism-.html.
human rights, or democracy was colonialism. She was keen to distinguish the
U.S. model of engagement with Africa from that of China.
That was not the first time Hillary Clinton had characterized China’s
dealings with Africa as parasitic, neocolonial, and antidemocratic; she also
did so in Zambia in June 2011. In June 2012, Dambisa Moyo castigated Clinton
for her comments.9 Moyo’s recent work on economic development in Africa
has had two trajectories: sharp criticism of Western foreign aid as a failed
model for African economic development,10 and recasting the relationship
between China and Africa as mutually beneficial and a much-needed alterna-
tive to the Western model.11 The Chinese model, in her view, is better because
it is driven by investment rather than aid, and investments in turn create
employment for Africa’s young population. To Clinton’s argument that the
Western approach is superior to that of China because it promotes democracy
and human rights, Moyo responds that the West’s foreign aid model has
emboldened and helped retain repressive regimes in Africa.
An important response to this controversy came from China’s President Xi
Jinping in a speech delivered in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, in March 2013.12
Media reported that citizens lined the streets and gave the Chinese president a
warm reception. In his speech, referring to ties and friendship that China has
had with African nations, Jinping acknowledged that China’s engagement
with Africa presented problems for African economies. According to Jinping,
these problems could be addressed through Chinese scholarships, loans for
infrastructure and agriculture projects, and technology transfer. But this was
hardly a revolutionary response; Chinese investors have been stifling local
economies by pushing out local traders, killing local industries, and systemat-
ically eliminating job opportunities.13
9
Dambisa Moyo, “Beijing, a Boon for Africa,” N.Y. Times (June 27, 2012).
10
Dambisa Moyo, Dead Aid: Why Aid Is Not Working and Why There Is a Better Way for Africa
(New York: Farrar, Strauss & Giroux, 2009). See also Dambisa Moyo, How the West Was Lost:
Fifty Years of Economic Folly – And the Stark Choices Ahead (New York: Farrar, Strauss &
Giroux, 2011).
11
Dambisa Moyo, Winner Take All: China’s Race for Resources and What It Means for the World
(New York: Basic Books, 2012).
12
Chris Buckley, “China’s Leader Tries to Calm African Fears of His Country’s Economic
Power,” N.Y. Times (March 25, 2013).
13
For a discussion of the negative effects of Chinese engagement with Africa, see Howard
French, China’s Second Continent: How a Million Migrants are Building a New Empire in
Africa (New York: Vintage, 2014), and “Into Africa: China’s Wild Rush,” N.Y. Times (May 16,
2014). He argues that democracy is the best antidote to China’s exploitation of Africa and
recommends the strengthening of civil society in the continent to demand from the Chinese
accountability and transparency.
Three arguments are on the table regarding Chinese engagement with

Africa. Discussions focusing on the effect on the global balance of power
and the relationship between America and China are just one dimension of
the law and development matrix. A second is the significance of human rights
to economic development, especially whether political rights and freedoms as
understood in liberal thought are a legitimate consideration to be built into the
economic models used to advance development in Third World countries.
A third argument has to do with a nation’s development priorities, especially
when the bulk of development financing comes from sovereign debt – which
in turn has an impact on a country’s credit rating, balance of trade, and general
fiscal well-being. Kenyan economist David Ndii is critical of development
policies that favor high-density infrastructure development and promote the
full embrace of Chinese investment by African governments.14 Ndii urges that
human capital development will be more beneficial to Africa than infrastruc-
ture development. Kimenyi Mwangi argues, on the other hand, for an eco-
nomic policy that advances both human capital and infrastructure
development because the two have “high complementarity of returns.”15
Given the unique history and colonial legacy of African countries, the three
arguments – global distribution of power, human rights, and development
choices – ignore the fact that African citizens, after long anti-oppression struggles
through colonial and postcolonial times, have legitimate expectations of their
governments that reject the reproduction of hierarchical oppression, even when
laced with the promise of development or civilization. As Karuti Kanyiga argues,
freedom is an important condition for development.16 The puzzle we face in
China’s engagement with Africa is whether states formed under a particular
colonial legacy of denial of African economic rights will protect the sovereignty
of African peoples in the face of China’s superpower status.
resilience of bandung despite shifts in international

law and ideology
The setting of the stage for today’s engagement between China and Africa
likely occurred sixty years ago at Bandung. China’s political and legal place in
14
See David Ndii, “Why Skyscrappers and Superhighways Are Not Development,” Daily Nation
(Nov. 21, 2014). See also “Human Capital, Not Mega-Projects Will Turbo-Charge Economy,”
Daily Nation (Nov. 7, 2014).
15
Mwangi Kimenyi, “How Mega Projects Can Help Fight Poverty and Spur Growth,” Daily
Nation (Nov. 14, 2014).
16
Karuti Kanyinga, “Without Good Governance and Liberty, Big Projects Will Not Energize the
Economy,” Daily Nation (Jan. 5, 2015).
world politics and international law was a central concern at the Conference.
As a communist regime, China was obviously a sticking point in Cold War
politics and a source of worry for Europe, the United States, and their allies.
Anticommunism aside, however, the countries convening the Bandung
Conference – namely, Indonesia, Burma, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, and India –
wanted to articulate their relationship with China, a powerful country still
billed as a Third World state. When in 1961 the Non-Aligned Movement
(NAM) was formed, again China was an important theme, but the Chinese
government was not a convener of the movement. NAM was the brainchild of
independence struggle leaders speaking the language of Pan-Arabism, Pan-
Asianism, and Pan-Africanism, many of whom were the first presidents or prime
ministers of their newly independent nations: India’s Nehru, Burma’s Nu,
Indonesia’s Sukarno, Egypt’s Nasser, Ghana’s Nkrumah, and Yugoslavia’s Tito.
The agenda of the Bandung Conference in subsequent years was quite
simply to guard independence against erosion through continued Western
domination and exploitation. The agenda was also protective – of national
economies, of natural resources, of internal affairs of each country, of peoples
and races of the Third World, and of world peace. The Charter of the United
Nations already embraced these principles, so it is telling that there was a need
to affirm them at Bandung. The fact that Bandung included a number of
anticommunist delegates ensured that the Final Communiqué sent a message
to both the West and the East that the Third World would resist colonialism
no matter where it originated, including China.
Today, the positions and anxieties exhibited at Bandung have special
resonance for Africa. The United States continues to compete with China
over who has the best policy for Africa’s political and economic advancement
and to debate who is an imperial vampire and who is an honest savior.17
Today there is role reversal in this narrative because the United States has
suffered a credibility loss in the recent past as the standard bearer for global
justice, coupled with a sense that many parts of Africa have not rejected
China as an imperial power. There has been remarkable progress in African
states that only recently were in economic doldrums and under close watch
by pro-Western international financial institutions such as the World Bank
and the IMF.18
17
The tendency to make sharp contrasts in order to make or justify interventions is a recurring
theme in engagements involving African countries. See, e.g., Makau Mutua, “Savages,
Victims, and Saviors: The Metaphor of Human Rights” (2001) 42 Harvard International Law
Journal 201.
18
See Brautigam, The Dragon’s Gift.
Today is also different because while the United States is in competition

with China, it is more for economic opportunity than for ideological align-
ment.19 Containing the spread of communism is no longer the front and
center of U.S. foreign policy toward Africa. In addition, China no longer looks
at Africa in terms of ideological divisions of socialist nation versus capitalist
nations, but in terms of commercial benefits and support of the African voting
bloc at the United Nations and other international institutions.20
The principles embraced at Bandung have passed through the heavily
ideological Cold War era and are now persisting through the heavily com-
mercial, non-ideological, post–Cold War era with the same two players
competing for influence. James Gathii has questioned the Chinese govern-
ment’s claim that a focus on the commercial and the promise of noninterfer-
ence means the absence of ideological imperialism.21 If anything, a review of
colonial engagements between Africa and the West reveal the same dynamics:
state officials sometimes focus on commerce and denial of ideology, and at
other times focus on ideology to mask exploitative commercial pursuits.22
chinese approach to economic development of africa

The world is in a renewed search for a suitable economic model or theory – a
search of remarkable importance for Africa, given the lag in economic devel-
opment of the region even after half a century of concerted global efforts to
save it.23 Commentators have observed that the Chinese seemed to have an
approach different from the West. Over time, analysts have become convinced
that there is a foreign policy methodology behind China’s engagement with
Africa that is characterized by well-choreographed visits to Africa by Chinese
leaders, and vice versa. These visits exploit the spirit of Bandung yet seem to
provide a refreshing newness – China, as an emerging world superpower,
overtly denounces a colonist, imperialist, and unequal relationship with
Africa, offering instead a straightforward business relationship characterized
19
See Friedman, That Used to Be Us.
20
Joseph Kahn, “China Opens Summit for African Leaders,” N.Y. Times (Nov. 2, 2006).
21
Gathii, “Beyond China’s Human Rights Exceptionalism.”
22
James Gathii, “Imperialism, Colonialism.” See also James Gathii, War, Commerce, and
International Law (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010) and Antony Anghie, Imperialism,
Sovereignty, and the Making of International Law (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2005).
23
Thomas Piketty, Capital in the Twenty-First Century (Cambridge: Harvard University Press,
2014).
by mutual respect and benefit, friendship, noninterference with internal

affairs, and respect for African peoples.24
But there is room for doubt and debate over whether there really is a
uniquely Chinese model:
But it may be too soon to say that China will be different. A study published
this year concluded that China’s main interest in Africa so far has been raw
materials. “China has predominantly imported a limited number of prod-
ucts – mostly oil and hard commodities,” the report said. In return, it said,
China mainly exports manufactured goods. In other words, China has done
pretty much what the rest of the world has done in Africa, but without the
moralizing about good government and fighting corruption. Indeed, the
Chinese model could prove deceptive and destructive.25
China’s use of Bandung principles in its engagement with Africa seems

refreshingly new at this point in history for a number of reasons. Until now,
economic development models employed in Africa have been billed as
failures, beginning with the colonial experiment that hinged on moderniza-
tion and the civilizational adventures of the West in the East, to postcolonial
state-led industrialization that occurred under the distortionary specter of the
Cold War, to the Washington Consensus of the post–Cold War era that
aggressively advanced fiscal austerity, good governance, and free-market cap-
italism in Third World countries under the close tutelage of the World Bank
and IMF.26 None of these models put respect for African peoples forward as an
aspiration in the same way that China has attempted to do. These failed
economic development models provide a rich historical backdrop for China’s
deployment of Bandung principles to show that its economic engagement
with African countries is not imperialist, unequal, or exploitative, and is
therefore morally superior to that of the West. China’s embrace of Africa
looks genuine because the two have had similar poverty indexes, but China
also frequently reiterates that it shares the same values and culture as Africans.
An additional boost to the African nationalist psyche is simply that the
Chinese model offers an alternative.27 Choice is an exercise of sovereign
24
See Lydia Polgreen, “Chinese Take a Turn at Turning a Subsaharan Profit,” N.Y. Times
(Aug. 18, 2006).
25
Polgreen, “Chinese Take a Turn.”
26
See Polgreen, “Chinese Take a Turn.” See also James Gathii, “Retelling Good Governance
Narratives on Africa’s Economic and Political Predicaments: Continuities and Discontinuities
in Legal Outcomes between Markets and States” (2000) 45 Villanova Law Review 971.
27
See Polgreen, “Chinese Take a Turn.”
power. Africa experienced earlier models not as offering choices, but as

instances of punishment, belittling discipline, and threats to their sovereignty.
The Chinese approach to Africa has taken old economic concepts and,
using sharp political acumen, made them appealing and acceptable. The
economic concepts involve, for example, scale, because scale speaks of effi-
ciency. China is not only involved in mega-infrastructure construction pro-
jects in Africa; it is also reported as having a presence not just in oil-rich
countries but also in less attractive states; not only in traditional, sovereign-
backed projects but also in retail shops, hotels, restaurants, and real estate,
mostly supplying extremely cheap imports. Not only does the Chinese model
offer competition against the West; it also does so against indigenous African
traders and workers. Further, the political acumen involves secrecy about
deals concluded with African states. But it has been argued that secrecy serves
two objectives: it protects important projects from political manipulation,
assuring efficient execution; and it protects the state from justifiable political
activism and judicial review, giving the state unwarranted respect in the eyes
of the public because of its ability to control release of unfavorable
information.28 Secrecy makes the state resemble a commercial actor because
it acts as a party interested in keeping competitors uninformed about import-
ant strategic moves. This means a blurring of the old characterization of the
state as a public entity, not an economic or a commercial actor.29 Control of
scale and secrecy of projects in turn allows the African state to project
sovereignty and independence – highly desirable and sought-after qualities.
The traditional aspect of this approach lies in the depoliticization of economic
models employed by governments, an approach well entrenched in Western
classical economic thinking30 and now celebrated as a crown jewel of China’s
economic success at home and abroad.
28
See Brautigam, The Dragon’s Gift.
29
See The Schooner Exchange v. Mcfaddon, 11 US 116 (1812), an early case that advanced the
idea that sovereigns engage in public obligations that are distinguishable from the obligations
undertaken by private individuals or entities. However, see a later case, Republic of Argentina
v. Weltover, Inc., 504 US 607 (1992), in which the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the
Argentine government had engaged in a commercial activity under the meaning of the U.S.
Foreign Sovereign Immunity Act similar to one that a private company could engage in and
had therefore not merely engaged in a sovereign activity when it issued debt instruments in the
marketplace.
30
Frank Michelman, “Ethics, Economics, and the Law of Property,” in J. Roland Pennock and
John Chapman (eds.), Nomos XXIV: Ethics, Economics, and the Law (New York: NYU Press,
1982), p. 8. Duncan Kennedy, “Law and Economics from the Perspective of Critical Legal
Studies,” in Peter Newman (ed.), The New Palgrave Dictionary of Economics and Law, Vol. 2
(New York: Stockton, 1998).
property rights and sovereignty doctrine

The Chinese model involves complementarity of projects and linkages, so
compulsory acquisition of land and general dealings with land are indis-
pensable to China’s engagement with Africa. Not all land required by the
Chinese is compulsorily acquired; the government buys or leases most of it.
Perhaps land that is purchased or leased by Chinese nationals is actually
land near infrastructure projects that have needed compulsory acquisition.
Chinese nationals, and others with access to information and financial
ability, acquire such adjacent land strategically for other developments
(such as real estate) in readiness for the economic boom that typically
follows the completion of infrastructure projects. Whether land is compul-
sorily acquired for infrastructural development or purchased privately for
complementary projects or even for speculation, in a continent where land
has evoked violence, corruption, and political patronage, one must wonder
about Africa’s future political stability31 given the speed, scale, and intensity
of Chinese investments that require land resources. The intensity of Chi-
nese investment means that not much time is spent on due diligence on
land titles and related matters.32 Because Chinese investors are transacting
secretly and the details of the primary and secondary land transfers are
private, there is no chance of any local public outcry against the detrimental
effects of Chinese investments.
In the African context and elsewhere, property is strongly linked to sover-
eignty. Conquest is an expression of sovereignty that involves taking colonized
people’s land.33 Settling the land by issuing title to the land to private owners is
also an exercise of sovereign power. And the same is applicable to regulating
the use of land and implementing development policies.
31
Bernadette Atuahene, “Property Rights and the Demands of Transformation” (2009–2010) 31
Michigan Journal of International Law 765 (2009–2010).
32
Ibrahim Oruko, “Sh370m Lost in SGR Land Scandal Deals,” The Star (Dec. 14, 2015), at 6,
reporting on fraud in land compensation claims involving the Standard Gauge Railway being
constructed by the China Road and Bridges Corporation. See also Sam Kiplagat, “New Court
for Graft Cases – CJ,” The Star (Dec. 14, 2015), at 7, reporting that Kenya’s Chief Justice had
announced the creation of the Anti-Corruption and Economic Crimes Division of the High
Court of Kenya that would open in January 2016.
33
Martti Koskenniemi, “Empire and International Law: The Real Spanish Contribution” (2011)
61 University of Toronto Law Journal 1; James Gathii, “Foreign and Other Economic Rights
Upon Conquest” (2004) 25 University of Pennsylvania Journal of International Economic Law
491; James Gathii, “Imperialism, Colonialism, and International Law” (2004) 54 Buffalo Law
Review 1013.
With the consolidation of contemporary international law, countering

conquest and colonialism required recapture of property by the disposed in
an exercise of their right to self-determination. Recapture of land was part of
the narrative of liberation and self-determination. In the postcolonial moment,
international law was concerned with the permanent sovereignty of the use of
natural resources. Hence, one measure of statehood under international law
became territorial sovereignty, and the possibility of protecting it through the
use of force should other measures fail.
Related to the exploitation of natural resources is the right to contract with
other sovereigns – and to do so on equal footing. The pursuit of economic
development as a legitimate exercise of sovereign power holds sway in political
philosophy, domestic law, and international law. In political philosophy, it is
the reason for the democratic social pact between citizens and their govern-
ments. In the past, domestic law gave the state ideological identity as capitalist,
socialist, or communist, and also the well-worn legal identity of common law
regime, civil law regime, and Islamic law regime, not to mention democratic
versus dictatorial regimes.
China has argued that its model is based on mutual respect and friendship
among equal sovereigns. This narrative has been used to distinguish China
from the West. It argues that the West interferes with the domestic matters of
African nations when Western aid is based on conditions such as good
governance, human rights, democracy, elimination of corruption, and free
markets. China’s noninterference policy supports and recognizes the sover-
eignty of African nations.
Therefore, we have a boost to African countries’ outward projection of
sovereign power because of the rise in compulsory acquisition for economic
development purposes and assurance of noninterference, which is another bow
to sovereignty. We see an engagement that is simultaneously open and shut. It is
open because Chinese FDI receives support by the state exercising compulsory
acquisition power, and shut because the process through which this power is
exercised is ring fenced by non-interference doctrine. At the international plane,
this gives China a monopoly over what is open and what is shut in international
law discourse, leaving Western countries to either follow the Chinese example
or remain excluded from African markets and development projects.
China’s projects in Africa promote sovereignty of African nations by embra-
cing three international law concepts that trace their origin to Bandung: the
right to development, sovereignty over natural resources, and nonintervention.
The complex legacy of colonialism and the current specter of geopolitical
posturing between China and other powerful countries give these Bandung-
derived principles a unique hue.
The rights to development and sovereignty over natural resources are being
exercised within a framework of laws on compulsory acquisition that, because
of historical colonial bias against native land rights, favors a titled ownership-
market valuation approach to compensate individuals whose land is taken to
advance ongoing, massive, and intensely executed infrastructure development
projects. Only a few countries, such as Kenya, have recently adopted new
constitutions that provide greater safeguards in the form of progressive com-
pulsory acquisition clauses. These states have not netted full benefits of these
new laws because supporting institutions have not been strengthened or
developed because of the political alliance that has emerged between African
leaders and Chinese investors. Consequently, massive compulsory acquisition
is taking place under the umbrella of sovereign right to development, but
many countries still have land reform programs that are incomplete because
they do not extend to rural interior regions – exactly the places where massive
infrastructure development is taking place. New laws do protect customary
land tenure through recognition, but that does not protect the land from being
devalued because it is still subject to market valuation that ignores its many
non-market values. In its engagement with China, Africa continues to rely on
the same laws that emerged from heavily discredited land reform programs
that produced gender, ethnic, racial, and economic inequality, and in many
cases resulted in massive political instability and violence.
Further, the legal framework for development by design or default has
many legitimate gaps as well as opportunities for corruption. In these circum-
stances, a moneyed foreign investor has more access to government officials,
the justice system, and valuable business information than does an ordinary
citizen whose land has been marked for acquisition. Even if the laws as written
were followed to the letter, these asymmetries would still emerge because of
the continued strength of the colonial legacy, which is biased against proper
valuation of African land, property interests, and right to have favorable and
functioning governments. In sum, effective valuation of land for compulsory
acquisition depends on much more than the letter of the law and market
pricing.
Moreover, the market bias of property laws in Africa and most of the world
assumes that valuation of property during compulsory acquisition should focus
only on the loss suffered by the individual. Compulsory acquisition doctrine
has its roots in liberal legal thinking, which protects the individual, not the
community, from excess assertion of power by the state, and considers property
ownership as an inviolable individual right. Massive infrastructure develop-
ment and natural resource exploitation often takes place at a huge cost to
communities as well. Given the institutional weaknesses as well as secrecy and
the pro-China bias prevailing in Africa, it is doubtful that environmental cost

valuations, for example, are undertaken and factored into investment contracts
and compensation configurations. On the right to sovereignty over natural
resources, resource-rich African countries have a right to trade with the best
buyer in a market that now has many more players than before, and this is a
good environment for development because the competition allows African
countries to sell at competitive prices. This position has also provided the
argument that China’s trade approach is superior to the West’s aid approach. If
the valuation of infrastructure development and resource exploitation is not
effective, this argument fails to be persuasive, and the sharp distinction
between the two models becomes little more than a smoke screen.
While nonintervention is used to underwrite the argument that China’s
approach is superior to that of the West because it rests on friendship, mutual
respect, and noninterference and takes African quest for sovereign power
seriously, it also closes off questions of compulsory acquisition as domestic
matters that are to be handled by each country as it deems fit. The argument
has technical bite until one sees that compulsory acquisition processes have
become hotbeds of corruption, secrecy, opacity, and justice-stifling bureau-
cracy. Yet, these limitations find shelter in nonintervention.
The language of international law created at Bandung – noninterference,
sovereign equality, resource sovereignty, foreign investment, multiple models
of economic development, and even human rights – is how world govern-
ments continue to contest and compromise over property. But, as Abi-Saab
argued soon after Bandung, new independent countries (as they were then
called) should not focus solely on exercising sovereign power. They should
also attend to legitimately exercising domestic jurisdiction. “Sovereignty indi-
cates the unlimited discretion of the state, and domestic jurisdiction delimits
the scope of this discretion.”34
conclusion
China’s entry into the scene of Africa’s economic development has caused
ripples in diplomatic and academic circles, and forced a debate about failed
economic models and alternatives. In an era of expanding legal awareness,
and therefore political restlessness, China has given African governments a
new lease on life with their voting populations, because Chinese-built
34
Georges Abi-Saab, “The Newly Independent States and the Scope of Domestic Jurisdiction”
(1960) 54 Proceedings of the American Society of International Law 84, 87.
infrastructure is dignifying not just from a poverty eradication point of view

but also from a sovereign consciousness dimension.
The problems reportedly raised by China’s economic engagement with
Africa, such as corruption, exploitation, neocolonialism, and authoritarianism,
are important and should be well researched and addressed. However, the
problem highlighted in this chapter – namely, historical bias that would lead
to a misevaluation of property in compulsory acquisition cases – is less obvious
and therefore more challenging to resolve. The challenge is in the tendency to
overstate or assume the public benefit accruing from China’s infrastructure
investment, which in turn diminishes the safeguards compulsory acquisition
doctrines could give to private landowners. Exaggerating the public benefit,
coupled with a failure to appreciate the true value of private ownership status
in an African context that is riddled with historical bias against claims of
private ownership by Africans, combined with a corruptible land adminis-
tration regime and mega-projects involving huge acreage, is a problem that
will hatch many legal problems well into the future.
Sixty years after Bandung, the economic ascent of China and other erst-
while Third World countries reveals the emergence of a world full of possibil-
ities but rife with risks, even within the context of South-South cooperation. It
would be regrettable if Bandung’s principled idealism helped advance exploit-
ation on a worse scale than the conveners of the Conference imagined.
We must ask, for example, whether the spirit of Bandung was ever to advance
and protect sovereign absolutism by laying down the principle of noninterven-
tion. Second, we must ask whether the principles of Bandung would not be
better advanced if we opened up important domestic law doctrines such as
compulsory acquisition to appropriate internal and external scrutiny. After all,
a well-executed, compulsory acquisition program will better showcase African
sovereignty than any other, as will a program that seeks to protect individuals
as well as communities by taking into account the total and actual costs of
massive investment projects. Further, secrecy, especially in large-scale pro-
jects, does little to protect the sovereignty of African peoples. Ultimately, the
development of laws in the continent must bear in mind context and historical
biases in order to avoid or prepare for conflicts that might arise in future.
Development cannot be an end in itself. It must reckon with societal well-
being in the long term and minimize resource-driven political instability.
23
Bandung’s Legacy for the Arab Spring
noha aboueldahab
introduction
Almost half of the nine Arab states represented at Bandung more than sixty
years ago have experienced the dramatic uprisings of the so-called Arab
Spring. These massive popular uprisings, which unseated or significantly
weakened long-standing leaders, struck at the heart of postcolonial authoritar-
ianism by calling for its removal and demanding “bread, freedom, social
justice.”1 There has been a resurgence of literature on Bandung and its legacy
since the Conference’s fiftieth anniversary in 2005.2 More than ten years later,
the Arab region has embarked on drastic transitions that have shaken society in
all its political, legal, economic, and cultural manifestations. This historic
episode presents an opportunity for a renewed focus on Bandung in the
context of the Arab Spring. While it is important to take into account the
open-ended nature of the Arab uprisings,3 discussing the Bandung legacy is a
useful way to reflect on the mixed results of the immediate post–Arab Spring
period, on Bandung itself, and on the transformative potential of human rights
in the midst of rebellion. This chapter reveals continuities and discontinuities
1
This was one of the prominent slogans of the Egyptian uprising of 2011.
2
See, e.g., Christopher J. Lee (ed.), Making a World after Empire: The Bandung Moment and
Its Political Afterlives (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2010); Derek McDougall and Antonia
Finnane, Bandung 1955: Little Histories (Caulfield: Monash University Press, 2010); see Seng
Tan and Amitav Acharya (eds.), Bandung Revisited: The Legacy of the 1955 Asian-African
Conference for International Order (Singapore: NUS Press, 2008); Roland Burke, “The
Compelling Dialogue of Freedom: Human Rights at the Bandung Conference,” 28 Human
Rights Quarterly (2006), p. 947; Robert Young, “Postcolonialism: From Bandung to the
Tricontinental,” 5 Historein (2005), p. 11. Accessible at: www.historeinonline.org/index.php/
historein/article/view/70.
3
Hamid Dabashi, The Arab Spring: The End of Postcolonialism (London, Zed Books, 2012).
381
382 Noha Aboueldahab
from the anticolonial Bandung era to the postcolonial era, particularly in the
Arab region, with an emphasis on Egypt and Tunisia.
While the Cold War politics of the Bandung era resonate in the Arab
Spring, new and influential strategic alliances have emerged since 2011.
Bandung was the response of many newly independent states to Western
political and economic exploitation. It was also one of the cornerstones of
the more global Non-Aligned Movement, which included Latin American
countries as well as Yugoslavia, Cyprus, and Malta. Since the Arab Spring,
however, a new regional political order in the Arab region has emerged.
Marked by an alliance of certain Gulf countries with other countries in the
region, this new political order is quite different from the regionalism of
Bandung and lies outside the traditional superpower framework of inter-
national relations. It points to how the structure and motivations of regional
alliances have significantly changed since Bandung. One of the impacts of
these new alliances is the consolidation of domestic authoritarian rule for the
protection of the region’s broader political and economic interests.
Bandung saw the birth of the “Third World,” which rejected colonialism
and Western economic and political imperialism. The values of self-
determination and freedom from colonial rule that defined Bandung in
1955 have remained relevant in the development of Third World politics
and well into the Arab Spring uprisings of 2011. However, whereas Bandung
celebrated the freedom of nations from imperialism, the Arab Spring
demanded attention to freedom of individuals from authorities within those
nations. The decades of authoritarian rule that followed Bandung meant that
Third World intellectuals and activists had to reorient and redefine their
struggle for human rights.
This chapter reflects on the legacy of Bandung for the Arab Spring in three
ways. First, there has been an emergence of a new regional political order
since Bandung. This is marked by a shift allowing for a greater regional
influence on the domestic affairs of the Arab Spring countries. Egypt’s
strengthened alliance with certain Gulf countries, primarily Saudi Arabia
and the United Arab Emirates, demonstrates this strategic realignment. This
new regional political order has not replaced strong economic and political
ties between Egypt and the traditional superpowers. It has, however, diversi-
fied Egypt’s allies, thereby contributing to a stronger regionalism that lies
outside of the traditional U.S.-Russian superpower framework in the Bandung
era and from which Egypt draws significant support.4
4
As Sally Khalifa Isaac notes, the predominantly Sunni Gulf influence in regional politics
started in the 1990s. This influence was, and continues to be, largely in the form of generous
Bandung’s Legacy for the Arab Spring 383
Second, local resistance to internal and external forms of domination and

exploitation in the Arab Spring has developed the struggle for human rights
since Bandung. While the human rights cause was central to both historic
moments, its scope has significantly broadened, and it has acquired greater
agency in the form of indigenous resistance. The strong popular demand for
socioeconomic rights and justice, as well as the important role of workers’
movements in the Arab uprisings, are at the forefront of this expanded struggle
for human rights and a more just economic order.5 In much the same way that
Bandung was a collective stand against colonial domination and exploitation
of indigenous resources, the Arab Spring was a protest against both foreign and
indigenous exploitation of resources. The Arab Spring reinforced the Ban-
dung aspiration for an end to socioeconomic exploitation, but it strengthened
this call by making equal demands for basic civil and political rights. The two
sets of rights thus became inseparable.
Third, the emergence of a strengthened local resistance in the Arab Spring
constitutes an important milestone for the development of Third World
Approaches to International Law (TWAIL). While TWAIL has traditionally
criticized the Third World’s continued subordination to the colonial and
imperial roots of international law,6 the Arab Spring demands a highly critical
focus on subordination and exploitation at home. Central to this renewed role
of the Third World intellectual and activist is the struggle against postcolonial
authoritarianism on local, regional, and international levels. The massive
popular protests of the Arab Spring, which ousted long-standing dictators,
mark an important moment in redefining this role. The Arab Spring strongly
reasserts and develops the Bandung demand for a more prominent role for the
Third World intellectual and activist in shaping so-called global norms that
adequately address local realities.
financial assistance and significant numbers of Arab migrants working in the Gulf countries.
Following the Arab Spring uprisings, however, certain Gulf States have had conflicting roles in
the region, “largely driven by the interest of maintaining the political stability of their own
monarchies and that of the region at large.” See “Explaining the Patterns of the Gulf
Monarchies’ Assistance after the Arab Spring” 19 Mediterranean Politics (2014), p. 415.
5
The role of these workers’ movements was particularly prominent in the Egyptian and
Tunisian uprisings. See Gilbert Achcar, The People Want: A Radical Exploration of the Arab
Uprising (London: Saqi Books, 2013).
6
See, e.g., Makau Mutua, “What Is TWAIL?” 94 American Society of International Law
Proceedings (2000) p. 31; Antony Anghie, Imperialism, Sovereignty and the Making of
International Law (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005); Karin Mickelson,
“Rhetoric and Rage: Third World Voices in International Legal Discourse,” 16 Wisconsin
International Law Journal (1997–1998), p. 353.
shifting political alliances in the arab spring

While Bandung is regarded as the birth of the Third World and of postcolo-
nialism,7 the Arab Spring, according to Hamid Dabashi, signifies the end of
postcoloniality:8
These revolutionary uprisings are postideological, meaning they are no
longer fighting according to terms dictated by their condition of coloniality,
codenamed ‘postcolonial.’ . . . The revolts . . . are not a return to any absolut-
ist ideology but a retrieval of a cosmopolitan worldliness that was always
already there but repressed under the duress of a dialectic sustained between
domestic tyranny and globalized imperialism.9
Dabashi thus declares the death of postcolonialism, the end of Westernism,

and, thanks to the Arab Spring, the emergence of a “new worldliness.”10
However, Dabashi’s declaration now appears premature.
External influence and intervention in the social, political, and economic
affairs of the Arab Spring countries have evolved to allow for a greater regional
role in shaping those affairs. The Afro-Asian regionalism of Bandung was
inspired by anticolonial solidarity and nonaligned unity in the face of a
polarizing Cold War.11 The Arab Spring, however, partially resulted in a
divisive regionalism motivated by political interests. All national leaders and
many members of the ruling class in question worked to contain prodemo-
cratic rebellion rather than accommodate it.
The anticolonial conscience of the Bandung era left unaddressed the
proliferation of postcolonial, national authoritarianism. Leaders of the same
countries represented at Bandung ruthlessly and systematically violated their
own people’s human rights. This blatantly contradicts the international
human rights standards they so ardently supported at Bandung. The problem
of postcolonial authoritarianism has been further complicated, even but-
tressed, by the new regionalism that emerged after the Arab Spring. One of
the impacts of this new regionalism is the consolidation of domestic authori-
tarian rule for the protection of the region’s broader political and economic
7
Robert Young, “Postcolonialism”; Roland Burke, “Afro-Asian Alignment: Charles Malik and
the Cold War at Bandung,” in Derek McDougall and Antonia Finnane (eds.), Bandung 1955:
Little Histories (Caulfield: Monash University Press, 2010).
8 9 10
Dabashi, The Arab Spring. Ibid., pp. 9–11. Ibid.
11
This solidarity, however, was not uniform throughout, as others in this collection have noted.
Roland Burke discusses this in detail in his account of the disagreements among delegates at
Bandung. See Burke, “Afro-Asian Alignment.” See also Mcdougall’s discussion of regionalism
in the Bandung era in his Afterword, Bandung 1955: Little Histories, p. 137.
interests. This has arguably made dependence on international – that is,

Western – powers less pressing for propping up authoritarian leaders facing
domestic resistance.
Egypt’s shifting strategic alliances with neighboring countries, particularly
in the Gulf, aptly illustrate this emerging regional political order.
A comprehensive overview of the motivations behind these new alliances is
beyond the scope of this chapter.12 However, Egypt has accepted significant
amounts of aid and political support from the Gulf States, which points to the
changed dynamics of regional power relations in the wake of the Arab
Spring.13 Karen Young describes the post-2011 period as “a moment of finan-
cial and military interventionism unprecedented in Arab Gulf politics.”14 An
Arab Cold War, waged through proxy wars that pit some countries against
others, thus surfaced in the immediate post-uprising period.15 The motivations
of this new regional order include the repression of local opposition move-
ments, particularly the Muslim Brotherhood, and other opposition move-
ments, individual activists, and media professionals that criticize continued
authoritarian rule.16 Isaac adds that the pre-2011 motives of Gulf aid to the Arab
region include “investing in regional stability, enhancing Gulf commercial
interests and promoting Islam through large flows of non-official aid.”17
Moreover, in recent years the influence of Western powers on domestic
politics has begun to diminish, with some important exceptions. For example,
the United States continues to send billions of dollars in mostly military aid to
Egypt.18 As Shaikh and Hamid argue, Western political influence in the Arab
Spring transitions has played contradictory roles:
12
For recent analysis on the emergence of the Gulf-Arab political order before and after the Arab
Spring, see Isaac, “Explaining the Patterns” and Karen Young, “The Emerging Interventionists
of the GCC,” LSE Middle East Centre Paper Series/02 (Dec. 2013). Accessible at: www.lse.ac
.uk/middleEastCentre/publications/Paper-Series/EmergingInterventionistsGCC.aspx.
13
Steven A. Cook, Jacob Stokes, and Alexander Brock, “The New Arab Cold War,” Foreign
Policy (Aug. 28, 2014). Accessible at: www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2014/08/28/the_war_
within_the_middle_east_sunni_qatar_saudi_arabia_uae_libya_syria.
14
Karen Young, “The Emerging Interventionists,” p. 4.
15
Cook, “The New Arab Cold War.”
16
In addition to Egypt, Bahrain, Libya, Syria, and Yemen are examples of countries where Gulf
aid and political support (including military support from Saudi Arabia, in the case of Bahrain)
played a significant role in buttressing authoritarian rule and suppressing local prodemocratic
resistance.
17
Isaac, “Explaining the Patterns,” p. 414.
18
Salman Shaikh and Shadi Hamid, “Between Interference and Assistance: The Politics of
International Support in Egypt, Tunisia and Libya,” The Saban Center for Middle East Policy,
Brookings Institution (Nov. 2012).
Arab pro-democracy activists argue that . . . the United States has been
behind the curve in the various countries facing mass protests, and that it
continues to arm, fund, and otherwise support many of the region’s most
autocratic countries. Yet at the same time, many of these same activists have
called for a greater American role in the region, hoping that the United States
would support their struggle against repressive regimes . . . These seemingly
conflicting sentiments – anti-Americanism coupled with a desire for the
United States to be more, not less, involved – continue to be a source of
confusion for American observers.19
But the emerging alliances of the Gulf countries and Egypt – in the form
of both large amounts of financial aid and political support for the
military regime of Abdel Fattah El Sisi, who became president in June 2014 –
constitute a regional shift that has not existed since Bandung.20 This regional-
ism is marked by top-down subordination, whereby authoritarian leaders and
political elites implement policies with the aim of containing, repressing, and
penalizing local resistance. One of the biggest victims of this new regional
political order is, arguably, indigenous struggles for human rights.
Egypt clearly illustrates this tragedy of a battered human rights system.
Since the toppling of President Hosni Mubarak in 2011, both military-backed
transitional governments (2011–2012 and 2013–2014) and the one-year rule of
Islamist president Mohamed Morsi (2012–2013) oversaw widespread human
rights abuses. In November 2012, Morsi issued a highly controversial presiden-
tial decree that effectively removed the separation of powers.21 A repressive
protest law, which grants security forces sweeping powers to ban protests
through the use of lethal force, effectively putting an end to any kind of
dissent and freedom of assembly, was issued in 2013 under then–interim
president Adly Mansour.22 Moreover, the biggest mass killing in Egyptian
19
Ibid., p. 3.
20
At the time of this writing, Qatar and Egypt were not allies. Accusations of Qatar’s funding and
support for the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood, for example, have angered the military-led
government in Egypt and its supporters. See Cook, “The New Arab Cold War,” for a concise
explanation of the positions of Gulf countries in the new Arab cold war.
21
For an English translation of the constitutional declaration, see Ahram Online, “English text of
Morsi’s Constitutional Declaration” (Nov. 22, 2012). Accessible at: http://english.ahram.org.eg/
NewsContent/1/64/58947/Egypt/Politics-/English-text-of-Morsis-Constitutional-Declaration-.
aspx. After intense protests, this decree was annulled in December 2012.
22
Law 107 (2013). For more on the human rights implications of this law, see Amnesty
International, “Egypt: New Protest law gives security forces free rein” (Nov. 25, 2013).
Accessible at: www.amnesty.org/en/news/egypt-new-protest-law-gives-security-forces-free-rein-
2013-11-25.
modern history, the Raba’a massacre of August 2013 – where security forces
killed more than 800 Muslim Brotherhood supporters – continues to be
marked by impunity.23 Thousands of people have been arrested and detained
without trial, while crackdowns on student protesters, journalists and
the media, and NGO members are endemic and have become
institutionalized.24
Regional aid to Egypt, primarily from the Gulf Arab States, has trans-
formed the political economy and allowed human rights violations to con-
tinue unabated.25 Adam Hanieh describes Egypt as a laboratory of the post–
Washington Consensus, where a “deepening of the neoliberal trajectory of
the Mubarak era” has taken place.26 The result is an Egypt that “remains a
highly authoritarian neoliberal state dominated by an alliance of the military
and business elites.”27 Dabashi, while acknowledging the open-ended nature
of the Arab Spring transitions, is more optimistic: “The postcolonial did not
overcome the colonial; it exacerbated it by negation. The Arab Spring has
overcome them both.”28 However, the political and economic alliance of
Egypt and the Gulf,29 coupled with the extensive human rights abuses
committed domestically and with widespread impunity, challenge this asser-
tion. While the uprisings of the Arab Spring may have been inspired by a
desire to overcome postcolonialism in its myriad forms, their immediate
aftermath reveals a renewed structure of subordination in the form of a
regional political order seeking to fulfill the political and security interests
of its governing elites.
23
For a detailed report on this massacre, see Human Rights Watch, “All According to Plan: The
Rab’a Massacre and Mass Killings in Egypt” (Aug. 12, 2014). Accessible at: www.hrw.org/node/
127942.
24
Sharif Abdel Kouddous, “Egypt’s 1984,” Sada, Carnegie Endowment for International Peace
(October 28, 2014). Accessible at: http://carnegieendowment.org/sada/index.cfm?fa=show&
article=57051&solr_hilite=.
25
According to Egyptian President Abdel Fattah El Sisi, Egypt received $20 billion from Gulf
Arab states since the June 30, 2013 coup that removed Mohamed Morsi from the presidency.
The human rights situation has since worsened. Ahram Online, “Gulf Aid to Egypt since
30 June more than $20 billion: El-Sisi” (May 6, 2014). Accessible at: http://english.ahram.org
.eg/NewsContent/1/64/100653/Egypt/Politics-/Gulf-aid-to-Egypt-since-June-more-than-billion-E
.aspx. For more on the worsened human rights situation in Egypt, see Shaikh, “Between
Interference and Assistance.”
26
Adam Hanieh, “Egypt’s ‘Orderly Transition’? International Aid and the Rush to Structural
Adjustment,” Jadaliyya (May 29, 2011). Accessible at: www.jadaliyya.com/pages/index/1711/
egypt’s-’orderly-transition’-international-aid-and.
27 28 29
Ibid. Dabashi, The Arab Spring, p. xvii. With the exception of Qatar.
socioeconomic roots of local resistance

Despite the collective support for the Universal Declaration of Human Rights
(UDHR) at Bandung, its delegates disagreed on which rights to prioritize.30
Delegates agreed on the importance of both civil and political and socio-
economic rights, but they were addressed separately. The split between socio-
economic rights and civil and political rights was already forming in the
international human rights covenants. Charles Malik, an influential Lebanese
delegate who also played a significant role in the drafting of the UDHR, noted
a similar split at Bandung:
One of the basic issues on which we were sharply divided . . . was the
question of Human Rights. What are the ultimate fundamental human
rights? For the communists these rights are for the most part social
and economic rights; but for some of the rest of us the ultimate
human rights that should now be guaranteed by the world and by
the diverse nations are the personal, legal, political rights to freedom –
to freedom of thought, to freedom of expression, and certainly of free
elections.31
Kweku Ampiah also argues that the countries at Bandung were aware that
economic development could be realized only after political liberation was
achieved.32
In the decades following Bandung, however, this distinction made less
sense. Civil and political rights were perceived as interconnected with socio-
economic rights. Soaring unemployment rates among youth, significant struc-
tural inequalities, corruption, and a generally poor economy plagued many
Arab Spring countries. These dire socioeconomic conditions and endemic
corruption did not merely serve as context or a background to the political
developments of these transitions; they were fundamental concerns that trig-
gered the political uprisings, particularly in Egypt, Tunisia, and Yemen.
Indeed, the tragic self-immolation of Mohammed Bouazizi, which serves as
a strong symbol of the Tunisian revolution and the Arab Spring, makes clear
that the uprisings were inspired by a long history of such economic
30
See Helen E. S. Nesadurai, “Bandung and the Political Economy of North-South Relations:
Sowing the Seeds for Re-visioning International Society,” in Tan, Bandung Revisited and
Burke, “Afro-Asian Alignment.”
31
Charles Malik’s luncheon address, quoted in Burke, “Afro-Asian Alignment.”
32
Kweku Ampiah, “The Political and Moral Imperatives of the Bandung Conference of 1955 –
The reactions of the US, UK and Japan” (Global Oriental LTD, 2007). p. 204.
injustices.33 Bouazizi’s self-immolation was the result of years of economic

oppression and miserable living standards that had no prospect of improving
because of a severely corrupt government and the absence of access to the
most basic civil and political rights.
The social and political processes that unfolded in Egypt and Tunisia
point to the decisive role that workers’ movements and labor unions played
before, during, and after the uprisings. Prior to the eruption of the Tunisian
uprising in December 2010, the General Union for Tunisian Workers
(UGTT) played a leading role in challenging government policies. For years
it was the country’s strongest opposition.34 The mass revolt against
unemployment and economic inequality in the Tunisian town of Gafsa in
2008, which resulted in several deaths and many injuries, is widely seen as a
turning point in the lead-up to the uprising two-and-a-half years later.35 It
helped chip away at the fear barrier that prevented many Tunisians from
challenging the regime’s repressive policies. It also demonstrated the
strength of mobilization in the face of an often-brutal police force. The
UGTT led a general strike during the uprising and oversaw the sit-ins at
the Casbah thereafter, all of which strengthened its influence and stature as
the government’s most serious opposition. Therefore, the fight against eco-
nomic injustice in Tunisia was well established from before the outbreak of
the mass uprising of 2010 and was led by the UGTT and other workers’
movements during and in the aftermath of the uprising.
In Egypt, workers’ movements also had a significant impact on the popular
demands of the uprising. The general strike led by textile workers in Mahalla
in 2008, for example, led to the formation of the April 6 movement, which
became an influential workers’ rights and human rights mobilizing force. Like
the UGTT, this movement – along with other similar workers’ rights move-
ments – led mass protests before, during, and after the Egyptian uprising. In
the lead-up to the 2008 general strike in Egypt, a number of opposition groups
and parties signed this statement:
All national forces in Egypt have agreed upon the 6th of April to be a public
strike. On the 6th of April, stay home, do not go out; Don’t go to work, don’t
go to the university, don’t go to school, don’t open your shop, don’t open your
pharmacy, don’t go to the police station, don’t go to the camp; We need
33
Achcar, The People Want.
34
Hela Yousfi, “Ce syndicat qui incarne l’opposition tunisienne,” Le Monde Diplomatique (Nov.
2012). Accessible at: www.monde-diplomatique.fr/2012/11/YOUSFI/48348.
35
Author’s field interviews in Tunis in 2012. See also Achcar, The People Want.
salaries allowing us to live, we need to work, we want our children to get

education, we need human transportation means, we want hospitals to get
treatment, we want medicines for our children, we need just judiciary, we
want security, we want freedom and dignity, we want apartments for youth;
We don’t want prices increase, we don’t want favoritism, we don’t want police
in plain clothes, we don’t want torture in police stations, we don’t want
corruption, we don’t want bribes, we don’t want detentions. Tell your friends
not to go to work and ask them to join the strike.36
This statement clearly lays out the socioeconomic and civil and political
human rights demands of the Egyptian opposition and workers’ movements
in 2008, a key year before the 2011 uprising. What is striking about this
statement is that the demands for social justice and for civil and political
rights are at par with each other. There is no prioritization of one set of rights
over the other; the April 6 movement and its supporters clearly viewed socio-
economic rights as inseparable from civil and political rights.37 Just as it was
impossible to “quarantine the human rights issue from Cold War politics”
during the Bandung era, protestors’ demands for socioeconomic justice were
inseparable from any understanding of the Arab Spring.38
The workers’ movements in Egypt and Tunisia did not operate alone. For
example, the Kefaya movement in Egypt was persistent in its calls for democ-
racy and an end to authoritarianism since its inception in 2004.39 However,
movements calling for civil and political rights – such as the right to freedom
of expression, the right to assemble, and freedom from torture and arbitrary
detention – were severely repressed through massive crackdowns led by the
police and other state security forces. This resulted in a significantly weakened
human rights movement in Egypt and in Tunisia. In contrast, the workers’
movements were met with greater tolerance, particularly in Tunisia, where
the UGTT has had a complicated relationship with the previous regime,
36
Courtney Radsch, “April 6th General Strike in Egypt Draws Together Diverse Groups Using
Newest Technologies.” Accessible at: www.radsch.info/2008/04/using-facebook-blogs-sms-
independent.html.
37
The workers’ rights movements in Egypt have continued to actively challenge government
policies in the transitional period. According to the Egyptian International Development
Centre, 1,354 social and labor rights protests took place in March 2013 alone, compared to
864 protests during the previous month. This means an average of 44 protests per day, or 1.8
protests every hour. Ahram Online, “Post-revolution labour strikes, social struggles on rise in
Egypt: Report” (April 29, 2013). Accessible at: http://english.ahram.org.eg/News/70384.aspx.
38
Burke, “Afro-Asian Alignment.”
39
For more on the Kefaya movement, see Erin A. Snider and David M. Faris, “The Arab Spring:
US Democracy Promotion in Egypt,” 18 Middle East Policy (2011), p. 49.
which often ensured that the union’s executive office was staffed with individ-
uals loyal to the regime.40
The Egyptian and Tunisian workers’ movements were thus successful in
bringing to the fore demands for social justice and an end to corruption. The
build-up of their influence over the years played a big role in the consequent
emphasis on socioeconomic crimes charges in the criminal prosecutions that
took place in Egypt and Tunisia. Workers’ movements and labor unions
served as key drivers in ensuring some form of criminal accountability for
violations of socioeconomic rights. On the other hand, the harsh crackdowns
on civil and political rights activists left a seriously weakened human rights
lobby that has been largely unsuccessful in ensuring criminal accountability
for human rights abuses committed both before and during the uprisings.41
The debate on the inclusion of accountability for economic and social
rights in transitional justice mechanisms, which has become significantly
more established in recent years, is thus a nonstarter for Egyptians and
Tunisians.42 For them, transitional justice is about economic and social
justice and civil and political rights. There is no hierarchy of accountability
for either set of rights, despite the fact that they have not been equally
addressed in the post-transition period. While Bandung addressed both civil
and political rights and economic injustices, the Arab Spring intertwined the
two and signified the culmination of economic policies that entrenched
poverty and stripped countries of the equal distribution of resources. Equipped
40
Interview with Anis Morai, radio show host for Dans Le Vif Du Sujet, political columnist, and law
academic at the Tunisian Ecole Superieure de Sciences Economiques et Commerciales
(ESSEC), Tunis (May 2, 2013). Many workers’ movements were, however, also brutally repressed.
41
To be sure, additional factors, including politicized judiciaries and ambiguous transitions, have
also played a role in the failure to ensure criminal accountability for human rights abuses in
Egypt and Tunisia. See Noha Aboueldahab, Transitional Justice and the Prosecution of Political
Leaders in the Arab Region. A comparative study of Egypt, Libya, Tunisia and Yemen (Oxford:
Hart Publishing, 2017).
42
For more on these debates see, e.g., Dustin Sharp, “Addressing Economic Violence in Times
of Transition,” (2012) 35 Fordham International Law Journal (2012), p. 780; Reem Abou-El-
Fadl, “Beyond Conventional Transitional Justice: Egypt’s 2011 Revolution and the Absence of
Political Will,” 6 International Journal of Transitional Justice (2012), p. 318; Louise Arbour,
“Economic and Social Justice for Societies in Transition” (lecture given as the Second Annual
Transitional Justice Lecture, New York University School of Law Center for Human Rights
and Global Justice and the International Center for Transitional Justice, New York, Oct. 25,
2006); Lars Waldorf, “Anticipating the Past: Transitional Justice and Socio-Economic
Wrongs,” 21 Social and Legal Studies (2012), p. 171; Lisa J. Laplante, “Transitional Justice and
Peace Building: Diagnosing and Addressing the Socioeconomic Roots of Violence Through a
Human Rights Framework,” 2 International Journal of Transitional Justice (2008), p. 331;
Zinaida Miller, “(Re)Distributing Transition,” International Journal of Transitional Justice
(2013), p. 1.
with additional decades of widespread socioeconomic exploitation, the Arab

Spring thus reinforced the Bandung aspiration for an end to socioeconomic
exploitation by asserting a more locally grounded demand for an end to the
endemic corruption responsible for this state of affairs. State leaders at Ban-
dung were the arbiters of this protest against socioeconomic exploitation. In
the Arab Spring, they became the targets of this protest, led by indigenous
popular movements at home. As some scholars argue, however, the so-called
international human rights movement has been structured in such a way as to
entrench social inequality through the promotion of a purportedly apolitical
“liberal rule of law” and market democracy.43 The task for Arab intellectuals
and activists was not only to free themselves from indigenous exploitation, but
to redefine the domestic struggle for human rights so that it better addresses
local realities, not least of which is the socioeconomic inequality that the
international human rights system helped bring about in the first place.44
a milestone for twail

Makau Mutua’s description of the emergence of a critically minded African
thinker and activist is especially pertinent to the story of the Arab Spring
uprisings:
Such a thinker is aware of the deep contradictions that mark the human
rights enterprise and seeks the construction of a different human rights
movement. While this new actor is still being defined and constitutes but a
small fraction of the human rights movement on the African continent, he is
now increasingly at the center of innovative thinking and action. At the core
of this new activism . . . is the push for intellectual originality and self-
reliance, local and not Western foundation support . . . This development
represents the cultivation of a truly local human rights culture.45
Since the Arab Spring, many intellectuals, activists, human rights profession-
als, and other actors increasingly seem to fit this description. For example,
Arab Spring countries have faced the pressure of an international transitional
justice industry, keen on pushing for globalized standards of justice through
43
See, e.g., Hannah Franzki and Maria Carolina Olarte’s discussion of the inherently political
project of transitional justice. Hanna Franzki and Maria Carolina Olarte, “Understanding the
Political Economy of Transitional Justice,” in Susanne Buckley-Zistel, Teresa Koloma Beck,
Christian Braun, and Friederike Mieth (eds.) Transitional Justice Theories (New York:
Routledge, 2014).
44
Ibid.
45
Makau Mutua, “Savages, Victims and Saviors: The Metaphor of Human Rights,” 42 Harvard
Journal of International Law (2001), p. 242.
one-size-fits-all toolkits, often at odds with local realities.46 Related to the

emergence of a more locally grounded human rights constituency is the
increasing realization of the indispensible connection between socioeco-
nomic and civil and political rights in the Arab Spring, which has deepened
the human rights struggle since Bandung.
One important difference between the post-Bandung and the post–Arab
Spring human rights activist is the increase in possibilities for local critiques of
domestic human rights violations. Before the Arab Spring, reliance on the
advocacy of international human rights organizations came with negative
consequences for local human rights movements, as explained by veteran
Egyptian human rights activist and intellectual Bahey El Din Hassan.47
However, two changes have profoundly impacted the role of the Arab human
rights activist since Bandung. First, the barrier of fear has broken down, which
has facilitated mass protest and local dialogues on the political, legal, and
social levels. Second, there is an increasing realization that locally grounded
human rights protests and advocacy have greater resonance in communities
that are traditionally suspicious of a human rights framework that originates in
the West. Bahey El Din Hassan’s 1999 remarks amidst a repressive human
rights climate in Egypt are insightful:
A pervasive feeling of having been historically wronged by the West weighs
heavily on the Arab collective psyche. Arabs of all cultural and political
backgrounds, from the general public to intellectuals, harbor resentment
over foreign occupation, the destruction of Iraq, the starvation of the Iraqi
people through the strictest economic blockade in history, and the impunity
given to aggressive acts by Israel. This sense of injustice gives us cause to
invoke human rights in the defense of our collective rights. At the same time,
Arabs are averse to the human rights framework because Western govern-
ments use its rhetoric when defending such policies. Moreover, many Arabs
perceive internationally recognized human rights as a Western import and
thus unsuitable for our societies.48
The emergence of the African intellectual as described by Mutua has thus

manifested itself in the Arab Spring, where so-called human rights were
46
Habib Nassar, “Transitional justice in the Wake of the Arab Uprisings: Between Complexity
and Standardization,” in Kirsten J. Fisher and Robert Steward (eds.), Transitional Justice and
the Arab Spring (New York, Routledge, 2014).
47
Bahey El Din Hassan, “The Credibility Crisis of International Human Rights in the Arab
World,” 2.1 Human Rights Dialogue (Winter 1999); “Human Rights for All?” Carnegie
Council for Ethics in International Affairs (Dec. 5, 1999). Accessible at: www.carnegiecouncil
.org/publications/archive/dialogue/2_01/articles/606.html.
48
Ibid.
reconsidered and redefined. Whereas most of the Bandung delegates invoked

the UDHR, the Arab Spring made clear that this was not enough. It
demanded a human rights framework that more adequately addresses local
realities, thereby reinforcing the Third World’s role as an active shaper of
human rights norms, rather than a mere recipient.49
While Bandung asserted Afro-Asian solidarity against colonial rule and
signified the birth of the Third World, the Arab Spring asserted the Arab
people’s solidarity against their own authoritarian governments, or against the
indigenous elites of this part of the Third World. The implications of these
popular, indigenous mass struggles against authoritarian rule present an
opportunity to revisit the way in which TWAIL is defined. While TWAIL
has traditionally been critical of the Third World’s continued subordination to
the colonial and imperial roots of international law,50 the Arab Spring is
highly critical of subordination and exploitation at home. It strongly reasserts
the Bandung demand for a more prominent role for the Third World intel-
lectual and activist in shaping global norms that adequately address local
realities. And it does this not at a diplomatic meeting of state leaders, but
through mass protest.
conclusion
Whereas Bandung celebrated and empowered newly independent states, the
Arab Spring demanded attention to freedom of individuals within those
nations. The decades of authoritarian rule that followed Bandung meant that
Third World intellectuals and activists had to reorient and redefine their
struggle for human rights in two ways. First, an increasing realization of the
indispensible connection between socioeconomic and civil and political
rights in the Arab Spring deepened the human rights struggle since Bandung.
Second, despite the ambiguity of the ongoing transitions and despite con-
tinued authoritarian rule, particularly in the case of Egypt, the post–Arab
Spring human rights activist and intellectual is no longer as dependent on
the advocacy of international human rights organizations. The Arab Spring
therefore signifies an important milestone in the development of TWAIL
since Bandung, as intellectuals, activists, human rights professionals, and
49
Amitav Acharya discusses the importance of paying attention to norm-making since Bandung
and how regional and interregional sites of global norm making remain undertheorized. See
“Who Are the Norm Makers? The Asian-African Conference in Bandung and the Evolution of
Norms” 20 Global Governance (2014), p. 405. Dabashi’s discussion about the end of
postcolonialism is also relevant here. See Dabashi, The Arab Spring.
50
See Mutua, “What Is TWAIL?”
other actors reoriented their human rights agenda to become more locally
grounded and more critical of external and domestic repressive policies and
exploitation.
Moreover, while the Cold War politics of the Bandung era resonate in the
Arab Spring, an Arab Cold War has emerged, shaping a new regional political
order marked by an unprecedented rise in political and economic support
from the Gulf countries to the rest of the Arab region. Egypt’s shifting alliances
and the significant political backing by certain Gulf States of the policies of
Egypt’s military-backed regime is a case in point. Through proxy wars motiv-
ated by political, security, and economic interests, the shifting alliances
between the Gulf countries and Egypt point to the significantly greater
regional influence in the domestic affairs of Arab Spring countries. This
new regional political order has reinforced the neoliberal trajectory in Egypt
and has done little to improve the human rights situation. As such, inter-
national strategic alliances continue to take precedence over the interests of
those who took to the streets to protest throughout the uprisings.
However, the people shook postcolonial authoritarian rule in the Arab
region, leaving a transformative and irreversible impact on multiple levels.
The deepened struggle for human rights, most prominent in the popular
demand for socioeconomic justice and an end to corruption, is one such
transformative impact. The Arab Spring foregrounded the need for socio-
economic justice, following decades of political and financial corruption that
worsened poverty and deprived parts of the population of the fair distribution
of resources. In much the same way that Bandung was a collective stand
against colonial domination and exploitation of indigenous resources, the
Arab Spring was a protest against both the indigenous and foreign exploitation
of resources. Balakrishnan Rajagopal makes clear the link between neoliberal
policies and the abuse of the human rights rationale in his discussion about
the security rationale for development at the Bretton Woods Institutions.51
The Arab region is not an exception to this practice, sanctioned by both global
and domestic actors.52 The stronger human rights movement produced by the
Arab Spring, despite the daunting challenges it faces, therefore constitutes a
significant step forward from Bandung.
51
Balakrishnan Rajagopal, “From Resistance to Renewal: The Third World, Social Movements,
and the Expansion of International Institutions,” 41 Harvard International Law Journal (2000),
p. 529.
52
Mutua, for example, refers to “collaborationist intellectuals and political leaders” that have
“littered the Third World.” See “What Is TWAIL?,” p. 32.
Moreover, removing the barrier of fear that plagued the populations of the
Arab Spring led to a self-reflection that necessitates revisiting the role of the
Third World intellectual and activist in shaping global norms. Increasingly
active social movements and civil society have brought about a serious re-
examination of the meaning of human rights at home. If Bandung is one of
the birthplaces of TWAIL, which Mutua describes as proactive in that it “seeks
the internal transformation of conditions in the third world,” then the Arab
Spring is a significant milestone in its development.53
53
Ibid., p. 31.
24
Applying the Memory of Bandung

Lessons from Australia’s Negative Case Study
rebecca laforgia
introduction
Mustapha Kamal Pasha, who has written on Bandung,1 rejects a historical
analysis of the Conference. He contends that such an approach creates a
linear causal analysis and does not do justice to the memory of Bandung or its
emancipatory promise. Questions such as “Did Bandung succeed?” and “Was
Bandung limited by choices made to express its aims and traditional concep-
tions of sovereignty?” adopt a causal style of language. Pasha notes that while
inquires are made and answers sought, there is a tendency that the “promise of
perpetual decolonization” that was implicit in Bandung will be lost.2 While
this chapter does not endorse the rejection of the historical approach, it
addresses some of these concerns.
Yet if the historical approach has limits, so too does the memory approach,
particularly the ephemeral and subjective nature of memories. Questions arise
as to how memories can be coherently evoked, used, and shared. Further,
adopting a memory approach appears at odds with Bandung, which was born
out of a very real historical claim and struggle for equality and nondiscrimina-
tion. Adopting a memory approach to analyze Bandung may lead to results
that are ephemeral, subjective, and too detached from the struggles that
formed the Conference.
This chapter attempts to make the memory of Bandung neither detached
nor ephemeral, but rather located in the practical and the present. Implicit
1
Mustapha Kamal Pasha, “The ‘Bandung Impulse’ and International Relations” in Sanjay Seth
(ed.), Postcolonial Theory and International Relations: A Critical Introduction (New York:
Routledge, 2013), p. 144.
2
Sanjay Seth, Introduction, in Postcolonial Theory, pp. 1, 10–11, 148.
397
398 Rebecca LaForgia
jarring and conflicting combinations are inherent in this task: memories

and reality, past and present, ephemeral and practical. This chapter there-
fore employs a deliberately diverse methodology in order to couple
memory with the practical and present. First, the chapter explores and
reviews the theoretical limitations of the historical approach and the
possible contribution a memory approach to Bandung could offer. Then,
the chapter considers the engagement of Australia with Bandung in
1955 and again in 2005. This case study is significant, as it provides an
account of how one memory of Bandung operates in contemporary inter-
national law and politics. Next, this chapter explores how a positive reading
would work. It selects a treaty and asks questions of the text using the
memory of Bandung to inspire revelations of sites of silence and inequality.
This memory is applied to find meanings, not present in the initial reading
of the treaty text.
Finally, this chapter briefly considers the theoretical contribution of the
memory of Bandung. Perhaps Bandung was a memory of not simply a
feeling and search for perpetual decolonization but also a memory of a
method. If that is true, Pasha’s memory approach has an unexpected
implication. Bandung was a memory of newly formed independent states
acting on the preexisting text (if we can call sovereignty a text or idea). The
participants were sliding, by virtue of their newly formed independence,
across a preexisting surface – the tundra of Westphalia.3 The memory of
this method suggests that questions of perpetual decolonization can also
legitimately slide over the preexisting surface of any given treaty text –
perhaps with the aim of either forming hairline cracks on a given text or, as
is argued here, peering into the existing silent world, underneath the
frozen surface.
3
The idea of a “shared surface” of legal obligations is employed by Martti Koskenniemi, The
Politics of International Law (Oxford: Hart Publishing, 2011), p. 266. He sees this surface as a
site of possible mutual political communication. Here the surface of sovereignty is a cold
and remote image withholding, or at least limiting, shared meaning. Nevertheless, reflecting
on the idea of legal obligations as a surface and, as Koskenniemi describes it, a “fragile” one,
I think must have implicitly influenced the creation of the visual imagery of the sliding on
the surface of the tundra of Westphalia. Westphalia is, of course, a contested concept (it is
ephemeral and subjective), yet it stills holds power. So whatever the particular construct
of Westphalia (even the idea of it is a myth), the point here is that for Bandung, there was
the sense of moving over this structure, even if it was moving over an illusion. The content
of the meaning of Westphalia is therefore not central for the image and the metaphor
to hold.
Applying the Memory of Bandung 399
stage 1: the memory of bandung vs. the history

of bandung
There are a range of works on Bandung that celebrate, analyze, and explore its
successes and disappointments.4 Some also look to the future, and others are
dedicated to the spirit of the Conference.5 There are also contemporary works
on Bandung being produced to coincide with the sixtieth anniversary of the
Conference and assist the submission by the National Archives of the Repub-
lic of Indonesia, requesting the Bandung Conference materials be included in
UNESCO’s Memory of the World program in 2015.6
This chapter uses the lens that Pasha developed, and views Bandung as
memory rather than a historical event.7 In describing the following framework
for understanding Bandung, this chapter rejects the idea that the historical
4
For example, see Roland Burke, “‘The Compelling Dialogue of Freedom’: Human Rights at
the Bandung Conference” (2006) 28(4) Human Rights Quarterly 947; Augusto Espiritu, “‘To
Carry Water on Both Shoulders’: Carlos P. Romulo, American Empire, and the Meaning of
Bandung” (2006) 95 Radical History Review 173; David Walker, “Nervous Outsiders” (2005) 36
Australian Historical Studies 40; Sally Percival Wood, “Retrieving the Bandung
Conference . . . Moment by Moment” (2012) 43(3) Journal of Southeast Asian Studies 523. Sally
Percival Wood, The Australia-ASEAN Dialogue Partnership at 40: Past Dilemmas and Future
Prospects (Sept. 11, 2014), available at https://sydney.edu.au/southeast-asia-centre/documents/
pdf/ASEAN2014_SPWoodSpeech.pdf.
5
Palat explores how momentum and power have been lost by those that attended to provide a
different political world order, noting, “the opening to the market in most countries [has],
however, only benefited narrow elites – the creation of ‘globally integrated enterprise’
symbolise more an interstate alliance of business and government elites – and have widened
inequalities in income and wealth within almost every state.” Ravi A Palat, “A New Bandung?
Economic Growth vs. Distributive Justice among Emerging Powers” (2008) 40 Futures
721, 732.
6
See also United Nations, Asian-African Conference Archives (2014), available at www.unesco
.org/new/en/communication-and-information/flagship-project-activities/memory-of-the-world/
nominations-2014-2015/full-list-of-current-nominations/current-nominations-a-to-b/asian-
african-conference-archives/. The website states that Indonesia was the nominating state, and
describes the documentation of Bandung for the Memory of the World nomination as follows:
The Asian-African Conference (AAC) Archives is a set of documents, pictures and films
related to the Conference held in Bandung, Indonesia, from 18 to 24 April 1955. The
conference was the first international assembly of Asian-African nations, aimed to
promote world peace and cooperation, and freedom from colonialism and imperialism.
The Conference was attended by 29 Asian and African countries.
See, e.g., Bandung Spirit (www.bandungspirit.org/), which is holding a sixtieth-anniversary
commemorative conference to support the memory of the world nomination and to celebrate
the spirit of Bandung.
7
Pasha, “Bandung Impulse.”
approach does not yield important observations, and Pasha’s concerns

regarding historical approach are sympathetically interpreted.
Pasha has significant explanations for considering Bandung through a
memory frame. Seth outlines some of these core observations; specifically, it
is “a reminder that decolonisation is an impulse, not an event”; an “impulse”
and an “aspiration,” a “structure of feeling” containing a “promise of perpetual
decolonization.”8 For Pasha, Bandung remains in the present: “Bandung
continues to haunt us as memory: and while memory, like history, conjures
up something past, it does not represent a dead past that has efficiency only
through causality and effects.”9 As Seth further notes, Pasha rejects a historic
frame. He does not consider it durable because it relies partly on observations
of events “rather than giving shape to a particular vision of inclusiveness and
parity, with durable, effective and symbolic effects.”10 Pasha further argues that
the concept of seeing Bandung through a historical form
reduces Bandung to a datum on a linear trajectory of decolonisation. How-
ever, Bandung is itself a decolonising move, an utterance of muted revolt
against the past. In its cathartic quintessence, Bandung registers a “structure
of feeling” associated with the injuries and violence of colonialism; it is a
reminder that the past occluded in the memory of international society rests
on a burial ground.11
Pasha’s analysis reinforces that Bandung can and does “animate”; that it
is therefore not simply a historical subject. For Pasha, Bandung is also a
“feeling” or an “impulse.” This concept of memory as felt intimacy creates
“proximity”; that is, a form of proximity arising, Pasha argues, because the
Bandung memory is linked to a reality:
In the purely experimental realm, Bandung makes the world appear more
proximate to its realness: a diverse and multi-coloured habitation of peoples,
political desires, cultures and hopes.12
Accordingly, from Pasha’s analysis, some of the themes of memory of

Bandung are that it can be “felt,” is “proximate” and “animates,” and is not
on a “linear trajectory” dependent on causality, and because of that, it is
8
Seth, Postcolonial Theory, referring to Pasha, “Bandung Impulse.”
9
Seth, Postcolonial Theory, p. 10.
10
Ibid. Pasha rejects the idea of Bandung as “event history.” He states that “Bandung’s location in
“event history” is problematic”: Pasha, “Bandung Impulse,” 153, quoting Fernand Braudel, The
Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1995).
11
Pasha, “Bandung Impulse,” 153. 12
Ibid., 159.
“durable.” This memory framework is established by Pasha,13 who observes

and rejects a historical analysis of Bandung, considering such an analysis
limited and constrained to ideas of causality,14 while memory is more imme-
diate and contains in this immediacy the “promise of perpetual
decolonization.”15
Pasha rejected a historical approach because of its causal nature. Pasha’s
caution with the historical approach can be observed through examining the
following quote from Koskenniemi:
If there is no truth, there is no ideology. Politics becomes only a clash of
incommensurate “value-systems,” none of which can be rationally preferred.
No distinction can be made between the discourse of the oppressor and the
discourse of the oppressed. Only a reversal of power is possible, but never the
form of that power itself. The decolonised will use terror against the master
that had terrorised it in the past. Positions are reversed, but terror remains.16
Koskenniemi implicitly places the burden on the decolonized as the site of

potential reform to create a new, fairer expression of power itself. This
approach looks conceptually at State A as followed by State B and places the
burden on reforming power on State B – to offer the change or risk being
judged as replicating sameness. There is nothing inherently wrong with this
observation, but it places the burden on those who take the conceptual
personification of State B. Turning to Bandung, that burden manifests itself
through asking: How did the decolonization go after Bandung? Was power
transformed? Did the aims of Bandung, including peace, disarmament,
equality, and nonalignment, come to pass? Did Bandung reconfigure sover-
eignty and thus the forms of power? Such questions are legitimate, but they
refocus the burden of reforming concepts and power on the decolonized.
The questions are legitimate and implicitly explore a reforming of power
that still occurs. But by removing Bandung from any such causal analysis,
Pasha was trying to unburden the Conference from holding the weight of
expectations for the reformulation of power and politics. The memory
approach offers one method of considering Bandung without this burden. It
provides some breathing space from assessing Bandung as success or failure.
Nonetheless, a problem remains: If there no consideration is given to causal-
ity, how can a memory be used?
13 14
Ibid. See ibid., 153, where Pasha defends the role of memory.
15
Seth, Postcolonial Theory, pp. 10–11, referring to Pasha, “Bandung Impulse,” 148.
16
Martti Koskenniemi, The Gentle Civilizer of Nations: The Rise and Fall of International Law
1870–1960 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), p. 505.
stage 2: australia’s reaction to bandung 1955 and

2005 – a negative case study of the ‘memory’
In 1955, Australia was strongly aligned with the United States. Unsurprisingly,
it was not invited to be part of Bandung.17 Indeed, the Australian government
saw the Conference as something to be managed and as a possible threat to its
alliance with the United States.18
Walker and Waters describe Australia’s exclusion and the subsequent
reporting of the Conference.19 Walker notes Australia’s responses as reflecting
“anxiety and estrangement from the region.”20 He also points out that it
“triggered troubling anxieties about the rise of Asia and the coming together
of coloured nations.”21 Similarly, Waters notes that the “debate over Australian
attendance at the conference . . . revealed the bedrock of underlying fears and
attitudes that shaped Australia’s relations with nations of Asia for nearly
another two decades.”22
Walker details Australia’s somewhat ad hoc and impulsive response to not
being invited to Bandung and notes that the “Menzies government had
decided that it preferred not to be asked to the Bandung Conference,”23 but
that it did not “want to have to say so.”24 Waters notes that Bandung “created a
lively debate within government circles and in the broader political domain
over whether Australia should attend the conference.”25 Waters confirms
Walker’s analysis that “the debate is important historically, because a specific
issue of attendance at the Bandung Conference raised the broader question of
what the nature of Australia’s engagement with Asia should be in the post-
colonial era.”26
The fears around securing an invitation to Bandung included that
“Australia did not want its absence from Bandung to be interpreted as evi-
dence that it had no interest in the region”27 and “that Australia might become
a target for anti-western and anti-white sentiment.”28
17
Walker, “Nervous Outsiders”; Christopher Waters, “Lost Opportunity: Australia and the
Bandung Conference” in Antonia Finnane and Derek McDougall (eds), Bandung 1955: Little
Histories (Clayton: Monash University Press, 2010), p 75.
18
Walker, “Nervous Outsiders”; Waters, “Lost Opportunity.” 19
Ibid.
20
Walker, “Nervous Outsiders,” 41. 21
Ibid., 42. 22
Waters, “Lost Opportunity,” p. 86.
23
Walker, “Nervous Outsiders,” 44.
24
Ibid., quoting J. P. Quinn, “External Affairs to Australian Embassy, Djakarta” (paper presented
at the Asian-African Conference, 4 February, 1955, A11604; 604-2-2, NKA).
25
Waters, “Lost Opportunity,” p. 75. 26
Ibid. 27
Walker, “Nervous Outsiders,” 47.
28
Ibid.
The memory of Bandung on which these authors rely is one that reinforces
the power of the Conference. It was viewed as a strategic gathering that
Australia needed to manage and “distance” itself from. There is nothing
radical or unexpected in this description. Bandung presented a challenge to
Australia’s position and identity as a “minor imperial power.”29 Calls for peace,
disarmament, and non-alliance, as well as the rejection of racism and of
colonialism, were all challenges to Australia’s role identity and interests.30
However, in 2005, Bandung invoked a fearful response by Australia to
imagined threats and meanings. This uncomfortable and disturbing memory
caused Australia to officially respond by striking out against meanings in a
treaty that simply did not exist.
australia’s acceptance of bandung in 2005

In 2005, some fifty years after the event, Richardson and Wood considered
Australia’s contemporary engagement with the Bandung Conference.31 In the
2005 context, a heighted, emotional, and shrill engagement with Bandung is
evident. The background was that in order for Australia to attend a significant
regional meeting, the East Asian Summit (EAS),32 it was required to “sign
ASEAN’s Treaty of Amity and Cooperation [the TAC] in Southeast Asia, a
non-aggression pact.”33 One of the undertakings in this TAC was
that high contracting parties: . . . DESIRING to enhance peace, friendship
and mutual cooperation on matters affecting Southeast Asia consistent with
the spirit and principles of the Charter of the United Nations, the ten
principles adopted by the Asian-African conference in Bandung on the 25th
of April 1955.34
Thus, Australia was faced with signing a treaty that specifically endorsed the
Bandung Conference of 1955. Richardson raises two particularly interesting
points in relation to then–Foreign Minister Alexander Downer:
By April, Mr. Downer was proffering a new reason in public for Australia’s
reservation about the TAC. He repeated that the treaty was based on the Bandung
principles of non-alignment, while Australia was a close ally of the US.35
29
Waters, “Lost Opportunity,” p. 76. 30
Outlined ibid., 76–81.
31
Note this case study is drawn from these two works: Michael Richardson, “Australia-Southeast
Asia Relations and the East Asian Summit” (2005) 59(3) Australian Journal of International
Affairs 351; Wood, “Retrieving the Bandung Conference.”
32
Richardson, “Australia-Southeast Asia Relations,” 351. 33
Ibid.
34
Wood, “Retrieving the Bandung Conference,” 6 (emphasis added).
35
Richardson, “Australia-Southeast Asia Relations,” 362.
However, despite this public statement of reservation from an economic and

strategic perspective, Australia was very keen to join the EAS.36 The public
reservation was an expression of national fears and concerns in respect of
Bandung’s claims on Australia’s alliance with the United States. Thus, two
modes of language can be identified: one rational, and the other resulting
from a feeling of being threatened, challenged, and dislocated.
Wood’s recent analysis of the reaction of Australia to Bandung mirrors
Richardson’s observations. Wood gives context to ASEAN’s link with Bandung
and notes that the beginning of the Southeast Asian regionalism “could be
traced back to the Bandung Conference of 1955.”37 As Wood notes, the “five
founding members of ASEAN had signed the TAC in 1976, in effect reaffirm-
ing the historical foundations of Southeast Asian regionalism that could be
traced back to the Bandung Conference of 1955.”38 Further, Wood notes that
“this norm setting” around the ASEAN Way . . . is conceptually grounded in
the Bandung Conference ethos of “unity in diversity.”39
The memory of Banding then overtakes Australia’s official response to the EAS
treaty. As Wood also notes, Downer objected in Federal Parliament, stating:
First of all, in its [the TAC’s] preamble it talks about the Bandung principles.
Australia has never been a supporter of the Bandung principles in the sense
that we are not a member of the non-aligned movement – we never have been
and under this government we will not be.40 (Emphasis added)
This is an emotional response. It emphatically provides a boundary that is

meant to counter a claim that Bandung seems to be making on current
Australian interests. The boundary statement is an existential response,
rejecting the idea of non-alliance as though it would require Australia to float
alone in its own region. It seems, given the context, more shrill and fearful
than the historical description from 1955, and makes an intense boundary
claim in relation to the memory of Bandung.
In relation to Mr Downer’s referral to the Bandung principle, Wood
observes:
[It] was an insight into the longevity of the Bandung Conference as a
“psychological moment” – as Indian Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru put
it. The psychological moment galvanised Southeast Asia’s new leaders in a
desire to ground regional solidarity in formal process, and after failed
36
Ibid., 352. 37
Wood, “Retrieving the Bandung Conference,” 5. 38
Ibid., 5.
39
Ibid., 6.
40
Ibid., 7, quoting Commonwealth, Parliamentary Debates, House of Representatives, June 23,
2005, 85.
attempts, ASEAN was the result in 1967. Australia had taken a rather
detached, even hostile, view of the Bandung Conference at the time and
consequently did not share in, nor directly witness, this psychological
moment.41
observations of the negative memory of bandung

In 2005, there was a sense that Australia still interpreted Bandung as a
nonalignment, a distinct third way, and a “psychological moment.”42 One
way of understanding this, as Wood and Richardson have, is reminiscent of a
historical approach; that is, as a casual argument that the political advantages
of acceding to the treaty, which contained the Bandung principles, out-
weighed any concerns and was therefore a logical step.43 This is reminiscent
of the idea of an historical analysis that is based on a narrative with a “linear
trajectory.”44
However, based on a reading of Bandung as a memory, there is another
interpretation. Using Pasha’s observations of memory, we can see interesting
elements in the response of Australia. Despite the passage of fifty years, there is
an immediacy to the recollection of Bandung,45 a “structure of feeling.”46
These elements were present in Australia’s 2005 response to the accession of
the TAC. Indeed, Bandung seemed immediate, and continued to pose a
challenge to the foreign minister. In Downer’s referencing and reacting to
the principles of the conference, it is clear that Bandung still had immediacy
and its realness that had not been diluted. Australia, as Wood notes, continued
to reel from that “psychological moment.”47
The intriguing element of Australia’s response to the treaty text and the
question of accession is that the memory of Bandung trumped contemporary
interpretations of the Bandung principles within the TAC, which had effect-
ively diluted the idea of nonalignment. The memory was more evocative than
the actual current and literal interpretation of the TAC. Australia was evoking,
based on its memory of Bandung, something not present in the current
interpretation of the treaty.
This idea of evoking something negative based on the memory of Bandung
is the core lesson from observing Australia’s reaction. Australia carried a
41
Ibid., 7. 42
Ibid. 43
Ibid., 8. 44
Pasha, “Bandung Impulse,” 153.
45
Pasha, ibid., draws from Klein, noting, “Memory appeals to us partly because it projects an
immediacy we feel has been lost from history.” Kerwin Lee Klein, “On the Emergence of
Memory in Historical Discourse” (2000) 69 Representations 129.
46
Pasha, “Bandung Impulse.”
fearful, alienated memory of Bandung, and this worked to affect its under-
standing of the treaty.
The emotional memory of Bandung lingered in 2005, and this case study is
negative proof. It is not the memory Pasha was arguing for. The negative case
study does, however, give us a clue to the making of memory real. Australia
was reading the TAC as requiring nonalignment. At this point in treaty
meaning (and certainly in state practice) it was accepted that this was not
required.48 Australia evoked meaning based on its own fear; a form of memory
invoked fearful claims from the legal text. But this proves that the memory of
Bandung can affect meaning. If we then reclaim the memory of the “promise
of perpetual decolonization”49 and apply this to a treaty, would that not lead to
meanings that are not immediately discernable? Could this be a method for
making the memory real? This is explored in the next section in a treaty
unrelated to Australia.
stage 3: application of bandung memory

This section argues that the Bandung Spirit, as evoked from contemporary
texts, has the possibility of reinforcing the Conference’s original material aims
for distributive economic justice and the rejection of colonialisms in all its
forms. Indeed, “[a] key message of Bandung is the recognition that the terms
of incorporation into international society are partial and unjust.”50
Pasha provides the foundations for the questions that could encapsulate a
working memory of Bandung to be applied to a treaty text:
The Bandung principles do not merely echo the United Nations Charter,
but reinterpret the principle of sovereignty in light of the postcolonial
predicament. On the one hand, the five Bandung principles (mutual respect
of all nations for sovereignty and territorial integrity; non-aggression;
non-interference in internal affairs; equality and mutual benefit; and
peaceful co-existence) reinforce the theme of sovereignty. On the other
hand, there is an implicit recognition of the difficulty of forging a world
order defined by mutuality; absence of foreign intervention; unequal
relations between the dominant and subaltern powers; and belligerence.
The ambivalences captured in Bandung underline particular genealogies of
the international viewed from an alternative vantage point.51
48
Richardson, “Australia-Southeast Asia Relations,” 362.
49
Seth, Postcolonial Theory, referring to Pasha, “Bandung Impulse.”
50
Ibid., 161.
The difficulty of having one definition of the spirit or memory of Bandung is

acknowledged. However, drawing on Pasha’s work, it could be asked: Where
in a treaty text or arrangement is there a lack of mutuality, where is there
foreign intervention; and where is there unequal relations? Pasha observes that
the memory of Bandung causes a rupture and creates a different understand-
ing of temporality “[r]eleased from the prison-house of history.”52 The overlay
of memory and questions could be seen to rupture the text by asking where
power is being used, by whom, and how.53
How would this questioning and application of memory work?54 One
example that could help us resolve this question and application is the United
States Singapore Free Trade Agreement.55 This treaty affects Indonesia, spe-
cifically the islands of Bintan and Batam. Coyle’s and Polaksi’s56 work on the
United States Singapore FTA illustrate how the legal concept of an integrated
sources initiative (ISI) which is contained in the treaty – can create distortions
and silence. Polaksi notes that the FTA creates an
integrated sourcing initiative, or ISI, which allows goods produced in third
countries to be treated as if they had been produced in Singapore for the
purpose of satisfying rules of origin provisions . . . It is widely noted that the
ISI will cover products from the Indonesian islands of Bintan and Batam . . .
In the export processing zones of Bintan and Batam there have been wide-
spread violations of basic labour rights.57
However, the Office of the United States Trade Representative states that the
official reasons for an ISI are that
The ISI can also help in promoting good working conditions in the
developing world. Facilities used to produce IT products and medical
devices require high standards regarding safety, cleanliness, and working
conditions, and workers in these plants need greater skills and training for
52 53
Ibid., 147; on the concept of rupture, see ibid., 146, 159. Ibid., 151.
54
See Anne Orford, “Trade, Human Rights and the Economy of Sacrifice” in Anne Orford (ed.),
International Law and its Others (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), p. 156.
55
See John Coyle, “Rules of Origin as Instruments of Foreign Economic Policy: An Analysis of
the Integrated Sourcing Initiative in the US–Singapore Free Trade Agreement” (2004) 29 Yale
Journal of International Law 545.
56
Ibid., 551; Sandra Polaski, Testimony of Sandra Polaski Senior Associate Carnegie Endowment
for International Peace Before the Senate Committee on Finance on the Implementation of the
U.S. Bilateral Free Trade Agreements with Singapore and Chile (June 17, 2003), available at
www.finance.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/061703sptest.pdf.
57
Polaski, Testimony, p. 4.
such manufacturing jobs. The ISI, therefore, can encourage good jobs and
improved conditions of manufacturing facilities in developing countries.58
Practically, this means that Indonesia can be used for “Singaporean” produc-
tion, and goods produced in Indonesia can be labeled as “made in Singapore.”
The agreement subsumes the geography of Indonesia and silences the elem-
ent of production and presence of the Indonesia workers. The produced goods
are made in Singapore; international law has defined this and created this
outcome.
It may well be that the ISI creates a “positive” outcome; however, the point
is that in simply reading the treaty and its text any judgment or analysis of this
outcome is impossible. The Bandung memory could be applied to ask and
evoke: Where is the marginality in this treaty?59 Where is the mutuality of
contract between the workers and the State parties to the FTA? Did the so-
called developing state want an ISI and, if so, does that constitute consent?
What is meant by the idea of “cleanliness” – who used this term and why was
it used? How does “foreign intervention” work on the particular areas within
Indonesia? Where are unequal relations; where is the “dominant and the
subaltern power”?60
These questions cannot be readily answered; however, they create an
engagement with the text, which while related is quite different from one
based on a critical approach. This is an interpretation or questioning that seeks
to create a less word-bound approach to text. The memory of Bandung gives
agency or perhaps creates a responsibility for the interpreter to engage with the
immediacy and feeling of the memory of Bandung that, at its core, was about
intuitively knowing there may well be inequality.
Pasha uses the term “impulse” to describe the memory of Bandung.61 He
states, “The context of the Bandung impulse becomes apparent: the continual
relevance of the question of substantive justice in a world increasingly repro-
ducing a colonial cartography”62 Overlaying the memory of Bandung onto a
treaty text highlights the fact that the text does not provide the end of the
geography that contains the meaning of the treaty. There is meaning beyond
its words, and the memory of Bandung legitimizes this impulse to inquire.
58
Office of the United States Trade Representative, Singapore FTA: Integrated Sourcing Initiative
(July 2003), available at https://ustr.gov/about-us/policy-offices/press-office/fact-sheets/archives/
2003/july/singapore-fta-integrated-sourcing-initiative.
59
Pasha, “Bandung Impulse,” 161, explores marginality as part of the idea of Bandung.
60
These dichotomies are drawn from Pasha, ibid. 61
62
Ibid.
After critiquing discussions of international law in the classroom, Orford

asks, “So what was my role in (re)producing this fantasy in my classroom? How
might I approach this differently?”63 Reflecting on this in the context of the
memory of Bandung, students could perhaps be invited to do “memory
work”64 on a treaty, to evoke from the text questions arising from the memory
of Bandung. As Pasha has noted, mentioning the Conference is often referred
to as an “obligatory ritual” only to move on to the significant concepts such as
Westphalia.65 Perhaps replacing the tendency to observe and describe the
historical Bandung with the “ritual” of applying the memory of Bandung as a
form of engagement with international law texts releases Bandung to “tran-
scend its own time.”66
The first point to note is that if the application for UNESCO Memory of
the World Nomination is successful, its status as a memory will be official.
Bandung will be labeled as a memory. A strategy would then be used to select
a treaty and ask for the evocation of this memory from the treaty. Perhaps this
leap is too large? However, the 2005 negative case study of Australia stands. If
this negative application can and did occur, can the positive version argued
here be used? As the years have passed and even within the gathering of
conference states themselves, there are serious questions regarding continual
inequality and domination. But this does not dilute the method of asking
continually of any old or new political or legal structure where the promise of
perpetual decolonization could be. That is the memory of the method of
Bandung.
conclusion
Four stages were undertaken in this chapter. First, drawing on Pasha’s work,
Bandung was located as an impulse and a form of memory. Second, Austra-
lia’s responses to Bandung in 1955 and 2005 were considered. These responses
could have been characterized along a diplomatic, political, and historical
narrative; however, it was equally plausible to interpret the memory of Ban-
dung as being alive and dictating Australia’s interpretation and engagement
with a current treaty. The next section considered how the memory of
63
Orford, International Law, p. 164.
64
Pasha, “Bandung Impulse,” 153, quoting Catherine Hall, “Histories, Empires and the Post-
Colonial Moment” in Iain Chambers and Lidia Curti (eds.), Post-Colonial Question: Common
Skies Divided Horizon (Florence, KY: Routledge, 1996), p. 66.
65
66
Ibid. In the original, Pasha notes “as a prisoner of historicism, Bandung rarely transcends its
own time.”
Bandung could be positively applied to evoke meaning or questions from a

text to reinforce the spirit of the Conference.67 The questions that could be
asked of the treaty text to reflect the Bandung impulse were drawn from
Pasha.68 Finally, a practical example was provided to illustrate the evocation
of the Bandung memory. The chapter drew on theory, memory, history,
practical case studies, and a contemporary treaty application. These somewhat
clashing methods constitute a deliberate attempt to both ground the chapter
in the material and real while also celebrating the evocative and powerful
feeling69 of the memory of Bandung.
67
Orford, International Law. 68
Pasha, “Bandung Impulse.” 69
Ibid., 155.
25
Bandung in the Shadow

The Brazilian Experience
fabia fernandes carvalho veçoso*
“The special situation of America presents, in reality, certain aspects that deserve
reference in International Law, but which cannot be distinguished from the rules
universally accepted. What is different in the three portions of America does not
constitute an exclusive and isolated body of law, but a feature, a situation that does not
distort the general doctrine. Restricted questions, regarding local interests, may
influence the application of rules, but such rules, in their normative and procedural
form, are identical in all places.”
Raul Pederneiras, International Law Compendium, 1936, at 55
introduction
With this statement, Raul Paranhos Pederneiras, caricaturist and international
law professor from the National Law School (currently the Federal University
of Rio de Janeiro Law School), introduces the sixth chapter of his Inter-
national Law Compendium.1 The chapter discusses international law in the
American continent, and addresses objections to the so-called americanist
doctrine, asserting the universalism of international law and opposing the
alleged continental exclusivism.
The opening quotation contextualizes this chapter’s reflections on the
Bandung Conference, considering projects of international law that articulate
sensibilities on universalism from particular contexts. Both Latin American
international legal scholarship from the last century and the Final
*
I would like to thank the editors, João Henrique Ribeiro Roriz and George Rodrigo Bandeira
Galindo, for their insightful comments on earlier versions of this chapter. All English
translations are the author’s except where otherwise noted.
1
Raul Pederneiras, International Law Compendium, 5th ed. (Rio de Janeiro: s.n., 1936) (in
Portuguese).
411
412 Fabia Fernandes Carvalho Veçoso
Communiqué2 deal with the universal aspiration of international law.3 Other

similarities come to mind when connecting these two projects. Both relate to
regions that were formal colonies, and in both situations the vocabulary of
international law was articulated in order to shed light on the particularities of
their political contexts.
Notwithstanding, no one has made a robust effort to explore Bandung and
its legacies in the context of Latin America or, more precisely, Brazil. The
same could be said about the reach of TWAIL scholarship in Brazil. As
George Galindo says, it is impressive that even considering the context of
deep inequality experienced in our country, our jurists neither consider nor
discuss TWAIL literature in their studies in international law.4
Brazilian textbooks, the main entry point for undergraduate and graduate
courses in the field, follow a very orthodox structure, dealing with the founda-
tions of this branch of law, subjects, sources, treaties, and so on, with little
room for deeper analysis of the interaction between the Global South and
international law.5 One important exception is Celso D. de Albuquerque
Mello’s Public International Law Course, a two-volume textbook that has been
published in Brazil since 1967. In the chapter “Universality of International
Norms. American, Socialist, and African International Law,”6 Mello asserts
that international law can be divided into universal and particular according
to the level of application of its rules, recognizing that particular rules are
applied according to the limits of international general rules.7 Mello also
acknowledges the existence of American international law, stating that most
American states integrate the Third World.8
2
3
Martti Koskenniemi, “The Fate of Public International Law: Between Technique and Politics”
(2007) Modern Law Review 70, n. 1, at 30.
4
George Galindo, The Return of Third World to International Law, p. 2 (in Portuguese).
Available at http://sistemas.mre.gov.br/kitweb/datafiles/IRBr/pt-br/file/CAD/LXII%20CAD/
Direito/Galindo%20–%20A%20volta%20do%20terceiro%20mundo%20ao%20direito%
20internacional.pdf, accessed January 12, 2015.
5
See Hildebrando Accioly, Geraldo Eulálio do Nascimento E Silva, Paulo Borba Casella,
Manual de Direito Internacional Público, 18th ed. (São Paulo: Saraiva, 2010); Alberto do
Amaral Junior, Curso de Direito Internacional Público, 4th ed. (São Paulo: Atlas, 2013); Valerio
de Oliveira Mazzuoli, Curso de Direito Internacional Público, 5th ed. (São Paulo: Revista dos
Tribunais, 2011); Francisco Rezek, Direito Internacional. Curso Elementar, 12th ed. (São Paulo:
Saraiva, 2010) (all in Portuguese).
6
Celso D. Albuquerque Mello, Curso de Direito Internacional Público, 12th ed, Vol. 1 (Rio de
Janeiro: Renovar, 2000), pp. 175–190 (in Portuguese).
7 8
Ibid. at 176. Ibid. at 177.
Bandung in the Shadow 413
Bandung is largely absent from Brazilian textbooks, and, in broad terms,

from our legal education. The exceptions relate to a few legal scholars who
have mentioned Bandung in specific monographs, as discussed later in this
chapter. To understand the Brazilian connections to the Conference, and
how Bandung spoke to the Brazilian context, it is necessary to put aside
international legal scholarship.
This chapter suggests that a deeper engagement with the ambivalent
relationship between Bandung and Brazil may offer an interesting opportunity
to understand the Brazilian intellectual tradition in the field, especially its
hesitant connection to Third World sensibilities. The passage of time
regarding the Brazilian experience as a Portuguese colony is significant. But
there is also a resilient Brazilian sensibility against reconceptualizing and
challenging the idea of international universalism. Brazilian works, theories,
practices, and discourses in the field should have a single fate: to become a
contribution to international law, with no ruptures with an established
universal, as illustrated by the Pederneiras quote.
The first two sections of this chapter describe the Brazilian context related
to Bandung. The Conference did not go unnoticed in the country or among
its diplomats. The next section discusses the universalism articulated by the
Brazilian international legal scholarship as a competing or alternative view
regarding the claim of international universalism proposed in the Conference.
The chapter ends by considering the possibilities that a deeper engagement
with Bandung may offer in understanding the Brazilian oscillating
commitment to Third World sensibilities.
bandung in context: brazilian reactions to

the conference
The Brazilian press reported on Bandung with a strong headline.9 The Jornal
do Brasil published on April 12, 1955: “The Asian-African Conference meets in
Indonesia. All participants will be Orientals filled with real hatred against
white domination.”10 According to this article, “such a conference could be
called an assembly without expression, and equivocal, if not for one factor:
9
Electronic Brazilian Newspaper Library available at http://hemerotecadigital.bn.br/, accessed
January 12, 2015.
10
Available at http://memoria.bn.br/DocReader/docmulti.aspx?bib=030015&pesq=bandung,
accessed January 12, 2015. All next mentions from Jornal do Brasil come from the same Internet
source. In the second half of the 1950s, Jornal do Brasil and Correio da Manhã were among the
Brazilian newspapers with highest circulation.
communist China will participate in the meeting, represented by its skilled

prime minister and minister of foreign affairs Mr. Chou En Lai.”
The Jornal do Brasil focused on China’s role during the Conference,
questioning how this country’s representatives would gain support from other
Asian and African countries for their anti-U.S. strategy.11 The newspaper
covered the Conference in detail,12 and on April 26, it published an article
on the works of the closing day of the Conference. In a more careful tone, the
importance of the meeting was stressed – not just for the Asian and African
countries but for the whole world.13
With a more nuanced approach, on April 16 the Correio da Manhã
published an interesting opinion column by leftist journalist and intellectual
Mario Pedrosa.14 He took seriously the efforts by Asian and African countries
to dismantle colonialism in Bandung.15 In contrast to Jornal do Brasil, Pedrosa
engaged with the transformative possibilities of the conference:
The Afro-Asian conference does not seem, therefore, destined for the mere
exchange of platonic pleasantries between Orientals accustomed to this kind
of courtesy and politeness. It can, in effect, become a subtle way, in eastern
style, to pressure the two blocs, especially if there is orchestration of the
different voices in one direction: agreement on Taiwan.
11
On April 15, 1955: “The specter of communist China hanging over the Bandung
Conference.”
12
The periodical reported on the Taiwan issue, and the adhesion of so-called Red China to
the United Nations was pointed as one possible issue of the meeting. Accordingly, on April
17, 1955: “The African-Asian conference in Bandung opens up tomorrow. Surrounded by
extraordinary precautions the arrival of Chou en Lai to Jakarta. Possible topic of the
meeting: entry of Red China to the UN. Hardly the question of Taiwan can be discussed as
a ‘particular topic.’” Moreover, On April 19, with a half-page article, the Jornal do Brasil
published a summary of the activities and of the delegates’ speeches from the first day of the
Conference, again with a great interest in China: “Opened in Bandung the historic Afro-
Asian conference. The communist China figures among the most important countries
represented.”
13
“The works of the Afro-Asian conference declared closed. The most important resolutions were
condemning colonialism and exploitation of the peoples, and condemning the use of atomic
energy for war.”
14
“Voices from Asia, voices from Africa. The Bandung Conference.” Available at http://memoria
.bn.br/DocReader/docmulti.aspx?bib=089842&pesq=bandung, accessed January 12, 2015. All
subsequent mentions from Correio da Manhã come from the same Internet source.
15
“What ties together all these peoples? Just a tenuous historical link – the fact that they are
newcomers to independence or at least to self-government. They are still in the process of
conquest or recovery of sovereignty: hence the nationalist impulse that animates them.
National sovereignty, colonialism, racism are for them not only vital issues, but extremely
significant at the present moment. The every-day fight against colonial oppression and racist
degradation is an urgent need in Africa and in Asia.” Ibid.
He ended by connecting Bandung to Latin America, making an interesting

point on the similarities between them. Here, a Third World sensibility was
clearly articulated:
The success of the Afro-Asian Conference touches us very closely. We, from
the world’s political periphery, hope the Asian initiative to proceed. Latin
American people, the vast majority also belongs to the family of the billions of
disinherited of the earth. (...) This is why the way we see the business of the
world does not differ much from the people of Burma, Indonesia or India.
The only difference relates to the geographical points of view in which we
find ourselves. We are here the Far West. Culture, traditions, geographical
fatality make Latin America part of the Western bloc.
In order to understand these different positions, it is important to briefly

mention some contextual circumstances in Brazil. 1955 was an intense year
for Brazilian domestic politics. In August 1954, President Getulio Vargas
(1951–1954) committed suicide, and vice-president João Café Filho
(1954–1955) assumed power. Elections were originally planned for October
1955, and a tense political climate followed. Juscelino Kubitschek ran as a
presidential candidate and was opposed by the National Democratic Union
(UDN). The UDN thought Kubitschek would continue with the main pol-
icies of Vargas’s previous government, which were based on ideas of industri-
alization, national development, and employment protection. When
Kubitschek won the elections in a heavily disputed poll, the UDN started to
articulate a formal opposition to his inauguration as president. The National
Congress declared a state of siege for thirty days at the end of 1955. On January
7, 1956, the Brazilian Superior Electoral Court released the official results of
the elections held in October, and Kubitschek’s inauguration took place on
January 31, 1956.16
The troubled political setting of Café Filho’s government did not support
the articulation of a specific agenda in international affairs.17 The traditional,
amicable Brazilian position with respect to the United States was reinforced,
including new forms of cooperation between the two countries on atomic
16
See CPDOC entries on Kubitschek’s inauguration at http://cpdoc.fgv.br/producao/dossies/
FatosImagens/Movimento11Novembro, and at http://cpdoc.fgv.br/producao/dossies/JK/artigos/
JkRumoPresidencia/Candidatura, accessed January 14, 2015.
17
Rafael Souza Campos de Moraes Leme. Absurds and Miracles: A Study on the Lusotropical
Foreign Policy (1930–1960) (Brasília: Alexandre de Gusmão Foundation, 2011), p. 132 (in
Portuguese).
energy.18 Moreover, the Brazilian president officially visited Portugal at the

same time the Bandung Conference took place. Café Filho arrived in Portu-
gal on April 22, the celebrated date for the arrival of the Portuguese in Brazil.
There was no clear intention to oppose Bandung. In the absence of a political
project for international affairs, keeping traditional positions (e.g., supporting
Portugal) was a safe option for Brazil.19
Another interesting point of contextualization was the “lusotropical” foreign
policy, connected to the work of the Brazilian sociologist Gilberto de Melo
Freyre.20 In the 1930s, Brazil established a cultural policy that encompassed
the creation of the Ministry of Education, among other official organs.
Brazilian intellectuals with various backgrounds were involved in this project,
which led to them becoming public officials. As an elite destined to rethink
Brazil, these intellectuals reinterpreted the history of the country, creating
various new portraits.21
Freyre was an important figure in this group, and in 1933 he published Casa
Grande e Senzala,22 which articulated a vision of Brazil based on nature and
the positive aspects of the mixture of races in the country (white Europeans,
black Africans, and indigenous peoples). Freyre’s vision of Brazil was extrapo-
lated to foreign affairs as the theoretical formulation of lusotropicalism.
Portugal incorporated this theory between 1930 and 1950 to maintain
Portuguese colonies, legitimating Antonio de Oliveira Salazar’s authoritarian
government (1932–1968).23
In short, this political project depicted Portugal as a good colonizer, differ-
ent from other colonizing powers such as the United Kingdom, France, and
the Netherlands. Brazil had a very important role to play as an example to
other Portuguese colonies as proof that Portugal was able to create modern
nations out of its colonialism.24 Brazil of 1930 through 1940 was held up as a
modern and industrialized nation, an interesting portrait for the domestic
project of industrialization and national development that Vargas put forward.
18
Amado Luiz Cervo and Clodoaldo Bueno, History of Brazilian Foreign Affairs, 2nd ed.
(Brasília: University of Brasília, 2014), pp. 305–308 (in Portuguese).
19
Absurds and Miracles, p. 132.
20
On Gilberto Freyre, see the CPDOC entry at http://cpdoc.fgv.br/producao/dossies/
AEraVargas1/biografias/gilberto_freyre, accessed January 14, 2015.
21
See the CPDOC entry, “On the intellectuals and the state (1930–1937),” at http://cpdoc.fgv.br/
producao/dossies/AEraVargas1/anos30-37/IntelectuaisEstado, accessed January 14, 2015.
22
In the Brazilian farms of sugar, and later coffee, casa grande is the main house of the family of
the proprietor, while senzala is where slaves were allocated. The senzala used to be in the
basement of the casa grande, the first a cramped confinement without adequate sanitary
conditions.
23 24
Absurds and Miracles, p. 7. Ibid.
Brazil also became an example of how Portugal was able to create multicul-
tural and multiracial societies in which the emotional bounds connecting the
colonizer to the colonized were not hampered by economic or racial
matters.25
In this setting, a particular narrative was established: The Portuguese
colonies in Asia and Africa would have a great destiny remaining under
Portuguese rule, that is, to become modern nations like Brazil.26 There was
no open opposition to independence, but colonies should become independ-
ent at the appropriate time, which was not clearly defined under the doctrine
of lusotropicalism.27
On the influence of lusotropicalism on Brazilian foreign affairs, it is worth
noting that this doctrine is not well known today.28 In general terms, the
Brazilian position toward Asia and Africa in the early context of decoloniza-
tion was conservative, following the colonizing powers, as illustrated by the
debates of those days at the United Nations.29 In his speech to the Tenth
Session of the UN General Assembly in 1955, the Brazilian ambassador Cyro
de Freitas-Valle asserted:
Now that the tension in international affairs is declining, we can discern
more clearly the controversies plaguing the relations between peoples
and nations. I refer to the so-called colonial question. Almost all the
American nations won their independence by insurrection, and they are
still proud of their brave struggles and wars. It is natural, therefore, the
sympathy with those calling for independence. This feeling, however,
comes from the heart and should not cloud the mind. Let me recall,
gentlemen, the words of Napoleon: “Le coeur d’un homme d’Etat doit être
dans sa tête.”
So it seems that the role of the United Nations is to avoid premature
actions which, once adopted, may one day have a profound repentance. The
real independence is the result of the natural growth of political institutions,
based on an economic structure and stable policy. Let people mature and
their institutions to fully develop. Then independence will be a blessing;
otherwise it will just be a dangerous illusion.
25 26 27
Ibid. Ibid. at 7, 8. Ibid.
28
To illustrate, Cervo and Bueno do not explore lusotropicalism in their historical account of the
Brazilian foreign affair policies when considering the period from 1946 to 1961. History of
Brazilian Foreign Affairs, pp. 289–329. See also José Alexandre Altahyde Hage, “The Brazilian
Diplomacy and the African Question (book review)” (2014) Brazilian Journal of Social Sciences
29, 84, at 191–195 (in Portuguese).
29
History of Brazilian Foreign Affairs, p. 332.
The political maturity of the countries represented at the Bandung Con-

ference was emphasized by the very fact that, while firmly presenting their
opinion on many controversial issues, they took into account the realities of
the international situation and the problems that the need of coexistence
creates for each nation.30
Despite the Brazilian recognition of the new Asian and African states –
including the creation of Brazilian diplomatic missions in these countries –
under Kubitschek (1956–1960), the Brazilian government explicitly favored
Portuguese colonialism,31 as illustrated by the Brazilian support for the Portu-
guese position against the Republic of India’s request for the incorporation of
Goa, Daman, and Diu.32
This position favoring Portugal was not unanimous in the Brazilian
Ministry of Foreign Affairs. As one commentator noted, there was little space
in the ministry to articulate a broad understanding on the recent Asian-African
issues, despite the ministry’s efforts to monitor the Conference.33 In this
setting, Kubitschek’s position enhanced the group pro-Portugal, and this bloc
gained a voice in Brazilian interventions at the United Nations. In 1957,
Donatello Grieco, Brazilian representative to the UN General Assembly,
responded to Iraq’s request for information on Portuguese colonies that “to
touch Portugal is to touch Brasil.”34
Later, San Tiago Dantas, Brazilian Minister of Foreign Relations and
proponent of the idea of an independent foreign policy with respect to the
United States, openly criticized this Brazilian position favoring colonialism.
According to him, the Brazilian position defending colonialism, even if it was
possible to understand its main justifications, was corrected in the 1960s.35
30
Luiz Felipe de Seixas Corrêa, Brazil at the United Nations, 1946–2006, rev. ed. (Brasília:
Alexandre de Gusmão Foundation, 2007), at 108–109 (in Portuguese).
31 32
History of Brazilian Foreign Affairs, p. 323. Absurds and Miracles, p. 133.
33
“The Brazilian diplomacy” at 192.
34
Grieco also asserted “the civilizing mission of Portugal in America, as in Asia, as in Africa, had
been placed, always, as more important than the mere material factors of what is called
colonialism. Portugal has always attached greater importance to missionaries and teachers
rather than to traders, and never enslaved peoples. On the contrary, the Portuguese conquered
brothers, and were never rulers of servants without hope; Portuguese were mainly educators of
free men.” Absurds and Miracles, pp. 135. On Kubitsche’s foreign policy in relation to
colonialism, see Waldir Josi Rampinelli, “The international policy of JK and its dangerous
relations to the Portuguese colonialism” (2008) Esboços, 15, 20, at 275 (in Portuguese).
35
“The anti-colonial position of Brazil suffered small deviations only by the desire to give the
traditionally friendly nations of our country opportunities to define, in their own motion, an
evolutionary position on non-autonomous territories confined to their administration. These
deviations were, however, overcome and rectified at the XVI UN General Assembly, in which
the Brazilian delegation signed, by the voice of Ambassador Afonso Arinos, the view of Brazil
Considering this broad political setting and the various understandings of

Brazil’s relationship with colonialism, one may understand the Brazilian
ambivalent engagement with Bandung, a situation that postponed the emer-
gence of a Third World sensibility in international legal thinking in the
country.
brazilian diplomats in bandung 36

However, some Brazilian diplomats did take part in the Conference: The
Indonesian Ministry of Foreign Affairs invited the heads of diplomatic
missions in Indonesia to attend. Brazilian ambassador Oswaldo Trigueiro,
head of the Brazilian mission based in Jakarta, traveled to Bandung on
April 17 and returned on April 20. He attended the inaugural session and
the public sessions on April 18 and 19.37 Adolpho Justo Bezerra de
Menezes, secretary at the Brazilian embassy in Jakarta, was also sent as an
observer.38
In 1956, Menezes published a book on Asia and Africa based on his experi-
ence as a diplomat working in the East. Brazil and the Asian-African World
encompassed his analysis on the role Brazil would play in the context of
decolonization.39 This book, even if it cannot be considered an official record
of Bandung by the Brazilian government, constitutes a rich contextual analy-
sis. It includes topics such as colonialism, the Portuguese colonial project, the
Conferences of Colombo and Bogor, a picturesque depiction of Bandung, the
[the anti-colonial position].” San Tiago Dantas, Independent Foreign Policy, rev. ed. (Brasília:
Alexandre de Gusmão Foundation, 2011), p. 16 (in Portuguese).
36
This section is based on archival research at the Historical Archives of the Ministry of Foreign
Affairs (Itamaraty Palace, Rio de Janeiro). I would like to thank the personnel of the archives for
their kind assistance. The work by Arlindo José Reis de Souza, “Orientalism in the (Luso)
American Tropic: Brazilian perspectives on the Bandung Conference” (2011), was of great
help. This master’s dissertation assesses primary sources, especially the official correspondence
of Brazilian ambassadors based in Jakarta and New Delhi, among other places, related to the
countries that took part in the Conference. Dissertation available at www.historia.uff.br/stricto/
td/1528.pdf, accessed January 23, 2015.
37
“Letter n. 88, May 4, 1955,” Historical Archives of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs/Itamaraty.
Book 22/02/13. Jakarta – Received Letters – January/June 1955. Ministry of Foreign Affairs: Raul
Fernandes Ambassador: Oswaldo Trigueiro, at 14–15.
38
“Orientalism in the (Luso) American Tropic,” at 217.
39
An electronic edition of the book was published by the Alexandre de Gusmão Foundation in
2012. Adolpho Justo Bezerra de Menezes, Brazil and the Asian-African World (Brasília:
Alexandre de Gusmão Foundation, 2012) (in Portuguese). Available at www.funag.gov.br/
biblioteca/dmdocuments/O-Brasil-e-o-Mundo-%C3%81sio-Africano-corrigido.pdf, accessed
January 14, 2015.
United States policy toward the East, and the political project of Brazilian
leadership toward the Third World.
Menezes filled his thoughts with lusotropicalism,40 asserting that Brazil
could be seen as the heir of Portuguese civilization, charged with a civilizing
mission. In this setting, he noted, Brazil should start working to become the
new leader of Third World. Menezes’s opening words stated:
What is needed now is a response from the ruling classes of the Brazilian elite
to the question: Will Brazil be, in a century, the world power or one of the
world powers? The answer must be given with full exemption of mind, in
cold and logic terms, without patriotic wanderings. If, as it appears, by virtue
of its economic resources, size, the proper solution of racial and social
problems, the answer is positive, Brazil shall immediately begin to trace
and execute an international policy of global scope.41
In his seven-page chapter on Bandung, after describing the Conference and

the perspective of several participants and nonparticipants (including the
United States), Menezes shares his impressions of the Conference, including
a detailed account on the garments and clothing of the delegates, most of
whom dressed in traditional garb.42
On the one hand, this kind of narrative is symbolic of a Western approach,
which sees the Asian and African as different. On the other hand, this narrative
comes along with Menezes’s political project for Brazil in relation to the Third
World. Later in his book, when proposing his perspective for the Brazilian
foreign policy for the Asian-African world, he tried to minimize this differ-
ence, asserting that similarities existed between Brazil and the East.43
40
“Orientalism in the (Luso) American Tropic,” at 218.
41
Brasil and the Asian-African World, p. 19.
42
“On the opening day, the delegations, in groups and in alphabetical order, walked the distance
between the main hotel in the city and the building where the Conference took place. Most
wore their national customs, their typical clothing. Burmese wore sarong, the kind of cook
cloth to put on the head; bearded Arabs carried their golden scimitars, hanging from long white
or yellow robes; Filipinos wore transparent shirts similar to Cuban rumberos; black Liberians
wore impeccable suits made of good cashmere, fashion hats, striped ties, and one of them even
smoked a very English pipe in the street. All very ‘colorful’ as put by an American
correspondent from a tourism magazine.” Ibid. at 252.
43
“We shall gradually hammer, inexorably, whoever it hurts inside and outside our borders, that
although Westerners, we are not ‘wines from the same pipe.’ Either by our Portuguese-tropical
origin (in the appropriate expression of Gilberto Freyre), either by the black-Amerindian racial
mixtures of our colonial times, or either by the more recent influxes of bloods from various
backgrounds, we are a country, a people who disbelieves completely in separatism or in racial
superiority. We have many similar traits, not only ethnic, but also spiritual with Africa and Asia;
only the distances between us divides us, because the ideals are the same.” Ibid. at 292.
In this context, Brazil occupies a singular place in world politics. Even

though Brazil is in the Western Hemisphere, it does not resemble the United
States or Europe. But the country differs from Asia and Africa too, even if
Menezes intended to underline the similarities between Brazil and the latter.
This singularity was understood as the main justification for his project of
Brazilian leadership in the Third World.
Menezes closes his chapter on Bandung by listing two immediate results
of the Conference: the issue of Taiwan and the peaceful climate Bandung
created for the upcoming 1955 Geneva Summit. Moreover, according to
Menezes, the Conference brought China to international life and attrib-
uted official status to the Arab-Eastern mutual aid policy. The Conference
also gave birth to a regional system that could acquire importance at the
United Nations, which would provide incentives for Asian-African coun-
tries to keep their anticolonial claims. Menezes highlighted the importance
of showing the force of the Asian-African countries, despite the lack of
military power of the former; this would force the United States to engage
with the politics of neutrality of the Asian bloc.44 Menezes seems to engage
with the innovative character of Bandung, and the Brazilian political
overture to the Asian-African world constitutes his main objective with his
1956 book.
To comply with his duties as the Brazilian ambassador in Jakarta, Oswaldo
Trigueiro reported to the Brazilian Ministry of Foreign Affairs his view on
Bandung. Since the beginning of 1955, each month the ambassador sent
political reports to the ministry commenting on, among other issues, the
antecedents of Bandung.45
During the time leading up to Bandung, he was skeptical about the
concrete achievements of such a meeting.46 However, he also recognized
44
Ibid. at 252–253.
45
Among these antecedents, Trigueiro mentioned several diplomatic negotiations put forward
by Indonesia in order to bring closer the Asian countries, and also explored the outcomes of
the preparatory conference of Bogor. The Brazilian ambassador referred the initiatives put
forward by the Colombo powers (Indonesia, India, Pakistan, Burma, and Ceylon) to promote
pacific conversations on the question of Taiwan, a matter discussed in Bandung. “Political
month n. 1, February 3, 1955,” Historical Archives of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs/Itamaraty.
Book 22/02/13. Jakarta – Received Letters – January/June 1955. Ministry of Foreign Affairs:
Raul Fernandes Ambassador: Oswaldo Trigueiro.
46
“The aims of the Bandung are broad and inaccurate, ranging from the promotion of goodwill
and cooperation between actions of Asia and Africa, to the appreciation of all the social,
cultural and economic problems of these nations, and the possibilities for their joint action for
the preservation of peace between the two worlds. In this setting, it cannot deliberate but on
abstract principles or innocuous generalities, given the lack of chance to obtain the agreement
of Japan and China, India and Pakistan, Turkey and Northern Vietnam to solve specific
Bandung’s potential to contribute to the end of colonialism in Asia, and its

“moral signification, a psychological effect and a political resonance that we
shall not underestimate.”47
Oswaldo Trigueiro prepared two specific reports on May 448 and June 3.49
The first was dispatched before the Ministry of Foreign Affairs had sent
Trigueiro specific requests. The second addresses the Ministry’s four con-
cerns: the role played by Nehru, the role played by the Chinese representative,
the conduct of the Japanese delegation, and the position of the Arab
countries.50
After describing the main features of Bandung,51 Trigueiro addresses the
final conclusions of the Conference, including an analysis of the heated
discussion on colonialism and communism, based on the Iraq representative’s
inaugural speech, and the concrete achievements of Bandung (such as the
condemnation of apartheid and the support for the independence of Tunisia,
Algeria, and Morocco, among others).52 Trigueiro addressed three of the four
of the Ministry’s points. He provided his views on what he perceived to be
Nehru’s defeat, and on the Indian prime minister’s uncontrolled manners.53
He assessed Chinese representative Zhou Enlai’s positions as successful,
especially China’s proposal to the United States for a pacific solution to the
question of Taiwan.54 He had some comments on the Japanese delegation
and its focus on economic matters.55 Trigueiro did not comment on the Arab
countries specifically as a bloc. But he highlighted the Iraqi delegates’
disputes or the reduction of ideological incompatibilities that so deeply separate them.” Ibid.
at 4–5.
47
Ibid. at 6.
48
“Letter n. 88, May 4, 1955,” Historical Archives of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs/Itamaraty.
Fernandes Ambassador: Oswaldo Trigueiro.
49
“Letter n. 93, June 3, 1955,” Historical Archives of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs/Itamaraty.
Fernandes Ambassador: Oswaldo Trigueiro.
50
Letter n. 93, at 1–2.
51
He revisited the antecedents of the Conference (the Colombo and Bogor conferences), listed
the twenty-nine countries and their representatives, commented on Bandung’s five-point
agenda (economic cooperation, cultural cooperation, human rights and self-determination,
dependent peoples, global peace, and cooperation), and reported the main structure of the
proceedings, which included decisions reached by unanimity. According to Trigueiro’s report,
the opening session was scheduled for April 18 at 9:00 AM, and other three public sessions were
planned for the afternoon of April 18, and the morning of April 19; after that, the participants
worked in secret sessions. The last session of Bandung took place in the evening of April 24,
with the reading of the Final Communiqué. Letter n. 88 at 1–4.
52 53 54 55
Ibid. at 5–7. Ibid. at 7–8. Ibid. at 8–9. Ibid. at 9.
anticommunism and the Egyptian representative’s ability to pacify heated

discussions.56
Trigueiro also described the role of Western missions and observers and
focused on the United States ambassador (who declared himself satisfied with
the outcomes of Bandung).57 Trigueiro closed his analysis by listing his
impressions of Bandung, which he claimed were shared among diplomats
in Jakarta.58 In his view, Bandung was a well-organized and successful Con-
ference in which the Asian-African countries proved their maturity as inde-
pendent nations. The Asian countries revealed their peaceful purposes, and
their will to completely dismantle colonialism (more than the African coun-
tries, following Trigueiro). A disposition against communism was noted,
especially from the Muslim countries, notwithstanding the recognition of
the Chinese success. Bandung repealed the Indian hegemonic project toward
Asia, and the political tension in the Far East seemed to slow down, specific-
ally concerning Taiwan. Finally, the Conference was a successful result of
Indonesian foreign policy.
Trigueiro’s second report on Bandung did not repeat the terms of the first one,
but instead focused on the Portuguese colonial policy. The Brazilian ambas-
sador noted with curiosity that no resolution in the Final Communiqué referred
to the Portuguese colonies,59 but according to him, we do not know “until when
Portugal will be able to resist a method of combat that Britain itself was unable to
face successfully.”60 For Trigueiro, Bandung was not only an important event,
but also one in which he engaged as a Westerner,61 which illustrates a Brazilian
contested view about colonialism and its own postcolonial reality.
universalistic sensibilities
As mentioned, most international law textbooks in Brazil do not explore
specific efforts by the Global South in articulating alternative international
56 57 58
Ibid. at 10. Ibid. at 10. Ibid. at 12–14.
59
Trigueiro mentioned the information on the Chinese support for the Indian request for the
incorporation of Goa, but there was silence on Macau. He also commented the context of the
Portuguese colony of Timor, in Indonesia, mentioning that the latter would not require the
incorporation of Timor in those days. Notwithstanding, nothing would prevent this from
happening in the near future. Ibid. at 3.
60
Ibid.
61
“According to the instructions I received from Your Excellency, I traveled to Bandung on the
17th, returning on the 20th. In the company of all my colleagues in the West, I attended the
opening session and public sessions of 18 and 19” (emphasis added), Letter n. 88, at 14.
law projects.62 The Annual Bulletins of the Brazilian International Law

Society from 1955 and 1956 do not mention the meeting.63 (Brazilian ambas-
sadors were members of the Brazilian Society of International Law during this
time, and regularly published in the society’s bulletin.64) This highlights the
ways in which Brazilian diplomats participated in Brazilian international legal
scholarship.
Another important source for the history of international law in Brazil is the
Senate and Alexandre de Gusmão Foundation’s collection on the legal
opinions to the Brazilian Ministry of Foreign Affairs. There is no mention of
Bandung in the relevant volume (1952–1960).65 This absence is even more
important, as the collection gathers all legal opinions that the Ministry
requests, thus indicating that the Conference did not raise any legal complex-
ity at the time.
In the same vein, no mention of Bandung can be found in the Repertoire of
Brazilian International Law Practice. This collection gathers official docu-
ments on the relationships between Brazil and other countries in the field of
international law. In this setting, speeches, treaties, legal opinions, reports, and
diplomatic correspondence are organized and classified according to the so-
called great topics of international law. One may conclude that, in the
Brazilian practice of international law of those days, the Conference was not
a matter of concern.66
One specific book by the Brazilian international law scholar Haroldo
Valladão (1901–1987), published in 1961, dealt in more detail with inter-
national law and the new context of decolonization. Democratization and
Socialization of International Law and The Latin American and Afro-Asian
Impacts brought together these regions in an evolutionary and progressive
62
I cannot offer a complete mapping of Brazilian international law textbooks here, but this
statement reflects my own experience in studying international law at the University of São
Paulo Law School, the oldest school of law in the country.
63
Brazilian Society of International Law Bulletin, n. 21 and 22, year XI, January–December 1955;
Brazilian Society of International Law Bulletin, n. 23 and 24, year XII, January–
December 1956.
64
In the 1955 edition of the bulletin, for example, ambassador Cyro de Freitas-Valle had an
article on the United Nations (as mentioned above, the same ambassador who mentioned
Bandung in his speech at the X Section of UN General Assembly in 1955).
65
Antônio Paulo Cachapuz de Medeiros (Org.), Legal Opinions to Itamaraty (Brasília: Federal
Senate, 2001), v. V (1952–1960) (in Portuguese).
66
Antonio Augusto Cançado Trindade, Repertoire on Brazilian International Law Practice, 2nd
ed. (Brasília: Alexandre de Gusmão Foundation, 2012). Electronic version available at http://
funag.gov.br/loja/index.php?route=product/product&product_id=211, accessed January 5, 2015.
march toward the democratization of international law.67 His arguments help

articulate the Brazilian international universalism, and the sensibility against
changes in it.68
In a 98-page monograph, Valladão recognized the Eurocentric origins of
international law,69 which was later democratized by young Latin American
nations. This new international law was “deeply human and democratic,
proclaiming and adopting rules that would become universals, integrating
the true international law of humanity.”70 Under the influence of Latin
American young nations, the process of democratization of international law
started, “from sovereignty to solidarity.”71 In this setting, democratization
means the rupture with the Eurocentric origins of international law, a process
that encompasses the inclusion of non-European nations as legal subjects in
the field.
67
Haroldo Valladão. Democratization and Socialization of International Law. The Latin
American and Afro-Asian impacts. Rio de Janeiro: José Olympio, 1961 (in Portuguese).
68
Artur José Almeida Diniz published later, in 1977, Underdevelopment and the law of the
peoples. Even if he articulated a clear view on the Eurocentric origins of international law
(chapter four of the book is named “Law and Eurocentrism,” and chapter five “Colonialism
and Law”), his analysis did not articulate a specific take on the Conference of Bandung. He
asserted the importance of restoring the universality of international law, but his focus was
more on development: “International Law in the modern state must retake the tradition of the
great masters and include a concept of equality. It must be an essay concerning the poverty of
nations, not considering strict particularism from states committed to ‘Eurocentric’ values. This
book did not offer a recipe to solve the contradictions of the present. It tried to restore the
primacy of the universal. The international legal solidarity shall be based on the planetary
community, overcoming sterile particularism.” Artur José Almeida Diniz. Underdevelopment
and the law of the peoples (Belo Horizonte: Political and Social Studies, 1977), p. 10 (in
Portuguese) I thank George Galindo for bringing this book to my attention.
69
“But this very precarious international law is yet considered a perk of European states. Is in fact
an aristocratic law of the powers of Europe, who applied it between them or in Europe,
adopting “other” rules to the peoples of Latin America, Africa or Asia, the non “Christian” or
the “uncivilized,” in a distinction already refused, as we have seen by the work of Francisco
Vitoria. Democratization and Socialization of International Law, p. 28.
70
Ibid. at 32–33. Explaining the legal foundations of this new American International Law,
Valladão cites the Álvarez-Sá Vianna debate: “The struggle of giants, two great internationalists
of America, the Chilean Alejandro Alvarez, with the thesis “Le Droit International Americain,”
1910, and the Brazilian Alvaro Manuel de Souza Sá Vianna, with the antithesis “De la non
existence d ‘un Droit international Americain,” 1912, resulted in the grand synthesis that there
are principles of international law, basic today, fundamental, which originated or were
consolidated by declarations, treaties, conventions and practices of Latin American States, and
thus incorporate to international law. Therefore, the American international law represents the
wide cooperation of the Americas toward progress and the due improvement of the law of
nations.” Ibid. at 33.
71
Ibid. at 53.
After comments on the two great wars of the twentieth century and the
international law of the first half of this century, he takes the progressive
narrative to the Asian-African world, the so-called “march towards the univer-
sal democratization.”72 According to Valladão, the greatest international
happening of those years was the disaggregation of the colonial empires.
Trying to show that the American continent anticipated the fight against
twentieth-century colonialism, the author mentioned Resolutions XCVI and
XCVII on colonialism, approved at the Tenth International American
Conference of Caracas in 1954.73 After this comment, Bandung was
mentioned:
In the Afro-Asian Conference in Bandung, April 1955, 29 countries of Asia
and Africa were present, of which 16 belong to the UN, it was stated that
colonialism and all its manifestations were immoral acts that should finish as
earlier as possible, as they violate human rights and are contrary to the
Charter of the UN; the cause of freedom and independence of colonized
peoples was backed up; the intervention of powerful countries was requested,
in order to favor such a cause.74
The full democratization of international law was finally taking place,75 with
the inclusion of Asian and African countries as independent nations,
opening new perspectives to international law: “Its historical mission [the
Asian-African Third World], in the mid-20th century, has to be comparable
to the high democratic mission developed by the Americas on the 19th
century, and on the beginning of 20th century.”76 Adding that, “After the
stage of condemning colonialism, a new positive stage of construction has to
come.”77
Considering this Brazilian version of international universalism, the Ameri-
can continent pioneered the opening of international law, promoting its
transformations toward a more democratic field. Notwithstanding, the “true
universal international law” is seen as a given to Valladão, a realm to be
reached by the progressive process of inclusion of independent states. This
process would find its end when all countries on this planet were included in
international law (formally as UN members). Bandung shall be seen as a mere
continuation of such a process of democratization of international law. In
other words, the real innovation was with Brazil and other American coun-
tries, Asia and Africa merely followed.
72 73 74 75
Ibid. at 64 and following pages. Ibid. at 68. Ibid. at 71. Ibid. at 72.
76 77
Ibid. at 85. Ibid. at 86.
Even though it remains difficult to locate today this Latin American

international universalism,78 this conception of international law and a
“creole legal consciousness”79 shed light on particular understandings of
international law that proposed the integration of Latin American countries
into the universal world of civilized nations.80
The Brazilian international universalism, put in clear words by Haroldo
Valladão, and articulated by other Brazilian authors,81 intends to expand the
creole legal consciousness to Asia and Africa, but under the condition that
these countries do not alter the universalism earlier proposed by American
countries. In this setting, Bandung has no clear innovative reach, being the
completion of a process inaugurated by the American continent.
It is possible to discuss to what extent the Brazilian international universal-
ism has a genuine commitment to transformation, as it seems to favor an idea
of democratization without challenging the very basis of Eurocentric inter-
national law. In any case, what we can see here are competing projects of
78
“[C]ontemporary Latin American lawyers barely consider the existence of a Latin American
mode of thinking about international law. Yet, roughly from the 1880s to the 1950s, a
distinguished group of authors and texts fought over the affirmation or negation of a distinct
Latin American international law [the Sá-Vianna debate]. Current Latin American
international legal scholarship either has forgotten about this debate or has formalized it into a
standard account of institutional achievements and doctrinal contributions to the development
of a universal international legal system.” Arnulf Becker Lorca, “International Law in Latin
America or Latin American International Law? Rise, fall, and retrieval of a tradition of legal
thinking and political imagination” (2006) 47 Harvard International Law Journal, at 285.
79
“By a Creole legal consciousness I mean a broad set of problems, strategies, uses, and ideas
about the law that were shared among a group of Latin American lawyers in the post-
independence era.” Liliana Obregón, “Noted for Dissent: the international life of Alejandro
Álvarez” (2006) 19 Leiden Journal of International Law 4, at 985.
80
“The type of authorship, the choice of texts, the uses of different languages, and the different
international legal problems and doctrines addressed suggest that Latin American international
lawyers were preoccupied with different audiences at different historical moments. However,
they coincided in their intention to articulate to some extent what they believed represented a
regional dimension of international law, while at the same time wanting the region to be
understood as part of the community of civilized nations, and wanting themselves to be
recognized as legitimate publicists by their European counterparts.” Liliana Obregón,
“Completing civilization: Creole consciousness and international law in nineteenth-century
Latin America” in Anne Orford (ed.), International Law and its others (Cambridge:
Cambridge University, 2006), pp. 263–264.
81
For example, the attempt by Sá Vianna to deny Álvarez’s thesis on the Latin American
international law. For the Brazilian side of this story, see Fabia Veçoso, João Henrique Ribeiro
Roriz, and Adriana Sanctis Brito, “‘Nous somees jugés’: Revisiting the Debate between Álvarez
and Sá Vianna on Regional International Law in Latin America” in Liliana Lyra Jubilut (ed.),
Direito Internacional Atual (Rio de Janeiro: Elsevier, 2014), p. 287 (in Portugese).
international universalism, the American or Latin American project and the

one affirmed in Bandung.
conclusion
It is hard to present general conclusions from this analysis of Brazil and
Bandung when facing the extreme lack of attention on the Conference in
our international legal scholarship. Nonetheless, it is possible to say that Brazil
has had a historical ambivalent position toward colonialism. Even with Bra-
zilian diplomatic participation in the Conference, no deep engagement with
the efforts undertaken by the Asian-African countries can be seen in our
international legal scholarship.
More specifically, the doctrine of lusotropicalism illustrates our complex
relation to Portugal, and this context helped to shape the Brazilian view on
colonialism as seen at the days of Bandung. After all, it is not easy to get rid of
the image of the good, successful, and multiracial people.
There is a conservative international universalism articulated by Brazilian
scholarship in international law. The American continent has already trans-
formed this field of law toward its democratization. This universalism enabled
a new international law, to which Asia and Africa must adhere. There is no
room for additional changes in this exclusive American (or Latin American,
depending on one’s view on the United States) project.
In this setting, the sixtieth anniversary of the Conference is an excellent
opportunity to rethink the relationship between Bandung and Brazil. On the
one hand, resuming our past connections to the Conference may help us to
understand our oscillating engagement with Third World sensibilities,
including new possibilities of international legal scholarship in the country.
On the other hand, assessing Brazilian and Latin American international
universalism may enable a renewed exploration on the reach of the universal-
ism proposed in Bandung and its legacy to current discussions on inter-
national law, politics and contestation.
part iv.
Postcolonial Agendas
Justice, Rights, and Development
26
The Humanization of the Third World
hani sayed
introduction
The sixtieth anniversary of the Bandung Conference is an opportunity to offer
critical reflections and commentaries on contemporary institutions and tech-
niques of global governance. As Robert Vitalis noted, “two conferences were
held in Bandung in April 1955.”1 One was the “real conference,” the historical
event convened in Bandung with the participation of twenty-nine newly
independent countries from Asia and Africa. The other had an entirely
different and parallel mode of existence. It was, according to Vitalis, a “crys-
tallization of what people wanted to believe had happened which, as a myth,
took on reality in the Bandung Principles and, later, in the Bandung Spirit.”2
The elements of this myth are quite familiar. The official record of the
opening and closing sessions of the Conference, published by the Indonesian
Ministry of Foreign Affairs, featured a quote from President Sukarno’s speech
inscribed on the publication’s cover page: “Let a new Africa and Asia be
born.” The imperative mode of the sentence, and its aspiration to perform
like a speech-act – word and will changing the world – captured a recurring
theme. We remember the Conference as a moment of birth for a new political
subjectivity, with ostensibly coherent political and economic interests that
wanted to become something in the world.3
1
Robert Vitalis, “The Midnight Ride of Kwame Nkrumah and Other Fables of Bandung (Ban-
doong)” (2013) 42 Humanity: An International Journal of Human Rights, Humanitarianism,
and Development 2, at 261–288.
2
Id. at 261.
3
Delegations to the Conference were conscious of the historical significance of Bandung. Many
of them performed accordingly to emphasize the emergence of a new actor on the world scene
with coherent economic and political interest. See, e.g., the intervention of the Syrian foreign
minister Khaled Al Azm (1902–1965) during the opening session:
431
432 Hani Sayed
Much of the academic writing about Bandung, particularly in the field of

international law, is tangled in the discursive space created by this duality. The
myth of Bandung and its spirit have become constitutive of its reality.
Throughout the second half of the twentieth century, generations of
international lawyers who identified with the intellectual and political projects
of decolonizing international law exploited the duality between the real
conference and its myth. They developed an arsenal of rhetorical devices
and used them routinely to articulate legal strategies to reprogram and refit
international law and institutions to serve as the infrastructure of a new
international order of development and decolonization. Thus, in international
law scholarship and in documents generated by committees and other organs
of international organizations between 1955 and 1975, it is not uncommon to
find direct and indirect references to Bandung as the marker of sharp discon-
tinuity in international politics and law or as important milestones of progress
and universalization. Nostalgia for the Bandung Spirit has thus become one of
the available rhetorical devices, employed regularly to articulate criticisms of
This is a historic moment in the history of mankind. International conferences have

become a daily occurrence, but this conference of ours is unique in the eyes of history.
By its very nature, by its very objectives, and by its very name our conference stands
without parallel and without precedent. Here is an assembly of the ancient world at the
dawn of awakening. Here is an assembly that stands on its own feet, inspired by its own
spirit and led by its own mind. Here is an assembly that meets, not to establish a balance
of power, not to divide spoils, and not to draw new maps for homelands or peoples. We
come to bury the evils, not to praise them. . . . We meet exposed to no accusation. We
harbour no motives of imperialism for, at times, we were the victims of foreign domin-
ation. Our birth as states began with the deal of old Empires. We favour no discrimin-
ation of race, of color, of language or of creed, for at times we were and still are targets of
discrimination. We aim at no exploitation, at no intimidation and at no conquest, for our
resources had been subjected to exploitation, our political life to intimidation and our
countries to conquest. . . . [W]e come free from prejudice and vengeance. We come to
place our collective will in the service of international peace, peace based on freedom,
liberty and equality.
Mr. Al Azm’s intervention in the closing session focused on explaining away the disagreements
and the conflict of interests that emerged during the conference:
Our Conference is the world in miniature; we mix in diversity . . .. In the meetings we
offered conflicting views; we have offered dissenting opinions and sometimes there was
danger of losing unanimity, the danger of disagreement. . . . We disagreed, we dissented,
but finally we fell back on our hardships in the past; we fell upon our distress in the past;
we fell upon our memories in jails and concentration camps. . . . It was really, gentle-
men, a miracle to achieve unanimity in this diversity, but we were determined and we
did achieve that unanimity.
See R. Aboulgani, Asia-Africa Speaks from Bandung (Djakarta: Ministry of Foreign Affairs,
1955), pp. 125, 206.
The Humanization of the Third World 433
the discipline.4 In its most common iterations, the Bandung Spirit serves as a
model for a counterhegemonic cosmopolitan solidarity.5 The “real confer-
ence” has become the moment in which a new political subjectivity (the
Third World) emerged to the world scene with stable political and economic
interests that can be pursued by twisting and instrumentalizing existing law
and institutions.6
But this chapter explores neither the melancholy of nostalgia nor the
ressentiment7 of revisionist historiography. Instead, Bandung – the real confer-
ence and the myth – are simply records of deliberations among newly
anointed postcolonial elites about the fundamental governance challenges
facing them. This chapter makes explicit the political desires, forms of know-
ledge, rhetorical practices, structure of arguments, principles of veridictions,
institutions, and technologies of power that made statements like “Let a New
Africa and Asia be born,” obvious in 1955 – and that make our nostalgia and
ressentiment about Bandung obvious to us today.
More specifically, this chapter uses Bandung as a touchstone to chronicle
the humanization of the Third World – that is, the disintegration of devel-
opmentalism, the dominant governance mentality that set the horizon of
political possibilities of Bandung, into a cacophony of policy frameworks
and an amalgam of policy instruments referred to here as post-
developmentalism.8
4
Karin Mickelson, “Rhetoric and Rage: Third World Voices in International Legal Discourse”
(1988) 16 Wisconsin International Law Journal 2, at 353–419.
5
Balakrishnan Rajagopal, “Locating the Third World in Cultural Geography” (1998–1999)
Third World Legal Studies, at 1. Partha Chatterjee, “Empire and Nation Revisited: 50 Years
after Bandung” (2005) 6 Inter-Asia Cultural Studies 4, at 487–496. Akhil Gupta, “The Song of
the Nonaligned World: Transnational Identities and the Reinscription of Space in Late
Capitalism” (1992) 7 Cultural Anthropology 1, at 63–79.
6
Georges Abi-Saab, “Newly Independent States and the Rules of International Law: An
Outline” (1962) 8 Howard Law Journal, at 95–121. Ram Prakash Anand, “Attitude of the Asian-
African States toward Certain Problems of International Law” (1966) 15 International and
Comparative Law Quarterly 1, at 55–75.
7
Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, trans. Reginold John Hollingdale and
Walter Kaufmann (New York, Vintage Books: 1989), pp. 36–39.
8
In the early 1990s, many in the fields of development, international law, and postcolonial
theory used the term “postdevelopment” in ways that are qualitatively different from the one
intended in this chapter. The notion of postdevelopment in the early 1990s referred to a stream
in scholarship and a mode of engagement with the development field that have at least the
following two characteristic elements: (1) disenchantment with the ideology of development
that focused on modernization and economic growth and took for granted the superiority of
the capitalist mode of production and the institutional framework that sustained it; and (2)
resistance and the role of new social movements in articulating an alternative models for social
transformations that are inclusive and respectful of nature. See Arturo Escobar, “Imagining a
434 Hani Sayed
on humanization
For international lawyers, the word “humanization” is overdetermined in the
way a single image in a dream often represents the confluence and condensa-
tion of many latent thoughts, trivial aspects of our daily lives, and contradictory
desires. The most immediate use of the word, and the one that most main-
stream international lawyers consider plausible, describes a process of devel-
opment that took place in international law as whole during the post–Second
World War period. What characterized this process was the widespread influ-
ence of developments in international human rights law on many other
subareas of international law, ranging from the Laws of War9 to International
Economic and Trade Law.10 Mainstream international lawyers converge in
citing this path of development as a marker of some notion of progress.
There are also postorientalist, left-of-center uses of “humanization” among
international lawyers. In some instances, “humanization” simplistically refers
to the process of deliberate change in “our” representation of the “other,”
avoiding essentialist ideas and easy generalizations by introducing, history,
context, diversity, and complexity. In others, “humanization” corresponds to a
project of “establish[ing] more humane forms of global relations and govern-
ance animated by broader-based and people centered concept of develop-
ment, one that is far more aware of and accepting the demands emanating
from the South.”11
Post-Development Era? Critical Thought, Development and Social Movements” (1992) 31/22
Social Text, at 20. Majid Rahnema and Victoria Bawtree, The Post-Development Reader
(Dhaka: Zed Books, 1997); B. Rajagopal, International Law from Below: Development, Social
Movements, and Third World Resistance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003).
9
Theodor Meron, “The Humanization of Humanitarian Law” (2000) 94 American Journal of
International Law 2, at 239–278.
10
See United Nations, Press Release (SG/SM/6881): Secretary-General Kofi Annan Proposes
Global Compact on Human Rights, Labor, Environment, in Address to World Economic
Forum in Davos, February 1, 1999, available at www.un.org/press/en/1999/19990201.sgsm6881
.html; Ernst-Ulrich Petersmann, “Time for a United Nations Global Compact for Integrating
Human Rights into the Law of Worldwide Organizations: Lessons from European Integration”
(2002) 13 European Journal of International Law 3, at 621–650; Susan Ariel Aaronson, “Seeping
In Slowly: How Human Rights Concerns Are Penetrating the WTO” (2002) 6 World Trade
Review 3, at 1–37. For a skeptical view of the same development, see Robert Howse, “Human
Rights in the WTO: Whose Rights, What Humanity? Comment on Petersmann” (2002) 13
European Journal of International Law 3, at 651–659.
11
Obiora Okafor and Obijiofor Aginam, “Humanizing Our Global Order: An Introduction,” in
Okafor and Aginam (eds.), Humanizing Our Global Order: Essays in Honour of Ivan Head
(Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2003), p. 4.
This chapter’s use of “humanization” starts with the constructivist insight

according to which the way we choose to represent a dynamic political
situation is an irreducible aspect of it that influences the behavior of the
relevant actors and eventually its political outcome. Every time we try to
capture the Real (with a capital “R” in the Lacanian sense of the term12) of
a political dynamic, we intervene in it, we misunderstand it, and our attempts
at representation become constitutive elements of it.
Our attempts to represent a dynamic political situation are not random, and
they rely on a generative grammar that gives our representation the character-
istic hue of a particular governance mentality. This is exactly what happens
when we choose to approach the problem of inequality in the global distribu-
tion of resources as one of allocative efficiency and market failures in relatively
autonomous national economies, or when we choose to approach the flow of
people across the Mediterranean as a security problem. Similarly, the human-
ization of the Third World becomes the process through which policymakers
suppress the multiple determinations of the global governance challenge
confronting the Third World and decide to approach it as essentially a
humanitarian concern.
But what is a “humanitarian” concern? This is essentially a historical
question and cannot be deductively answered a priori. Answering this ques-
tion requires two things: (1) that we suspend our most immediate understand-
ing of the term “humanitarian” and (2) that we excavate the contemporary to
make sense of the term by tracing the accumulated sediments of past political
choices and institutional experiments.
The “humanitarian” referred to here is not the alternative normative frame-
work, minimalist, lowest common denominator that stands in contrast to realist
calculations of self-interest or to formal treaty or customary international law.
Instead it is the imagined domain for governance practices in which the
paradigmatic challenges are framed as an emergency. In our contemporary
world, policymakers confront these challenges with a toolbox of bricolage
combinations of development assistance, emergency relief, or security measures
that are expected to work together in the best possible way when rationalized in
the framework of a policy discourse. In a way, this chapter is an attempt to write
a genealogy of the humanitarian as a domain for practices of global governance.
12
Jacques Lacan, Le Séminaire XXII: R.S.I., 1974–1975, available at www.ecole-lacanienne.net/fr/
p/lacan/m/nouvelles/paris-7/stenotypies-version-non-j-l-seminaire-xxii-i-rsi-i-1974-1975-94. For
accounts of the concept of “real” in Lacan found in secondary sources in English, see in
particular S. Žižek, The Sublime Object of Ideology (New York: Verso, 1989), pp. 169–173. For
an in-depth survey of Lacan’s psychoanalytic method, see Anika Lemaire, Jacques Lacan, trans.
David Macey (London: Routledge, 1979).
436 Hani Sayed
developmentalism and sauvy’s predicament

As in any critical genealogy,13 we should resist the temptation of basing our
analysis on searching for a point of origin, or on fetishizing a particular
moment in which Developmentalism finds its most pristine iteration. In a
way, we can only demystify Bandung by accepting that, for the purposes of
describing Developmentalism, it is an arbitrary benchmark. But in order to
understand the internal structure of this governance mentality, I would like to
introduce another arbitrary benchmark.
In August 1952, only a few weeks after the July coup that brought Nasser and
the free officers to power in Egypt, French demographer Alfred Sauvy
(1898–1990) published in a center-right magazine an article of reflection that
set the stage for our contemporary understanding of the Bandung Spirit.14
Sauvy noted that while everyone seemed to focus on the East-West divide as
the central challenge of global governance at the time, another, far more
important challenge was being ignored. It is not that the struggle between the
First World and the Second World was not a defining feature of world
organization in the 1950s, but that the stakes of that struggle were in that
“other” world, a “Third World” composed of those countries referred to in UN
jargon at the time as “underdeveloped.”
Sauvy the demographer was particularly attentive to the mathematical
fatalism (fatalité mathématique) that was unfolding in this other world. Med-
ical advancements had improved life conditions, increasing life expectancy
and leading ultimately to demographic expansion. But this demographic
expansion was not met with corresponding economic expansion and invest-
ment because of the “financial wall of the cold war” (Le mur financier de la
guerre froide). The cycle of life has been prolonged, but it was prolonged to a
vicious cycle of misery. And this is what he considered as the fundamental
challenge of global governance of his time. It is a challenge because such
vicious cycles of misery, if not addressed structurally, will only beget revolu-
tions and violence. To quote Sauvy,
N’entendez-vous pas sur la Côte d’Azur, Can’t you hear on the Côte d’Azur the
les cris qui nous parviennent de l’autre cries coming from the other end of the
bout de la Méditerranée, d’Égypte or de Mediterranean, from Egypt or Tunisia?
Tunisie? Pensez-vous qu’il ne s’agit que de Do you think that it is about revolutions
13
Michel Foucault, “Nietzche, Genealogy, History” in Paul Rabinow (ed.), The Foucault Reader
(New York: Vintage: 1984), pp. 76–100.
14
Alfred Sauvy, “Trois mondes, une planète”, L’Observateur politique, économique et littéraire,
118 (14 August 1952), p. 5.
révolutions de palais ou de grondements de in palaces, or the growling of ambitious

quelques ambitieux, en quête de place? men aiming at a place on the table? No,
Non, non, la pression augmente no, the pressure is constantly mounting in
constamment dans la chaudière humaine. the burner of humanity.
For Sauvy the political significance of this “third” world (again, third in the
sense of “other”) is deep and radically transformative on a global scale. Vast
territories on our planet and two-thirds of the human race are no longer
governable. The moment, according to Sauvy, was analogous to the big bang
that unleashed political modernity in late eighteenth-century Europe.
Because, to quote Sauvy one last time,
Car enfin ce Tiers Monde ignoré, At the end, this Third World, ignored,
exploité, méprisé comme le Tiers Etat, exploited and despised, just like the
veut, lui aussi, être quelque chose. Third Estates wants also to be
something.
The reference he makes here is to the famous revolutionary pamphlet
(Qu’est-ce que le tiers-état?)15 written by l’Abbé Emmanuel Joseph Sieyès
(1748–1836) and published on the eve of the French Revolution in 1789.
Sauvy’s text has many of the discursive moves that are characteristic of
postwar reflections on governance challenges in the period between
1945 and roughly 1975. First, he made poverty the object of a new problem-
atization. He described the dynamics that had produced it (demographic
expansion and low investment). And his description foretold the solutions that
should be proposed.16 The Third World is two-thirds of humanity and what
characterizes the conditions of life for two-thirds of humanity will hencefor-
ward be a vicious cycle of population expansion, low productivity, and low
investment.17 And when Sauvy presented poverty as the global problem he
15
Emmanuel Joseph Sieyès, Qu’est-ce que le tiers-état?, 1789.
16
Alfred Sauvy, De Malthus à Mao Tsé-Toung: le problème de la popoulation dans le monde
(Paris: Denoël, 1958).
17
Between 1945 and 1975, Sauvy’s problematization of poverty and the invention of
underdevelopment were widely shared among policymakers in relevant academic fields in the
United States and Western Europe. See, e.g., Harry Truman, Inaugural address delivered at the
Capitol, Washington, D. C., January 20, 1949, U. S. Govt. Print. Office, Washington, DC;
Whitman Rostow, “The Stages of Economic Growth” (1959) 12 Economic History Review, at 1;
Gunnar Myrdal, Asian Drama: An Inquiry into the Poverty of Nations, 1st ed. (New York:
Pantheon, 1968). For retrospective accounts of the construction of underdevelopment as a
governance concern and the problematization of poverty, see Arturo Escobar, Encountering
Development: The Making and Unmaking of the Third World, 2nd ed. (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 2012); Majid Rahnema, “Global Poverty: A Pauparizing Myth” (1991)
Interculture, at 111. There is, of course, a related (albeit parallel) line of inquiry that re-
problematizes global poverty. The following are merely representative examples: Amartya Sen,
438 Hani Sayed
relied on more than a century of national experiments in problematizing

poverty,18 and on techniques in managing it that eventually culminated in
the welfare state19 and Keynesian macroeconomics.
In addition to problematizing poverty, he also gave it a geographic location
and named it. Finally, and perhaps more important, Sauvy’s text preformed an
interesting displacement in the discourse about war and violence. The Cold
War concerns over weapons that would soon become obsolete were
impertinent. It is not the Cold War that should be the priority, but a war on
poverty.
The idea that a problematization of poverty in the 1950s constituted the
field of development policy is, of course, familiar.20 This chapter examines the
extent to which this way of problematizing the Third World implies an
understanding of how different practices of global governance were expected
to work with each other in the best possible way. This formulation of this
chapter’s line of inquiry invites some clarifications.
First, the units of analysis in this chapter are not the practices of global
governance per se, including their different institutional vehicles, policy
objectives, and the balance sheet of successes and failures. Instead, it looks
to reconstruct from the snapshots assembled herein (e.g., Bandung and Sauvy)
what Foucault called (albeit with reservation) the self-consciousness21 of rulers
as they reflect on how to govern better or on what is the best possible way to
govern. This “self-consciousness” of rulers is a governance mentality. Second,
reconstructing a governance mentality to continue with the Foucauldian line
of inquiry brings to the surface a number of specific questions, including how
the domain of different practices of governance is defined and the types of
relationships between them that are presumed necessary to govern in the best
possible ways. Third, the possible relationships between the different practices
of governance can be typified. Practices of governance could be comple-
mentary, or in a tension to balance each other. They could also be understood
to operate in parallel domains with no causal pathways for influence and
Poverty and Famines: An Essay on Entitlement and Deprivation (New York: Oxford University
Press, 1982); Mike Davis, Late Victorian Holocausts: El Niño Famines and the Making of the
Third World (London; Verso, 2001).
18
Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation (Boston: Beacon Press, 1985).
19
Jacques Donzelot, L’invention du social: essai sur le déclin des passions politiques (Paris: Fayard,
1984); Francois Ewald, L’Etat providence (Paris: B. Grasset, 1986). Gøsta Esping-Andersen, The
Three Worlds of Welfare Capitalism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990).
20
Escobar, Encountering Development; Rahnema, “Global Poverty.”
21
Michel Foucault, Naissance de la biopolitique: cours au Collège de France, 1978–1979 (Paris:
Gaillimard: Seuil, 2004), p. 4.
interactions. Or, practices of governance could relate to each other as fore-

ground regulatory action and background conditions. Fourth, a governance
mentality is structured like a language. This structure can be discerned by
understanding the relationship between different governance practices at any
given period. Different governance mentalities are structured differently.
the structure of developmentalism

An obvious but truly important starting point to understand the structure of
Developmentalism as a governance mentality is to appreciate the extent to
which it mediates the colonial and the postcolonial. Colonialism was not
merely a system22 that bound a colonial power with its colonies, both peoples
and territories. Between the Berlin Conference (1884) and the First World
War (1914), colonialism was global governance.23 An understanding of colo-
nialism as global governance evokes a number of ideas of varying degrees of
complexity. To start, as Edward Said reminds us, colonialism was a “career.”24
It relied on people with personal projects and aspirations, aesthetic sensibilities
and political loyalties. It produced its own forms of knowledge and institu-
tions. And in the complex of ideas, people, and institutions involved in the
colonial project, societies were invented, and the domains for exercising
power (economy, civil society, or the social25) coalesced at the intersection
of different practices of governance.
Meanwhile, decolonization was a global historical process of violent struc-
tural political and economic change. It was also a period of transition imbued
with experiments, uncertainties, half-formed ideas, and conflicts. This transi-
tion unfolded in parallel along all aspects of colonial relations in politics, the
economy, and the arts. Postwar developmentalism, the governance mentality
that framed both Bandung and Sauvy, was one important instance of this
transition process and reflected its conflicts and ambivalences.
In developmentalism, there are a number of elementary conceptions about
governance that were operationalized in the colonial era, survived decoloniza-
tion, and remained at the foundation of post colonial developmentalism. Two
are particularly significant in this chapter.
22
Jean-Paul Sartre, “Le colonialisme est un système” (1956) 11 Les Temps Modernes 123, at
1371–1386.
23
Antony Anghie, Imperialism, Sovereignty, and the Making of International Law (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2005).
24
Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Vintage Books, 1979).
25
Timothy Mitchell, Colonising Egypt (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988).
440 Hani Sayed
First, there is what can best described as geo-strategy, the idea that for the
purposes of governing, the entire globe is a continuous geographic space that
could be governed by dividing it into standard territorial units, sub-units, not-
yet units, and even negative units (e.g., terra nullius). In geo-strategy, we
assume that the exercise of public reason to rationally decide on how best to
use resources, or when and how to deploy to coercive apparatus of the states
can be on the scale of the entire globe – and the effects of these decisions can
be calculated and evaluated on that same global scale.26
Second, there are the orientalist premises of practices of governance on a global
scale. That is the idea that our most basic rationalization about how to govern best,
or how different practices of governance are supposed to work together in the best
possible way, could be understood as contingent elaborations of a fundamental
distinction of the world into orient and occident, into self and other.27 In
developmentalism, this distinction is an epistemological frame that conditions
the way rulers understood the so-called art of governance.28 In addition to these
two, a number of basic ideas about how to govern well on a global scale became
more pronounced in postwar developmentalism. Two are particularly significant.
First, from the perspective of developmentalism, governance practices are
independent from jurisdictional boundaries. The lines between national,
local, and international or between public and private were pragmatic aspects
of governance and not ontologically preceding. Second, from the perspective
of developmentalism, governance practices on a global scale can be clustered
in functional units that were at some point labeled regimes.29 What is
characteristic about regimes in that governance mentality is that:
They are conceptually headless (you do not need to assume a particular
flow of power and influence to describe them)
They intersperse different levels of governance – national/international/
local and public and private
They are complex phenomena operating on the ideational level, on the
level of individual projects, and on the level of institutions and formal
and informal rules
26 27
Foucault, Naissance de la biopolitique, pp. 57–62. Said, Orientalism.
28
Escobar, Encountering Development.
29
On regime theory in international relations theory, see Stephen D. Krasner, “Transforming
International Regimes: What the Third World Wants and Why” (1981) International Studies
Quarterly, at 119–148; Krasner, “Regimes and the Limits of Realism: Regimes as Autonomous
Variables” (1982) 36 International Organization 2, at 497–510. Stephen Haggard and Beth A.
Simmons, “Theories of International Regimes” (1987) 41 International Organization 3, at
491–517. Susan Strange, “Cave! Hic Dragones: A Critique of Regime Analysis” (1982) 36
International Organization 2, at 479–496.
Global governance becomes the governance of regimes as regimes in their

mutual interactions. And what distinguishes different global governance men-
talities is how these regimes are integrated with each other, or are expected to
work with each other in the best possible way. Sauvy’s problematization of the
Third World, which is characteristic of the governance mentality that he
channeled, proposed a certain relationship between three regimes:
Regime for violence

Regime for welfare and prosperity: this refers to the institutional and
ideational complex that organizes how complex, interdependent societies
collectively manage the way individuals can maximize pleasure and
reduce pain
Regime for relief and assistance in emergencies: this refers to the insti-
tutional and ideational complex that organizes how interdependent
societies collectively manage situations of mass suffering resulting from
emergencies, whether natural or manmade
Developmentalism was then a particular way of understanding the relation-
ship between these three regimes. Postdevelopmentalism is another way of
understanding this relationship. Humanization is the process that culminated
in the shift from the former to the latter.
Developmentalism is organized around one fundamental distinction. This
is the distinction between normal and exceptional circumstances or situations.
The imagined domain for normal practices of governance is the national
economy, with post-Keynesian macroeconomics providing the toolbox. An
outbreak of violence or the onset of a humanitarian emergency is an interrup-
tion of normalcy. Managing the consequences of an outbreak of violence on
whatever scale (UN system of collective security or humanitarian assistance) is
qualitatively different from addressing market failures and interrupting vicious
circles of low productivity and poverty (official development assistance). In
each one of these regimes, the Third World is problematized differently.
Governing through development policy is logically independent from
governing through deciding when a civil war is a rebellion, and a rebellion
a war of national liberation. In other words, a policy decision in one did not
imply a decision in the other.
The distinction between normal and exception situations is institutionally
manifest in the distinction between development assistance and emergency
relief. During the second half of the twentieth century, the distinction
between development assistance and emergency relief permeated the insti-
tutional framework for international transfers of resources between the Global
North and the Global South. A clear marker of the fundamental character of
442 Hani Sayed
the distinction can be found in the debate that filled so many position papers
and policy studies during the 1990s among experts and institutional actors
active in both types of assistance about the so-called assistance gap30 and about
the advantages and disadvantages of linking relief and development.31
According to some analysts,32 the immediate triggers for these debates were
the popularization of a series of critiques of the role of humanitarian assistance
in situations of civil conflict,33 particularly after the Rwandan genocide, and a
marked conceptual transformation in how experts and policymakers in donors’
institutions understood the causes and consequences of humanitarian emer-
gencies, whether natural or manmade. Thus, according to another analyst, it
became increasingly clear to a majority of donor agencies that “relief efforts
have an impact on longer-term development, and that development efforts
also impact on a country’s disaster proneness.”34 The consequences of these
debates on the architecture of the global regime of aid will be explored in the
next section. But for now, what is useful about these debates is that they
generated an elaborate, retrospective discourse on the working assumptions of
the post–Second World War regime of aid, and the fundamental character of
the distinction between humanitarian and development assistance.
In the postwar regime of global governance, the two forms of assistance
were mutually constitutive while remaining institutionally quite distinct.
During the early years, the immediate concern for reconstruction was about
the rehabilitation of territories ravaged by destruction and types of problems
30
Astri Suhrke and Arve Ofstad, “Filling ‘the Gap’: Lessons Well Learnt by the Multilateral Aid
Agencies,” Chr. Michelsen Institute’s Working Paper 2005, at 14.
31
See, e.g., Commission of the European Communities, Communication from the Commission
to the Council and the European Parliament on Linking Relief, Rehabilitation and
Development (LRRD), COM (96) 153 final (1996); UN, OCHA, Humanitarian Report 2007
(ch. 13, The link between relief and development), UN Doc. Number DHA/97/72; UN, UNDP
(Rwanda), Linking Relief to Development (June 1998); Joanna Macrae and Mark Bradbury, Aid
in the Twilight Zone: A Critical Analysis of Humanitarian-Development Aid Linkages in
Situations of Chronic Instability (A Report for UNICEF), ODI (Humanitarian Policy Program)/
Humanitarianism and War Project Brown University (1998), available at http://reliefweb.int/
sites/reliefweb.int/files/resources/634D2A0330F1DCA6C1256C7C00471BB0-unicef-aid-feb98
.pdf (last updated on February 7, 2015).
32
Alexandra Galperin, Discourses of Disasters, Discourses of Relief and DFID’s Humanitarian Aid
Policy: A Diagnostic Snapshot of the Crisis of Relief as a Legitimate and Universal Instrument in
Contemporary Conflict, London School of Economics, Development Studies Institute,
Working Paper: 02–28 (2002).
33
Mary B. Anderson, Do No Harm: How Aid Can Support Peace – Or War (Boulder: Lynne
Rienner Publishers, 1999); B.E. Harrell-Bond, Imposing Aid: Emergency Assistance to Refugees
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986).
34
Peter Sollis, “The Relief-Development Continuum: Some Notes on Rethinking Assistance for
Civilian Victims of Conflict” (1994) 47 Journal of International Affairs 2, at 451–471.
that required quick humanitarian relief (e.g., United Nations Relief and
Rehabilitation Administration,35 the International Refugees Organization).
From the 1950s, these multilateral relief agencies were quickly dissolved and
their functions distributed among specialized agencies within the UN system
(WFP, UNICEF, UNHCR), and voluntary national/international initiatives
(e.g., OxFam, ICRC, CARE). Later developments brought about the emer-
gence of multilateral bodies for the coordination of humanitarian assistance,
especially through the UN.36 Development assistance and humanitarian relief
institutions had different priorities, mandates, financing schemes, and oper-
ational principles.
The mandate of relief agencies is to protect human life by providing basic
necessity items like food, shelter, water, and basic health services. It is micro-
oriented in that it is intended to be temporary and concerned with present and
immediate needs of specific communities. Operationally, relief agencies focus
on speedy delivery, with more involvement of global actors compared to local
capacity in the delivery and implementation of assistance programs. Humani-
tarian assistance is ethically deontological in that its justification is the sanctity
and dignity of individual human life. Operationally this translates to the
principle that humanitarian assistance should be unconditional. Relief
workers and agencies experience their daily practice as a series of irresolvable
dilemmas between pragmatic, problem-solving operational decisions and
commitment to the principles of humanity, neutrality, and impartiality.37
In contrast, development assistance is macro-oriented to the extent that its
imagined space of operation is a national economy taken as a whole. It focuses
on building institutions, sustainability, and funding projects with longer time
frames. Operationally, development assistance agencies are more closely
involved with local institutions, tend to phase the channeling of funds over
the life of the project. Development experts are predominantly ethically
consequentialist. In practice this effectively means that, because in donor
35
For a history of the UNRRA, see Jessica Reinisch, “Internationalism in Relief: the Birth (and
Death) of UNRRA” (2011) 210 Past and Present (Supp. 6), at 258–289.
36
UN, General Assembly, Resolution, Strengthening of the Coordination of Humanitarian
Emergency Assistance of the United Nations, A/RES/46/182. In 2007 the UN International Law
Commission included the topic of the “protection of persons in the event of disasters” in its
program of work. The outcome of the Commission’s work is a draft convention regulating
protection and assistance of persons in the event of a natural disaster. See UN, General
Assembly, Official Records of the General Assembly, Sixty-Second Session, Supplement No. 10
(A/62/10), Section 375.
37
For a comprehensive overview of the principles of humanitarian assistance see UN, General
Assembly, International Law Commission, 60th session, Protection of Persons in the Event of
Disasters: Memorandum by the Secretariat, A/CN.4/590 (Dec. 11, 2007).
444 Hani Sayed
countries relief and development are often managed by different departments

and financed from different budget lines, a country that receives substantial
amounts for humanitarian assistance may not receive comparable amounts, if
any, for its development needs. Development assistance could be conditional
(e.g., tied aid).
Implicitly at first, policymakers, institutional actors, and professionals
involved at the operational level understood the relationship between the
two forms of assistance in linear terms – “with both seen as distinct and
essentially sequential types of efforts.”38 The ideal situation imagined by this
conception of the relationship between relief and development would be the
rapid onset of a natural disaster.39 External support comes first in the form of
relief, followed by rehabilitation and reconstruction, and ends with a return to
a so-called normal situation.40 At each stage, different institutions with differ-
ent mandates, operational guidelines, and funding sources will be involved.
During the period between 1960 and 1990, this implicit understanding of the
relationship between relief and development occasionally came to the surface
in situations where a relief agency engaged in initiatives that overstepped the
38
Ian Smilie, “Relief and Development: The Struggle for Synergy,” Watson Institute of
International Studies: Occasional Paper No. 33 (1998), at XXII.
39
This, however, did not stop relief agencies from observing the similarities between natural
disasters and war, civil disturbance. In its report to the Economic and Social Council that
ultimately culminated with the adoption of General Assembly Resolution 2816(XXVI) that
established within the UN the position of Disaster Relief Coordinator, the Secretary General
noted:
The effects of civil conflicts or emergencies caused by war or civil disturbance have
many of the features associated with natural disaster situations. They are frequently
sudden, and give rise to a need for assistance of many kinds from different sources.
A number of measures designed to cope with the needs arising from natural disasters can
be applied in such other emergencies.
From United Nations, Economic and Social Council, 51st session, Assistance in Cases of
Natural Disasters: A Comprehensive Report of the Secretary General, E/4994 (May 13, 1971).
From the development assistance side of the continuum, the World Bank operational policies
on “Emergency Recovery Loans,” the Bank’s main instrument of lending for emergencies
since 1984 defines an “emergency” to include both war and natural disasters. An early version
of the policy emphasized natural disasters. After the 1995 reforms emergencies were defined as:
“an extraordinary event of limited duration such as a war, civil disturbance, or natural disaster.”
See World Bank, Operations Evaluation Department, The World Bank Experience in Post-War
Reconstruction (1998), p. 5.
40
See UN, General Assembly, Resolution, Assistance in Cases of Natural Disaster and other
Disaster Situations, A/Res/2816 (XXVI) (Dec. 14, 1971). One of the functions of the Disaster
Relief Coordinator, enumerated in the resolution, was to “to phase out relief operations under
his aegis as the stricken country moves into the stage of rehabilitation and reconstruction, but
to continue to interest himself, within the framework of his responsibilities for relief, in the
activities of the United Nations agencies concerned with rehabilitation and reconstruction.”
boundaries of its mandate to incorporate developmental goals. This was

particularly the case, for example, in certain UNHCR initiatives during the
1970s and 1980s (the refugee aid and development approach).41 During those
years, the UNHCR undertook certain programs aimed at moving beyond
providing open-ended relief to promote sustainable development in refugee-
populated areas that benefited both refugees and the local population of the
host country. These programs included providing agricultural wage earning
opportunities for refugees and local population and strengthening the physical
infrastructure in areas where large numbers of refugees have settled.42 Donors,
according to Jeffery Crisp, soon realized that such initiatives exceeded the
narrow mandate of UNHCR, as they were being used to channel additional
development funding for “badly governed countries” instead of providing
means to solve refugee problems.43
From the development assistance side of the continuum, it is worth refer-
ring to the World Bank’s early attempts at providing lending for emergen-
cies.44 The Bank’s policy framework for Emergency Recovery Loans (ERLs)
emphasized the very different characters of relief and development assistance,
and limited the role of the Bank’s loans to support restoration of assets as
opposed to relief and consumption. In that framework, the Bank clearly
expressed the linear understanding of the relationship between relief and
development to the extent that it envisaged phasing the disbursement of the
ELRs for a period up to two years, citing that during the early stages of
emergencies, relief agencies have the comparative advantage. Similarly, the
Bank’s policy framework for the postwar reconstruction of 1997 also articulated
a linear conception of the transition from war to peace, dividing the work of
the bank to five stages ending with a return to normalcy. The Bank’s activities,
according to the 1997 framework, occur after the conflict has moved toward
resolution.45
The distinction and the lines between these regimes can even be traced
sociologically to different professional sensibilities, areas of expertise,
imagined space of operation, epistemological assumptions about processes
41
Jeffrey Crisp, “Mind the Gap! UNHCR, Humanitarian Assistance and the Development
Process” (2001) 35 International Migration Review 1, at 168–191.
42
Id. at 170–171. Crisp cites the example of the Income-Generating Project for Afghan Refugees
(IGPAR), a joint undertaking between the Pakistani government, the World Bank, and
UNHCR with a budget of US$86 million.
43
Id. at 172.
44
World Bank, Toward a New Framework for Rapid Bank Response to Crises and Emergencies
(January 12, 2007); World Bank, 1998.
45
World Bank, 1998, p. 6.
446 Hani Sayed
for validating truth claims, and policy objectives. In some way, these differ-
ences are so constitutive of the identity of the individuals involved that it
would be plausible to understand the relationship between them as different
“epistemic communities”46 that co-exist in parallel, imagined worlds.
In developmentalism, the relationship among the regimes of welfare, vio-
lence, and humanitarian emergencies were asymmetrical. The Third World
was primarily an economic challenge. Poverty and low productivity were
constitutive of this construct. Mass poverty was challenging, but treated
specifically as an economic policy challenge.
postdevelopmentalism: fragility
In postdevelopmentalism, the Third World – or, to be more accurate, what
Sauvy described as Third World – is problematized differently. Poverty =
demographic expansion + low investment is out. The problem in postdeve-
lopmentalism is fragility. The distinction between norm and exception is
blurred, and the lines between the regimes of welfare, violence, and relief
and assistance in emergencies are porous. This is a world of protracted
humanitarian crises, of complex emergencies, and of what is known in the
humanitarian field as multimandated and integrated missions.
War is normalized. War zones have become dwelling places. The paradig-
matic governance challenge is the humanitarian emergency. Development
assistance, emergency relief, and security measures are fused in a cacophon-
ous policy discourse. This is the world of what Mark Duffield described as the
“development-security nexus.”47 In this world, it is difficult to distinguish
between security policy, development policy and humanitarian policy. The
arrows of causality, the flows of time are forward and backward.
The World Bank’s 2011 World Development Report, Conflict, Security and
Development, best exemplifies this governance mentality.48 The report is the
46
I use the expression “epistemic community” loosely. Some international relation theorists use
the analytical construct “epistemic community” to sort through questions about policy
coordination between states and about regime change. See Peter M. Haas, “Introduction:
Epistemic Communities and International Policy Coordination” (1992) 46 International
Organization 1. I take no position in this debate or regarding the adequacy of using the
analytical construct of epistemic community.
47
Mark Duffield, Global Governance and the New Wars: the Merging of Development and
Security (New York: Zed Books, 2001); Mark Duffield, “The Development-Security Nexus in
Historical Perspective: Governing the World of Peoples,” in Challenging the Aid Paradigm:
Western Currents and Asian Alternatives (ed. Sörensen) (New York: Palgrave, 2010).
48
World Bank, 2011, World Development Report 2011: Conflict, Security, and Development, World
Bank, Washington, DC.
first time the Bank attempted to develop a policy framework to “secure

development” – that is, and I quote from a 2008 widely cited speech by Robert
Zoellick, a process “to synthesise security, governance and economics to be
most effective.”49
In this policy framework,50 a central distinction is one between robust,
stable states and fragile states. Robust and fragile states are distinguished by
their ability to respond and adapt to all sorts of stresses. This ability is a
function of “institutions” as this word is understood by “new institutional
economists.” Weak institutions in fragile states make them unable to adapt in
response to internal or external stresses, and thus become vulnerable to
periodic outbreaks of violence. Periodic outbreaks of violence affect the
ability of the economy to sustain increases in per capita income over the
long term. Fragility has systemic repercussions; it is not only a concern for
the states in question. Robust states confront a policy imperative to contain
the consequences of fragility and assist by encouraging transition out of
fragility.
From the perspective of this policy framework, an important determinant of
the strength and weakness of institutions is the state–civil society relationship.
Fragile states are contingently stabilized through elite pacts. This is the
situation when dominant elites find it more advantageous to extract rent from
land and labor under their controls than from violence and confrontation with
other elites. Their pacts are stabilized by an institutional frame and organiza-
tions that spread rents through client-patron networks.
In contrast, robust states control and limit violence through impersonal
institutions and perpetual organizations that survive the lives of individual
members. Access to violence is limited and monopolized by the state. Soci-
eties are not structured as coalitions of elites competing for rents and distrib-
uting it through patron-client networks, but as a mass of citizens with equal
access to public goods like safety, education, health care, and all sorts of
economic and political activities, individually or through organizations.
Transition out of fragility is a matter of affecting the rational calculations of
dominant coalition of elites to introduce marginal and gradual changes that
do not affect the continuation of their system of privileges. Radical and
emancipatory social/political transformation is impossible.
49
Robert B. Zoellick, “Fragile States: Securing Development” (2008) 50 Survival 6, at 67–84.
50
The 2011 World Bank Development report relied extensively on an analytical framework for
framing policy choices in fragile situations developed especially in: Douglass C. North, John
Joseph Wallis, and Barry R. Weingast, Violence and Social Orders: A Conceptual Framework
for Interpreting Recorded Human History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009).
448 Hani Sayed
conclusion
Describing the humanization of the Third World and the contrast between
two governance mentalities does not imply a critique. Rather, it opens a space
for critique in concrete cases.
What I could say at this level of abstraction is to point out how humaniza-
tion narrows a priori the range, and political depth of conceivable normative
visions about justice on a global scale. In developmentalism, it was conceiv-
able to propose global, structural alternatives to an unequal global order – a
new international economic order was conceivable. With humanization,
substantive visions of justice and inequality on a global scale were downgraded
to matters of human bare survival.
It is important to emphasize also, that from my perspective, from the
perspective of a man of my generation, I can only describe the sixty years that
separates us from Bandung as a crisis, in the same way Antonio Gramsci
described the crisis of liberal politics in Italy of the inter-war period: “The crisis
consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born;
in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear.”51
The sixty years that separates us from Bandung are this “interegnum” in
which developmentalism, humanization and post-developmentalism are the
“morbid symptoms.” The crisis and its morbid symptoms are not abstract ex
post intellectual reconstructions. The lived experience of being governed
through developmentalism and post-developmentalism appears to me, more
today than ever, as a catastrophic conflagration; a nuclear weapon exploding
in slow motion, slow enough to match the lifespan of an entire generation.
The problematization of the “third world” today as the “field” of the humani-
tarian disaster, which is a defining aspect of the post developmentalist govern-
ance mentality, is in fact particularly apt.
I came to the narrative about humanization as an impossible attempt to
intellectually make sense of the experience of witnessing the crumpling of my
home country like the biblical pillars of salt. I was struck by how quickly
the Syrian revolution turned to a Syrian question; how this question was
“humanized.” But more important, I was struck by how the humanization
of the Syrian question transformed subjectivity and redefined the horizons for
political change. Gone are the modernist notions of emancipation. Survival is
what you can aspire to. That descent into abjectness was barely noticeable.
First you resist.
51
Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, eds. Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey N.
Smith (International Publishers: New York, 1995), p. 276.
Then you are detained, tortured, bombed, displaced.

Then you are recognized as a victim. The world will fetishize your
suffering. Your body parts will be on the cover pages, your tattered clothes
and hunger will become points to win an argument between strangers in
diplomatic meetings thousands of miles away.
Then you become your suffering and you are self-aware as a victim, and
your politics becomes the politics of victimization.
Then your detention, torture, destruction, and displacement will become
normal. The more you engage in the politics of victimization, the more your
suffering will be normalized. Your resistance will fade in the background of
your wretched image.
In the current legal/institutional environment, many Syrians have started to
believe that it is more advantageous to be feared, even despised, than to be
humanized. But what struck me is how contingent and recent is this work of
humanization.
The Algerian war was not a clean war. The tactics of the armed struggle
were not clean and honorable. And the tactics of repression were brutal,
ranging from systematic torture to the use of incendiary weapons against
civilians. But the world did not respond to it the way they would respond to
a natural disaster. The consensus was that despite the atrocities, the funda-
mental political choice was that colonialism must end.
I wanted to understand what made those types of political judgments about
the outcome of an emancipatory war possible then, and unimaginable today.
And this chapter is what I have found out so far.
27
Bandung’s Legacy
Solidarity and Contestation in Global Women’s Rights
aziza ahmed*
introduction
The Bandung Conference brought together leaders from Asia and Africa in 1955.
Although the legacy of the Conference is contested, scholars and activists credit
Bandung as a founding moment in the rise of Third World solidarity and the
eventual formation of the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM).1 The Final Com-
muniqué made a significant statement by declaring full support of the Charter of
the United Nations, and took note of the Universal Declaration of Human
Rights as a common standard of achievement for all peoples and nations.2
While the Final Communiqué speaks to human rights, it makes no men-
tion of women, gender, or women’s rights. Given the enormous diversity of
feminist movements across the globe, it would be impossible to draw out a
single narrative of Bandung’s influence on feminist activism in the years since
the Conference. Yet it is clear that the spirit of the Conference has shaped
feminist activism in the last sixty years. In particular, the momentum and
critique generated by Bandung and NAM enabled feminists of the Global
South (GS) and their allies in the Global North (GN) to take a broader
* This chapter is adapted from three other publications: Aziza Ahmed, “Rugged Vaginas and
Vulnerable Rectums: The Sexual Identity, Epidemiology, and Law of the Global HIV/AIDS
Epidemic” (2013) 26 Columbia Journal of Gender and the Law 1; Aziza Ahmed, “Exploitation
Creep and Development: A Response to Janie Chang” (2014) 108 AJIL Unbound 268, online
https://www.asil.org/blogs/“exploitation-creep”-and-development-response-janie-chuang; and
“When Men are Harmed: Feminism, Queer Theory, and Torture at Abu Ghraib” (2012) 11
Journal of Islamic and Near Eastern Law 1. Many thanks to Vasuki Nesiah, Luis Eslava, and
Michael Fakhri for inviting me to participate in this volume.
1
Tan See Seng and Acharya Amitav, Bandung Revisited: The Legacy of the 1955 Asian-African
Conference for the International Order (Singapore: NUS Press, 2008).
2
Bandung Final Communiqué, available at http://franke.uchicago.edu/Final_Communique_
Bandung_1955.pdf.
450
Bandung’s Legacy 451
structural approach to addressing issues facing women and girls. This included
acknowledging the centrality of race, colonialism, and economic inequality in
struggles for women’s rights.
This chapter reflects on transnational feminist activism in global govern-
ance in the decades following the Bandung Conference and examines both
moments of solidarity and points of departure as women’s rights activists
sought to develop a unified platform for advocacy in international law. First,
using the example of the UN conferences on population, the chapter demon-
strates how GS feminists allied with GN feminists to lead a fundamental shift
away from population control and toward “. . .a reproductive health frame in
policies and programs aimed at addressing demographic concerns.” The
chapter then notes that tensions remain as feminists contest the centrality of
the broader structural contributors to women’s inequality as part of a feminist
agenda. This particular debate, between a broader structural approach to
women’s inequality and one based on single-issue feminist projects, is espe-
cially evident in the global movement to end violence against women (VAW),
which often places identity-oriented criminal law and security strategies at
odds with broader socioeconomic solutions.
women’s human rights and nam

Early agitation for women’s rights by the few women present at the founding
meetings of the UN resulted in a UN Charter calling for equality between
men and women and the Commission on the Status of Women.3 Through
the 1950s and 1960s, the Commission worked on a range of formal equality
issues, including women’s suffrage and a declaration specifically addressing
women’s rights. The 1970s were a turning point. The rise of NAM, as well as
the reemergence of human rights in international law as supported by the
Bandung Final Communiqué, provided a new framework in which women
could push for the centrality of women when considering the path of
emerging nations. Drawing on the spirit of NAM that followed from Bandung,
feminists also sought to challenge the simple definition of equality enshrined
in the UN Charter. As argued by Devaki Jain and Shubha Chacko,
The Non-Aligned Movement’s idea of the path to women’s equality departed
from UN strategies. The UN system at this time saw “women’s status” largely
as a social development issue and did not strongly connect it to the larger
context of international development. Within the UN, women were still
3
Devaki Jain, Women, Development and the UN: A Sixty-Year Quest for Equality and Justice
(Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2005).
452 Aziza Ahmed
viewed as resources whose potential could be tapped. But the NAM gather-
ings offered a space where women from former colonies could reassert the
standpoint that they were active agents in their nations, contributors to their
country’s progress, and not mere consumers of social services.4
Further, NAM’s ideological underpinnings aided in creating a transnational

Third World women’s movement that celebrated the maintenance of national
identity and self-determination alongside the acknowledgment that women’s
issues should be understood within the broader context of economic
development.5
By the 1970s, the reemergence of human rights discourse6 brought about a
new emphasis on women’s rights in the context of the UN and an opportunity
to broaden the women’s rights agenda and find a home for women’s rights in
international law and global governance institutions.7 The UN Decade on
Women, which began with the First World Conference on Women held in
Mexico City in 1975, inspired the formation of a global movement of women’s
rights activists who sought to engage UN mechanisms. GN and GS activists
collaborated to push the agenda for women’s rights.8 The initial organizing
was rooted in second-wave feminist ideas of achieving women’s equality
through ending women’s subordination to men.9
Tensions emerged, however, as feminists began to challenge the assump-
tions of universality in the experiences of women within the context of
human rights struggles.10 Writing for Development Alternatives with
Women for a New Era, a network of activists and academics from the
GS, Gita Sen and Caren Grown reflected on the divisions between femi-
nists in the mid-1980s: “While gender subordination has universal elements,
4
Devaki Jain and Shuba Chako, “Walking Together: The Journey of the Non-Aligned
Movement and the Women’s Movement” (2009) 19 Development in Practice 895.
5
Jain, “Walking Together,” and Gina Sen and Caren Grown, Development, Crises, and
Alternative Visions: Third World Women’s Perspectives (New York: Monthly Review Press,
1987).
6
Samuel Moyn, The Last Utopia: Human Rights in History (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
7
World Conference of the International Women’s Year, Mexico City, Mexico, June 19–July 2,
1975, Declaration of Mexico on the Equality of Women and Their Contribution to Development
and Peace, UN Doc. E/Conf.66/34 (July 2, 1975).
8
Peggy Antrobus, The Global Women’s Movement: Origins, Issues, and Strategies (Chicago: Zed
Books, 2004), p. 40.
9
Antrobus, Global Women’s Movement; Sen, Development, Crises.
10
Vasuki Nesiah, “Toward a Feminist Internationality: A Critique of US Feminist Legal
Scholarship” (2003) 16 Harvard Women’s Law Journal 189; Karen Engle, “International
Human Rights and Feminisms: When Discourses Keep Meeting,” in Doris Buss (ed.),
International Law: Modern Feminist Approaches (London: Hart Publishing, 2005), pp. 47–66.
feminism cannot be based on a rigid concept of universality that negates the

wide variation in women’s experience.”11 Feminists of the GS also noted
that the early organizing of Western feminists did not take into account the
“shocks of the world economy” generated by the rise of neoliberalism and
the negative impact of structural adjustment programs on women’s well
being.12 For GS feminists, gender was simply one category in a broader
analysis of inequalities perpetuated by the legacy of colonialism and the
international development agenda. Unlike the largely identity-based
struggles of second-wave feminism in the GN, feminists situated in the
context of NAM also framed their struggles against colonialism, capitalism,
and imperialism.
Third World feminists and First World feminists were not completely at
odds. Third World feminist positions on women were also often premised
on a sex-subordination model.13 This frequently led to accusations of
Western influence as well as suggestions that the women’s movement was
simply a distraction from larger economic and social battles. This tension is
exemplified in a 1988 in response to a Pakistani left intellectual who
criticized the women’s movement as Western and bourgeois. Kumari
Jayawardena argued:
What are bourgeois women’s rights and are they irrelevant for the masses of
women in Pakistan? Does he mean the rights of liberty, equality and democ-
racy, which presumably, men in Pakistan, whether westernized or not, have
been struggling for over many decades? These rights are not Western or
Eastern; they are not confined to the bourgeoisie, but are applicable to all
classes, and certainly cannot be restricted to males only.14
As ideas on women’s liberation, self-determination, and equality emerged

both from the local and the global, to become a global movement, with a
common language and a universal vision of ending subordination, that cap-
tured the shared imagination of many feminists.
population control and reproductive health: a victory

The many encounters between feminists from the GS and GN were import-
ant for both groups. There was a clear and open cross-fertilization of
11 12
Sen, Development, Crises. Antrobus, Global Women’s Movement.
13
Engle, “International Human Rights.”
14
Kumari Jayawardena, “‘So Comrade, What Happened to the Democratic Struggle?’: Thoughts
on Feminism and the Left in South Asia” 23 Economic and Political Weekly 41 (Oct. 8, 1988).
454 Aziza Ahmed
information about strategies, techniques, and methods for change.15

Frequently, feminists from the GS received financial and technical support
from feminists from the GN for organizing and building knowledge by and
about women.
One of the high points in the collaboration between feminists from the GS
and GN was the transformation of the emphasis on concerns about demog-
raphy from an ideology of population control to the promotion of women’s
reproductive health. The UN system began to “adopt policies aimed at
controlling fertility” in 1962.16 In 1974, the UN convened the Bucharest
Conference, which was intended to be the culmination of “a long series of
debates, conferences, and resolutions designed to increase the role of the UN
and its member governments in efforts to limit population growth.”17 As
described by Jason Finkle and Barbara Crane, the meeting presented a point
of conflict for population technocrats and members of NAM, who used the
Bucharest Conference to push the Agenda for New International Economic
Order (NIEO). The Draft World Population Plan of Action (WPPA) sought to
curtail population growth through population and social welfare policies that
would limit fertility.18 This position was largely in line with the thinking on
population and economics that often suggested large population growth was
impeding industrialization.19
Countries of the GS pushed back on the Draft WPPA, stressing that socio-
economic development would bring about a more equitable international
economic order. The new slogan of the Bucharest Conference became
“Development is the best contraceptive.”20 Argentina and Algeria, leading a
Third World coalition, pushed to have a greater integration of NIEO object-
ives in the document, including a broader restructuring of the global econ-
omy. Known as the redistributionalist position, this frame of analysis sought to
establish that the challenges of an increasing population were the result of
underdevelopment, for which NIEO was the best solution. At the Confer-
ence, the Western powers, which took an incrementalist position, pushed
15
Sen, Development, Crises. Further, there was stated solidarity between feminists of the GS and
poor women of the GN, and women of color in the GN often had a commonality with Third
World women’s movements as opposed to white women from the GN.
16
Jason Finkle and Barbara Crane, “The Politics of Bucharest: Population, Development, and
New International Economic Order” (1975) 1 Population and Development Review 1, at 88.
17
Finkle, “Politics of Bucharest.” 18
Ibid.
19
Kent Schwirian, “Population Growth, Economic Development, and Population Control
Programs” (1969) 69 The Ohio Journal of Science 6.
20
Mindy Roseman and Laura Reichenbach, Reproductive Health and Human Rights: The Way
Forward (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009).
instead for a plan that would support strengthening and integrating population
programs into development planning. They sought to avoid a final plan that
would take into account broader questions of “economic, social, and political
issues.” A leader in bi- and multilateral contributions to population activities
from 1965 on, the United States led the incrementalist bloc and took the
opportunity at the conference to repeat its opposition to the Declaration on
the New International Economic Order.21
In the end, the declaration represented neither a redistributional nor an
incrementalist position. Instead, it was a conciliatory document that left states
to determine their own course of action for population policies, while acknow-
ledging the push for a NIEO:
Efforts made by developing countries to speed up economic growth must be
viewed by the entire international community as a global endeavour to
improve the quality of life for all people of the world, supported by a just
utilization of the world’s wealth, resources and technology in the spirit of the
new international economic order. It also demonstrates that countries wish-
ing to affect their population growth must anticipate future demographic
trends and take appropriate decisions and actions in their plans for economic
and social development well in advance.22
National strategies on population control, however, did not bode well for
women and men targeted by governments. Pre- and post-Bucharest, countries
enforced a range of laws and policies to address demographic concerns.
China’s one-child policy and forced sterilizations during India’s emergency
period best exemplify this trend. For feminists, this meant allying with a global
feminist community to challenge national-level laws and policies that were
harmful and coercive for women and girls.
By the 1970s, women’s rights groups in the GS were actively organizing
around women’s human rights. In the years leading up to the First World
Conference on Women (the conference that launched the UN Decade on
Women), a growing patchwork of feminist organizations came together with
the goal of reshaping international and domestic laws pertaining to women.
For example, Isis International, established in 1974, sought to achieve
“women’s human rights and facilitating networking and information sharing
of women’s movements in the global south.”23 WIN NEWS, launched in
21
Finkle, “Politics of Bucharest.”
22
World Population Plan of Action, adopted by the World Population Conference,
Bucharest, 1974.
23
Isis International, ISIS Women, Who We Are, available at www.isiswomen.org/index.php?
option=com_content&view=article&id=1372&Itemid=41. See also The ISIS Collective
456 Aziza Ahmed
1975, served as a conduit for national women’s rights organizing globally, as

Third World women and First World women sought to outline a global
women’s rights agenda for the World Conference on Women in Mexico City
in 1975.24 Perhaps most relevant to reproductive health, the Our Bodies
Ourselves Collective, founded in 1969, went global. The Collective sent
copies of its now-famous guide on women’s bodies and health to activists
and health practitioners globally and received many requests for additional
copies.25 As described by Caribbean activist and scholar Peggy Antrobus,
transnational organizing by feminist leaders in the GN and GS profoundly
impacted and shaped the global women’s movement.26
Under pressure from the United Nations Fund for Population Activities and
the UN Population Division, governments reconvened in 1984 to revisit the 1974
plan. By this time the geopolitical landscape had shifted with the rise of neoli-
beralism and U.S. social conservativism.27 The U.S. government position at the
population conference reflected the conservative values that would shape the
U.S. position on population and demography for years to come. Most controver-
sially, the United States announced a new policy known as the Global Gag Rule
or the Mexico City Policy, which went beyond the existing restrictions on U.S.
funding for abortion. With the Global Gag Rule, an organization receiving
U.S. bi-lateral aid could not utilize non-U.S. funds to perform abortion as a
method of family planning.28 Given that the U.S. government was the largest
donor on family planning, the gag rule had an immediate impact on the provi-
sion of abortion “and family planning” services globally.
The U.S. government position was the outcome of active political mobiliza-
tion of the right-to-life movement to ensure that the delegation sent to Mexico
City was anti-abortion. At the behest of the conservative Reagan administra-
tion, the delegation was not only catering specifically to the pro-life lobby
groups in the United States but also trying to demonstrate its responsiveness to
the conservative American agenda. The United States was not alone in its
Annual Report 11 (1982) “ISIS International Feminist Network: ‘The IFN’s purpose is to
mobilize support and solidarity among women on an international scale.’” Radcliffe
Schlesinger Archives MC 503 Box 23.
24
Antrobus, Global Women’s Movement.
25
Boston Women’s Health Book Collective, Radcliffe Schlesinger Archives MC 503 Box 73.
26
27
David Kennedy, “The ‘Rule of Law,’ Development Choices, and Development Common
Sense,” in Alvaros Santos and David Truebeck, eds., The New Law and Economic
Development: A Critical Appraisal (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006).
28
Luisa Blanchfield, Congressional Research Service, Abortion and Family Planning-Related
Provisions in U.S. Foreign Assistance Law and Policy (2015), available at www.fas.org/sgp/crs/
row/R41360.pdf.
shifting response to a growing pro-life national constituency. In Canada, Great

Britain, Japan, New Zealand, and Sweden, numerous Vatican-supported
national organizations rallied their governments to advocate for more conser-
vative population policies in international fora.
While the Conference resulted in the Global Gag Rule, the momentum
and organizing efforts of the UN Decade on Women paid off and continued
to build. Between 1984 and 1994 – galvanized by the influence of conservative
forces in the United States, the Holy See, and religious countries – women’s
rights activists mobilized around one of the most cited victories of the global
reproductive rights movement: the International Conference on Population
and Development (ICPD) in Cairo, now known as the Cairo Conference.29
The primary agenda for women’s rights organizations was to ensure that
women’s empowerment and education were the central mechanisms through
which population programs would be channeled, transforming them into
reproductive health and rights interventions. The feminist project challenged
population advocates and experts who wanted to retain a focus on population
programs at the expense of women’s rights.30 At the Conference, the Inter-
national Women’s Health Coalition and the Women’s Environment and
Development Organization (WEDO) led a 500-member Women’s Caucus.
Advocates attended the NGO forum occurring in parallel with the Cairo
Conference and advocated for the inclusion of women’s empowerment with
government delegations. Because of the influence of women’s rights organiza-
tions, the women’s rights activists also appeared on official country delega-
tions, and prime ministers from Norway and Pakistan spoke of women’s
empowerment as central to addressing the population crisis.31 In a nod toward
women’s rights and the importance of self-determination, Prime Minister of
Pakistan Benazir Bhutto stated:
We stand on the cross roads of history. The choices that we make today will
affect the future of mankind. Out of the debris of the second world war arose
the impulse to reconstruct the world. Large communities of people exercised
their right of self-determination by establishing nation states of their own.
The challenge of economic development led, in several instances, to
29
Roseman, Reproductive Health.
30
Shara Neidell, “Women’s Empowerment as a Public Problem: A Case Study of the
1994 International Conference on Population and Development” (1998) 17 Population
Research and Policy Review 247, at 249. Boston Women’s Health Book Collective also played a
key role in mobilizing decentralized groups on the issue of women’s health and reproductive
rights. Boston Women’s Health Book Collective, Radcliffe Schlesinger Archives MC 503
Box 73.
31
Neidell, “Women’s Empowerment.”
458 Aziza Ahmed
group-formation where states subordinated their individual destiny to

collective initiatives . . .
The problem of population stabilization faced by us today cannot be
divorced from our yesterdays. Ironically enough, population has risen fastest
in areas which were weakened most by the unfortunate experience of colonial
domination. The third world communities have scarce resources spread thinly
over a vast stretch of pressing human needs. We are unable to tackle questions
of population growth on a scale commensurate with the demographic chal-
lenge. Since demographic pressures, together with migration from disadvan-
taged areas to affluent states, are urgent problems, transcending national
frontiers, it is imperative that in the field of population control, global strat-
egies and national plans work in unison. Perhaps that is a dream. But we all
have a right to dream . . .
Empowerment of women is one part of this battle. Today women pilots fly
planes in Pakistan, women serve as judges in the superior judiciary, women
work in police stations, women work in our civil service, our foreign service
and our media. Our working women uphold the Islamic principle that all
individuals are equal in the eyes of God. By empowering our women, we
work for our goal of population stabilization and, with it, promotion of
human dignity. But the march of mankind to higher heights is a universal
and collective concern.32
The activism of Third World women, bolstered by partnerships with progres-

sive women’s rights activists of the GN, challenged national population
policies and supported the push away from population control and toward a
reproductive health frame. As described by Antrobus,
Between 1991 and 1994 DAWN and others in the international women’s
health movement worked to bridge the ideological gap between these differ-
ent groups of women. It was not an easy struggle, and demanded the utmost
of skills in research, analysis, advocacy and, most of all, leadership. At the
beginning of 1994 DAWN worked with the US-based International Women’s
Health Coalition (IWHC) to organize an international strategy meeting (in
Rio) that prepared women to participate in the difficult process of producing
a document for ICPD [International Conference on Population and Devel-
opment] that would reflect women’s concerns. Participants from this meeting
then worked within the processes leading up to the conference to change the
draft document accordingly, and to engage in the even more difficult task of
building political will among governments. This was especially difficult for
32
United Nations Population Information Network, “Report of the International Conference on
Population and Development” (1994), available at, www.un.org/popin/icpd/conference/offeng/
addproga.html (emphasis added).
women from developing countries, since some of the most conservative

governments were members of G-77. In addition to all this, as we had feared,
the Vatican built a coalition with Islamic fundamentalists to discredit and
undermine the conference itself. In the end it was only by persuading
supportive G-77 members to abandon the consensus rule, thus freeing them
to negotiate with some strength, that a Programme of Action that reflected
women’s concerns was finally adopted.33
In the end, feminists were victorious. Unlike at the Bucharest Conference and
Mexico City Conference, the third conference on population and develop-
ment emerged with a Platform for Action with an explicit women’s rights
message:
The empowerment of women and improvement of their status are important
ends in themselves and are essential for the achievement of sustainable
development. The objectives are: to achieve equality and equity between
men and women and enable women to realize their full potential; to involve
women fully in policy and decision-making processes and in all aspects of
economic, political and cultural life as active decision-makers, participants
and beneficiaries; and to ensure that all women, as well as men, receive the
education required to meet their basic human needs and to exercise their
human rights. Recommended actions include, among others, establishing
mechanisms for women’s equal participation and equitable representation at
all levels of the political process and public life; promoting women’s educa-
tion, skill development and employment; and eliminating all practices that
discriminate against women, including those in the workplace and those
affecting access to credit, control over property and social security. Countries
should take full measures to eliminate all forms of exploitation, abuse,
harassment and violence against women, adolescents and girls. In addition,
development interventions should take better account of the multiple
demands on women’s time, with greater investments made in measures to
lessen the burden of domestic responsibilities, and with attention to laws,
programmes and policies which will enable employees of both sexes to
harmonize their family and work responsibilities.34
The 1994 conference was a high point in women’s rights global activism on
reproductive health and is frequently celebrated as such.35
33
34
International Conference on Population and Development Program of Action, Cairo, Egypt,
Sept. 5–13, 1994, Programme of Action, Ch. IV, UN Doc. A/CONF.171/13/Rev.1.
35
Roseman, Reproductive Health.
460 Aziza Ahmed
new solidarities and new tensions

In the years following ICPD, the broader structural debates fell off the agenda,
and activism narrowed to the immediate issues of sexuality and reproduction.
As described by Francoise Girard,
The activism on combined fronts – gender justice and economic justice –
that lay at the heart of the ICPD Programme of Action and the Beijing
Platform for Action seemed something of a distant memory. While structural
adjustment programs, unsustainable consumption, and neoliberal polices
had been narrowed to the ever challenging questions of sexuality and
reproduction.36
The narrowing of the women’s rights agenda to single-issue identity issues

over broader structural solutions lay at the heart of historical and ongoing
tensions between feminists of the GS and GN.37 A key site of this
disagreement, particularly since 9/11, is the ascendance of violence against
women as a core issue for feminist activists. In and of itself, the fight
against violence against women has broad-based support from feminists
from the GN and GS. The narrowing of the agenda from the larger social
and economic structures to a single issue, however, created schisms in
feminist engagement. This is particularly the case given that the interven-
tions proposed to address violence against women often took the shape of
military or criminal justice interventions. The disagreements between
feminists on how to address issues of women’s rights, including violence
against women, do not neatly align with the geographical divide. Instead,
advocates in the GN and GS who seek an increased use of police and
carceral intervention often work together,38 while feminist activists and
advocates who are critical of carceral and military interventions form
alliances.39
Violence against women became more central to the development
agenda with the rise of gender in development. Initially ignored in Western
36
Francoise Girard, Reproductive Health and Human Rights: The Way Forward, in Mindy
Roseman and Laura Reichenbach, eds. (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011).
37
Rosalind Petchesky, “Human Rights, Reproductive Health, and Economic Justice: Why They
are Indivisible” (2000) Reproductive Health Matters 12.
38
Aziza Ahmed and Meena Seshu, “We have the right not to be ‘rescued’. . .”: When Anti-
Trafficking Programs Undermine the Health and Well-Being of Sex Workers” (2012) 1 Anti-
Trafficking Review 149.
39
Chandra Mohanty, “US Empire and the Project of Women’s Studies: Stories of Citizenship,
Complicity and Dissent” (2006) 13 Gender Place and Culture 7, at 7–20; Jasbir Puar, “Queer
Times, Queer Assemblages” (2005) 23 Social Text = 121.
economic development prescriptions, women’s rights became increasingly

integral to new development models as disenchantment with the neolib-
eral40 underpinnings of the Washington Consensus development model
grew. By the mid-1990s, the ongoing failure of the Washington Consensus
to bring economic growth and stability brought renewed attention to what
Kerry Rittich calls “second-generation” reforms.41 These reforms shifted
focus toward the “social, structural, and human dimensions” of develop-
ment (including gender, health, and education) and away from a narrow
economic approach.42 Although largely understood to be a feminist victory,
the move toward second-generation reforms brought feminist experts into
the fold through gender mainstreaming, which has been criticized for
“sidestreaming” gender rather than integrating it fully into development
programs.43 Further, including second-generation concerns did not pose a
fundamental challenge to core neoliberal prescriptions. Instead, social and
structural concerns were embedded in the larger neoliberal development
paradigm.
In 2001, the role of women’s rights and feminism in the space of
development and international law was further complicated by 9/11 and
the U.S. government’s “response to the attack on the World Trade Center.”
There was already a rise in a crime-and-punishment model to address
violence against women, a strategy with the slogan “prevent, prosecute,
and protect.” On top of the carceral model sat the Bush administration’s
War on Terror, which justified military intervention as part of a broader
effort to end violence against women. In a speech on November 17, 2001,
First Lady Laura Bush stated:
I’m delivering this week’s radio address to kick off a world-wide effort to
focus on the brutality against women and children by the al-Qaida terrorist
network and the regime it supports in Afghanistan, the Taliban. That
regime is now in retreat across much of the country, and the people of
Afghanistan – especially women – are rejoicing. Afghan women know,
40
As defined by David Harvey, neoliberalism “proposes that human well-being can best be
advanced by liberating individual entrepreneurial freedoms and skills within an institutional
framework characterized by strong private property rights, free markets, and free trade.” David
Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), p. 2.
41
Kerry Rittich, “The Future of Law and Development: Second-Generation Reforms and the
Incorporation of the Social,” in David Trubeck and Alvaro Santos, eds., The New Law and
Economic Development: A Critical Appraisal (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006).
42
Ibid.
43
Hilary Charlesworth, “Not Waving but Drowning” (2005) 18 Harvard Human Rights Journal 1.
462 Aziza Ahmed
through hard experience, what the rest of the world is discovering: The
brutal oppression of women is a central goal of the terrorists. Long before
the current war began, the Taliban and its terrorist allies were making the
lives of children and women in Afghanistan miserable. Seventy percent of
the Afghan people are malnourished. One in every four children won’t live
past the age of five because health care is not available. Women have been
denied access to doctors when they’re sick. Life under the Taliban is so
hard and repressive, even small displays of joy are outlawed – children
aren’t allowed to fly kites; their mothers face beatings for laughing out
loud. Women cannot work outside the home, or even leave their homes by
themselves.
. . . Because of our recent military gains in much of Afghanistan, women
are no longer imprisoned in their homes. They can listen to music and teach
their daughters without fear of punishment. Yet the terrorists who helped rule
that country now plot and plan in many countries. And they must be stopped.
The fight against terrorism is also a fight for the rights and dignity of
women.44
The reaction by feminists was mixed, and the tension between carceral
approaches and structural approaches sharpened. Some feminists, including
the Feminist Majority Foundation, celebrated the focused effort of the U.S.
government to address women’s rights.45 The symbiosis of some feminist ideas
with the discourse of the War on Terror tracked the link between the rise
of the security state, the rise of the carceral state, and neoliberalism.46 Anti-
trafficking programs, anti–domestic violence programs, and broader violence-
against-women initiatives relied on increased security or policing apparatus
over structural solutions to address inequality. As Antrobus articulated
regarding the invasion of Iraq,
The war in Iraq has highlighted the extreme danger posed when processes of
power consolidation are embodied in a single ideology-driven superpower
that evokes in response an equally virulent and violent form of religious
fundamentalism. The resulting conjuncture of relentless neo-liberalism,
virulent religious and ideological fundamentalism, aggressive militarism
and resurgent racism poses particular dangers for women and for people of
colour worldwide, and calls for a clearer integration, in the work of the
44
Radio Address by Mrs. Bush, The White House, available at http://georgewbush-whitehouse
.archives.gov/news/releases/2001/11/20011117.html.
45
Ann Russo, “The Feminist Majority Foundation’s Campaign to Stop Gender Apartheid: The
Intersection of Feminism and Imperialism in the US” (2006) 8 International Feminist Journal
of Politics 557.
46
Mohanty, “US Empire.”
emerging social movement for global justice, of an analysis of the sexism and
racism underlying these processes and forces.47
Scholars and activists decried the U.S. government’s appropriation of women’s

rights, criticizing the use of force and the pretense of women’s rights and
human rights as a means to wage war in furtherance of an American imperial
project.48 Feminists critical of the pro-security, pro-carceral impulse continue
to take issue with feminists who have aligned themselves with military and
police. This critical feminist position reflects an alignment with the NAM,
which “rejected the use, or the threat of the use of armed forces against any
NAM country”49 waged today under the pretext of the War on Terror and
women’s rights.
conclusion
The story of the global women’s movement post-Bandung is one of shifting
solidarities. At times, as in the response to coercive population polices, global
feminist mobilization resulted in transformations in the way states discussed
and operationalized policies impacting women’s health. These alliances
weakened, however, where the single-issue focus of women’s rights groups,
especially those from the GN, mobilized the criminal law and security-based
interventions and did not take on the broader structural conditions that
produce women’s inequality. For feminists this raises a series of questions that
continue to animate contestation and debate: How will the global feminist
movement continue take on the broader questions of structural inequity? Or
will activism reliant on increased securitization become the mode of effectu-
ating women’s equality? And, importantly for the feminist movement, are
some feminisms irreconcilable?
As the redistributive project fades into the background of the global feminist
agenda and human rights and women’s rights become tools deployed by
contemporary world leaders to further war and inequality, the burden on
feminists to resurrect a movement that maintains a critical posture remains
great. For feminist activists emerging from the Bandung tradition, the struggle
47
48
Antony Anghie, Imperialism, Sovereignty and the Making of International Law (New York:
Cambridge University Press, 2005), p. 306; Mohanty, “US Empire.”
49
NAM XIII/Sumit/KL Declaration 25 February 2003 Kuala Lumpur Declaration on
Continuing the Revitalization of the Non-Aligned Movement, available at, www.nam.gov.za/
media/030227b.htm.
464 Aziza Ahmed
for gender equality goes beyond seeing the fight for women’s rights as an
epiphenomenon of class struggle, sovereignty, or a single-issue campaign.
Instead, women’s equality will only be realized with meaningful social and
economic transformation central to which is a reworking of the gendered
ideologies that sustain inequity.
28
Reflections on Rhetoric and Rage

Bandung and Environmental Injustice
karin mickelson and usha natarajan
introduction
When international lawyers think about the Bandung Conference, we do not
usually think about the environment. Our discipline does not make self-evident
the connections between the political and economic stances for which Ban-
dung is famed and our relationship with the natural environment. Indeed,
international law has made it difficult to talk about the link between politics,
economics, and the environment in a productive way.1 In this conversation, we
endeavor to make these connections in a manner that is useful for understand-
ing the contemporary environmental predicament of the Third World.
Perhaps the best place to begin is the political, economic, and legal
significance of the Conference. It was a forum for Third World leaders to
symbolically commit to working together to overthrow inherited political and
economic oppression from centuries of colonial rule and to declare this intent
to the Great Powers.2 Politically, Bandung led to the Non-Aligned Movement.
Both sides of the Cold War were endeavoring to take advantage of the
antiolonial struggle. Of the states that came together,3 some were in alliances
1
On this point, see the International Legal Theory Symposium on “Locating Nature: Making
and Unmaking International Law” (2014) 27 Leiden Journal of International Law.
2
Precursors include the Congresses for the Advancement of the Oppressed Peoples in Paris in
1920 and London in 1923. The League against Imperialism organized the Congress of the
Oppressed Peoples in Moscow in 1924 and Brussels in 1927, and Sukarno and Nehru attended.
Nehru brought together leaders at the Asian Relations Conference from March 23 to April 2,
1947, in New Delhi.
3
Afghanistan, Burma (Myanmar), Cambodia, Ceylon (Sri Lanka) 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, Thailand,
Turkey, Democratic Republic of Vietnam, Republic of Vietnam, and Yemen. Neither Ghana
nor Sudan was independent at the time.
465
466 Karin Mickelson and Usha Natarajan
with Western powers,4 some sided with the Soviet Union,5 and some tried to
preserve neutrality.6 The meeting was an opportunity to highlight mutual
interests across these groups and form the foundation for nonalignment.
Bandung’s central political demands were ending colonialism (including, at
times, Soviet colonialism), with particular demands for independence of
Algeria, Morocco, and Tunisia, and UN membership for newly independent
states. The primary economic aim was to come together to create a common
development policy. It marked the beginning of concerted and organized
Third World demands with regard to international law, as well as the strategic
use of international institutions, eventually leading to successful norm cre-
ation in various fields of politics and development. This chapter examines the
environmental legacies of these political, economic, and legal moves.
Central to our discussion is the understanding of development as expressed
in the Final Communiqué. Development is described in terms of economic
cooperation, importance of foreign investment, stabilizing commodity trade,
enlarging the scope of multilateral trade, diversifying exports, promoting
nuclear energy for peaceful purposes, and coordination and exchange of
expertise on all of the above.7 In short, development was understood as fuller
integration of the Third World into the world economy. It was essentially an
economic matter of production and accumulation based on private invest-
ment and external assistance.
In the Cold War context, such an understanding of development suited
both American and Soviet camps. If we leave aside the role of foreign capital,
their development models bore considerable resemblance to one another.
“Development of the productive forces” was the common objective of capit-
alism and socialism, even if the benefits were not distributed in the same way.
By the time of Bandung, debates about alternative understandings of develop-
ment had died down, and most Third World states had uncritically accepted
the Western industrial development model in either its capitalist or socialist
forms (with some exceptions). Alongside the culturally hegemonic conse-
quences of accepting Western meanings of what it means to be developed,
4
For example, the South-East Asia Treaty Organization (SEATO, founded in 1954) comprised
Great Britain, United States, France, Australia, New Zealand, Thailand, and Pakistan, and
guaranteed Laos, Cambodia, and South Vietnam. The Baghdad Pact (1955) consisted of Great
Britain, Turkey (NATO member since 1952), Iran, Iraq (withdrew in 1959), and Pakistan.
5
For example, Afghanistan, Burma, Peoples’ Republic of China, North Vietnam,
and Yemen.
6
For example, Egypt, India, Indonesia, and Saudi Arabia.
7
See George McTurnan Kahin, “Final Communiqué,” The Asian-African Conference:
Bandung, Indonesia, April 1955 (1956), pp. 76–88.
Reflections on Rhetoric and Rage 467
there were ecological consequences to treating mass industrialization and

eventual transition to a postindustrial lifestyle as an inevitability and necessity
for collective well-being. Through its call for development cooperation, Ban-
dung hastened the advent of new international institutions charged with
promoting development. These institutions helped universalize and normal-
ize dominant Western understandings of development despite such growth
patterns contributing to major environmental crises such as climate change,
mass species extinction, deforestation, desertification, and pollution of air,
water, and soil.
In their endeavor to overcome political and economic subordination, Third
World states did not demand a new type of sovereignty or economy at the
Conference. Rather, they strategized as to how they could achieve equality
with Western sovereigns and participate more fully in the global economy. In
this chapter, we consider whether, by wholeheartedly embracing sovereignty
and the pursuit of development in the Western sense, the Third World has
(1) lost the ability to imagine sustainable and equitable economic alternatives;
(2) splintered its solidarity through exacerbating economic and environmental
inequality and injustice in the Third World; and (3) how the environmental
challenge is transforming the Third World in fundamental ways, in terms of its
meaning and place, as well as its strategies in responding to the intertwined
conundrums of economic and environmental injustice.
We do this through a dialogue that revisits some of Karin Mickelson’s
central observations in her 1998 article “Rhetoric and Rage: Third World
Voices in International Legal Discourse.” Karin’s research on the Global
South and the environment has been at the vanguard of this field for two
decades and “Rhetoric and Rage” remains one of the most cited works on the
Third World and international law. We found this article particularly apposite
for reflecting together on the legacies of Bandung for the environment as it
traces the evolution of postcolonial solidarity in the aftermath of the influen-
tial Bandung meeting, identifying the emergence of distinctive Third World
approaches to international law in the fields of economics, human rights and
the environment through close analyses of Third World scholarly texts.8
bandung and the third world environment

Usha Natarajan [UN]: Karin, let me begin by asking what the Bandung
Conference represents for you in terms of North-South relations with regard
8
Karin Mickelson, “Rhetoric and Rage: Third World Voices in International Legal Discourse”
(1998) 16(2) Wisconsin International Law Journal, at 353.
to the environment. It doesn’t figure in the mainstream telling of environ-

mental law history because it precedes the creation of the specialized field of
international environmental law (IEL). The IEL story is usually narrated by
way of the big environmental summits, from the Stockholm Conference on
the Human Environment in 1972, to the Rio Conference on Environment
and Development in 1992, and Rio+20 Conference on Sustainable Develop-
ment in 2012, through which the evolution of the field and its concepts are
described and understood. However, as you have pointed out in your work,9
from the Third World point of view the environmental story is much older
than IEL. Access to and control of the colonies’ natural resources was a central
aim of the European project of empire. The resources and labor of its colonies
fueled the industrial development of the West. Imperial control was main-
tained, among other things, through the introduction of a variety of private
and public law understandings of property, enclosures, conservation, scarcity,
and so on, that intersected and hybridized as they collided with local practices
of economy, ecology, and resistance. In this much longer and more compli-
cated history of the environment and international law, what, if anything, does
the Bandung moment represent?
Karin Mickelson [KM]: Let me start by talking about the Conference more
generally. The “Bandung moment” is without question one of the most
important events leading up to the articulation of an explicitly “Third World”
engagement with international law in the 1960s and 1970s. Some have gone so
far as to call the entire period from 1955 to 1975 the “Bandung Era.”10 I may
perhaps reveal my Latin American bias when I say that the lack of Latin
American involvement at Bandung makes this label less than apt,11 but such a
view certainly highlights the importance of Bandung in the story of the
Third World.
However, in reading the Final Communiqué one is struck by how very
different it is from the documents that would follow. Its tone is largely
9
Mickelson, “Rhetoric and Rage,” at 387. See also Karin Mickelson, “South, North,
International Environmental Law, and International Environmental Lawyers” (2000) 11
Yearbook of International Environmental Law 52, at 55–60.
10
See, e.g., Samir Amin, “The Era of Bandung 1955–1975: An Assessment,” available at
www.aapsorg.org/en/vision-of-bandung-after-50-years/543-the-era-of-bandung-1955-1975-an-
assessment.html. See also Mark T. Berger, The Battle for Asia: From Decolonisation to
Globalisation (New York: Routledge, 2004), p. 48.
11
For an interesting discussion of why Latin American states in the 1950s might not have been a
good fit at Bandung, see Roberto Bissio, “Bandung in Latin America: The Hope for Another
World” (April–May 2015) 296–297 Third World Resurgence, at 45–49.
technical and quite dry; even colonialism, despite its characterization as “an
evil which should speedily be brought to an end,” is discussed in terms that are
curiously muted. I suspect this was a deliberate choice; the participants
seemed to be making every effort to avoid the appearance of challenging
mainstream understandings of international law.
I would tie this to the need to contextualize Bandung as part of a wider
narrative of environment and development. I take your point about the ways in
which the conference seemed to embrace a Western-style model of develop-
ment; there is no doubt that the specifically economic content of the Final
Communiqué did even less to challenge the mainstream than the other
portions (the section on economic cooperation is, in fact, completely unin-
spiring). It is worth keeping in mind, however, that at this stage there was still
considerable optimism about the potential for mainstream development
models to meet national needs and aspirations. With the benefit of hindsight
we can see the tragically narrow ways in which development was being both
understood and pursued, but at the time mainstream models of development
were only beginning to be contested in the institutional context of the UN
regional economic commissions. In particular, the understanding of structural
impediments to development and the ways in which those were deeply
imbedded in the international legal, political, and economic systems was yet
to fully emerge.
At Bandung, then, we are not seeing the full-blown disillusionment with
prevailing understandings of international law. The fact that there is none-
theless a direct link from this to the articulation of Third World concerns
in more radical and innovative ways may require attention to the nuanced
ways in which a Third World position was beginning to be chiseled out,
opening crevices through which a different understanding of justice could
be perceived. That understanding did not consist in a distinctive collective
vision so much as in the possibility of articulating concerns collectively, in
a way that could, in the words of President Sukarno in his opening speech,
prove that it was possible “to contribute to the general understanding
of matters of common concern and to develop a true consciousness of
the interdependence of men and nations for their well-being and
survival on earth.”12
12
President Sukarno of the Republic of Indonesia, “Selected Documents of the Bandung
Conference: Texts of Selected Speeches and Final Communiqué of the Asian-African
Conference.”
revisiting third world development alternatives

UN: In retrospect, the ten principles in the Bandung Final Communiqué
scarcely went beyond existing international law.13 While the Final Commu-
niqué calls for cooperation to elude the pitfalls of economic imperialism, it is
but a timid foreshadowing of what was to come in the 1960s and 1970s, when
the Third World attempted to inaugurate a New International Economic
Order (NIEO). The three texts you examine in “Rhetoric and Rage” in my
mind epitomize this heyday of third worldism in the 1970s: Mohammed
Bedjaoui’s Towards a New International Economic Order,14 Keba M’Beye’s
“Le droit au développement comme un droit de l’homme,”15 and R.P. Anand’s
“Development and Environment: The Case of the Developing Countries.”16
Specifically, you examine Third World states’ international law positions with
regard to economics, human rights, and the environment, with each section
concluding with a close examination of one of the respective aforementioned
texts. One is struck by the bold and inventive legal stances taken by these
Third World jurists, their insistence that injustice and unethical conduct be
confronted, their enviable confidence that once confronted it could not be
ignored, their quixotic faith in the rule of law, and the varying degrees of
success their efforts yielded.
While it is undeniable that the Conference, M’Beye’s establishment of a
right to development, Bedjaoui’s NIEO, and Anand’s insistence that environ-
ment and development are inextricable have all shaped the evolution of
international legal doctrine, it is also true that in the intervening years inequal-
ity between and within states has continued to increase and environmental
degradation has exponentially proliferated. We have not dismantled the sys-
temic structures of exploitation identified by Bedjaoui, tamed the excesses and
follies condemned by M’Beye; or sublimated the hubris and greed that Anand
13
Respect for basic human rights (including the right of peoples to self-determination, abolishing
racial discrimination in South Africa, and protecting the rights of the Arab people of Palestine),
sovereignty and territorial integrity, equality of races and nations, noninterference in internal
affairs, the rights of individual and collective self-defense, abstention from aggression, peaceful
settlement of disputes, international cooperation based upon mutual interests, respect for
justice and international obligations, and “abstention from the use of arrangements of
collective defense to serve the particular interests of any of the big powers.” Kahin, “Final
Communiqué,” pp. 76–78.
14
Mohammed Bedjaoui, Towards a New International Economic Order, UNESCO (1979).
15
Keba M’Beye, “Le droit au développement comme un droit de l“homme” (1972) 5 Revue des
droits de l’homme, at 505.
16
R. P. Anand, “Development and Environment: The Case of the Developing Countries” (1980)
24 Indian Journal of International Law, at 1.
warned against. In light of this, would it be worthwhile revisiting the ideas of

those Third World scholars that argued against the development model
embraced at Bandung?
For example, at the Conference on Asian Relations Nehru convened in
1947 in New Delhi, there was a clear denunciation of the Western develop-
ment model labeled “dollar imperialism.”17 Domestically, Nehru’s first devel-
opment plan for India, supported by both capitalists and communists, was
opposed by Gandhi, who called for a new type of economy based on justice
and self-reliance through limiting accumulation, division of labor, and
dependence on foreign trade.18 One cannot assume that these ideas would
have necessarily produced an alternative scenario to the post-Bandung envir-
onmental situation, as our examples of attempted alternative developments do
not inspire confidence. Nyerere unsuccessfully attempted self-reliance
through the notion of Ujamaa and instead Tanzania ended up mired in
foreign debt.19 Indeed, similar ideologies have produced even harsher out-
comes. Galtung traces the idea of self-reliance back to Mao Tse-Tung’s use in
1945 of the expression tzu li ken sheng, literally “rebirth through one’s own
forces,”20 and comparable dogmas were put forward by Enver Hoxha, Didier
Ratsiraka, Kim Il Sung, and Fidel Castro. Despite failures in Tanzania and
elsewhere, the warnings of Gandhi and other Third World liberation leaders
such as Fanon that the Western development model contained within it the
seeds of oppression were prescient of contemporary ecological and economic
injustice. We urgently need alternative understandings of economy. From the
environmental point of view, self-reliance has the advantage of placing the
natural environment under the control of those who depend upon it instead of
mortgaging it to distant owners and abusers. Through reducing the import-
ance of international trade, it promotes sustainable investment in local
resources, instead of capital being driven by short-term productivity differen-
tials and irrational gambles in the international financial and derivative
markets. Through understanding development as freedom from dependency
17
Gilbert Rist, The History of Development: From Western Origins to Global Faith [trans P. Camiller]
(2002) 85, first published as Le développement: Histoire d’une croyance occidentale (1996).
18
Bjorn Hettne and Gordon Tamm, “The Development Strategy of Gandhian Economics”
(1976) 6(I) Journal of the Indian Anthropological Society, at 51–66; Detlef Kantwsky, “Gandhi –
Coming Back from West to East? (1984) 39 IFDA Dossier, at 3–14.
19
Ujamaa is usually translated as familyhood. The term was chosen for its African heritage and its
connotations to the material and spiritual values of mutual involvement in the family: Julius
Nyerère, “Introduction,” Freedom and Socialism (City: Publisher, 1968), p. 2.
20
Johan Galtung, “Self-Reliance: Concepts, Practice and Rationale” in Johan Galtung, Peter
O“Brien and Roy Preiswerk (eds.), Self-Reliance: A Strategy for Development (City: Publisher,
1980) p. 19.
and debt, rather than limitless accumulation, it curtails hyperbolic produc-

tion, consumption, and waste.
KM: In my view, it is crucial to engage with the work of previous Third
World scholars, activists, and, yes, even international bureaucrats, who
attempted to articulate alternative approaches to environment, development,
and the relationship between them. For one thing, these approaches are
valuable in and of themselves. While I am always cognizant of the need to
try to understand the work of previous generations in light of the challenges
facing the international community at the time, I am often struck by how
many of their insights have contemporary relevance. For example, the
“Cocoyoc Declaration” from the 1974 Symposium on Resource Use, Environ-
ment, and Development Strategies should be required reading for anyone
who wants to think critically about development and environment. In fact, the
Declaration dovetails beautifully with what you are saying above, with its
discussion of a need for self-reliance as opposed to autarky, its focus on
meeting basic needs, its insistence on the need to address overconsumption,
and its vision of a “harmonized cooperative world in which each part is a
center, living at the expense of nobody else, in partnership with nature and in
solidarity with future generations.”21
Perhaps almost as important, I think we can learn a great deal from the
history of the struggles to find a space for these alternative visions. It has
been extraordinarily difficult to secure any kind of meaningful hearing for
these views, let alone having them taken into account in formulating law
and policy. Researching some of the lesser-known gatherings that reflected
fundamental debates about environment and development, such as the
Cocoyoc Symposium itself, I have felt like I was engaged in a process of
archaeological excavation, trying to chip away layers of neglect and disre-
gard. Even with well-known events such as the 1972 Stockholm Conference
on the Human Environment, the dominant accounts often flatten and
obscure the Third World engagement with international environmental
law. While it is frustrating to witness how previous Third World contribu-
tions are discounted or ignored altogether, it has the benefit of drawing
attention to the ways in which these patterns continue to repeat themselves
in current debates.
21
The Cocoyoc Declaration adopted by the participants in the UNEP/UNCTAD Symposium on
“Patterns of Resource, Environment, and Development Strategies’ held at Cocoyoc, Mexico,
from 8 to 23 October 1974,” reproduced in “The Cocoyoc Declaration: A call for the Reform of
the International Economic Order” (1975) 31(3) Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, 6, 9.
third world environmentalisms

UN: In your examination of Anand’s text, as well as in many other works since
then, you have analyzed the Third World’s approach to environmental issues.
The Third World viewed the advent of international environmental law in the
1970s with skepticism. Understandably, the Third World point of view has
been that the environmental degradation wreaked globally by Western devel-
opment should be primarily rectified by the West itself. At Bandung, and in
the two decades of third worldism that followed, the Third World’s primary
international law engagement with the environment was not through contest-
ing Western-style environmentalism in the realm of international environ-
mental law, but rather through fierce efforts to reshape public and private
international law’s role in the governance of natural resources.
Postcolonial states were keenly aware that reestablishing control over their
natural resources was going to be central to regaining their political and
economic sovereignty. The Final Communiqué already signaled the import-
ance of natural resource sovereignty for the Third World economy.22 Specif-
ically, it recognized the indispensability of energy-generating resources for
industrialization, singling out the strategic importance of oil and nuclear
energy.23 Energy was not only fundamental to Third World peoples’ basic
household and livelihood needs, fueling their access to health, food, educa-
tion, shelter, and so on; it was also key to processing raw materials in the
Third World itself so that states could diversify trade beyond commodity
exports.
Thus, the doctrine of Permanent Sovereignty over Natural Resources was
central to the Third World’s legal efforts for an NIEO. Many postcolonial
states attempted to nationalize the energy sector and wrest control away from
Western corporations that had inherited lengthy concession contracts under
colonial rule, contracts that continued for many decades into the postcolonial
era. In these controversial nationalization efforts, Afro-Asian Third World
jurists joined a longer tradition of Latin American jurists in attempting to
assert their domestic jurisdiction over such investment disputes rather than
allowing them to be determined via the private international law of investment
22
For the link between natural resources and political sovereignty, see Usha Natarajan, “TWAIL
and the Environment: The State of Nature, the Nature of the State, and the Arab Spring” (2012)
14 Oregon Review of International Law, at 101, which argues that sovereignty is inextricably
linked with demonstrating ever-increasing control over nature, and that such an understanding
of sovereignty is incommensurable with environmental sustainability.
23
Kahin, Final Communiqué, pp. 76–78.
arbitration. Investment disputes continue to be a Third World battleground

today, and are of central importance to anyone interested in environmental
problems. The environment as a natural resource continues to be the founda-
tion of the world economy and, as in the past, it is in the realm of private
international law that the environment is really being governed.
Today, people in the Global South are on the front line of increasingly
dire environmental problems that, for the most part, they did not cause and
over which they have no control. What is the nature of contemporary Third
World engagement with the environment? Are there multiple Third World
environmentalisms? Was this in fact always the case? Were there always
were multiple strategies pursued by Third World states and peoples, with
the story I narrate above being just one thread in a much more complicated
history?
KM: I agree that there are, and always have been, multiple Third World
environmentalisms. And in fact, I think one of the important and overlooked
stories of the Third World engagement with international environmental law
has been a lack of attention to the multiplicity of ways in which that
engagement has played out. I do not just mean the basic challenge about
whether it is possible to make meaningful generalizations about the existence
of the “Third World” and the role it has played in the international environ-
mental arena, although that can certainly be a challenge. I am thinking
more about complex narratives of equity, historical responsibility, and meet-
ing human needs and aspirations, to name just a few of the themes that have
played such a fundamental role in this field, and which the Third World has
often championed.
What this last point highlights, however, is that it is possible to identify some
common themes, and that by drawing connections between them it is possible
to identify a set of Third World approaches to international environmental
law. And in my view, this complicates your argument that the Third World
has not contested Western-style environmentalism. I think it actually has, and
that this challenge really goes back to the beginning of international debates
about how to respond to global environment concerns in the late 1960s and
early 1970s. Think, for example, about the way in which the Founex Meeting
on Environment and Development – one of the key gatherings leading up to
the 1972 Stockholm Conference on the Human Environment – argued that
“the major environmental problems of developing countries . . . are predomin-
antly problems that reflect the poverty and very lack of development of their
societies,” mentioning specific issues such as water quality and nutrition, and
insisting that these types of problems, “no less than those of industrial
pollution . . . clamour for attention in the context of the concern with human
environment.”24 Many Northern commentators were frustrated by this, as they

felt that the Third World was being self-serving by “redefining” poverty and its
effects as environmental concerns. While these interconnections were even-
tually incorporated into the official discourse of sustainable development,
I think the resistance has been difficult to overcome.
In the past I have argued that these different approaches could be seen as
reflecting different visions of environmentalism: One perceives the environ-
mental challenge largely in terms of minimizing human impacts on the
biosphere, while the other perceives it as part of a broader challenge of moving
toward a more equitable and sustainable international order. I would go
further and argue that the Third World contribution to international environ-
mental law has been critical to helping develop a more inclusive vision of
environmental protection and sustainability that encompasses concerns about
social justice and human rights as well as ecological integrity. Sadly, inter-
national environmental law still falls far short of the mark in terms of fully
integrating these concerns and providing an adequate response to the prob-
lems currently facing us.
environmentalism as a strategy of third

world resistance
UN: In “Rhetoric and Rage,” you observed that the Third World saw the
environment as a bargaining chip in the hands of the Global South. Environ-
mental problems are no respecters of sovereign boundaries and may be felt
everywhere regardless of cause or origin. Just as the South has not been able to
insulate itself from the environmental problems caused by the North, the
North also cannot insulate itself from the environmental consequences of the
rise of the big emerging economies in Brazil, China, India, Indonesia, South
Africa, and so on. But perhaps we were mistaken in assuming that this was an
asset in environmental negotiations. Compared with Bandung and the third
worldism of the 1960s and 1970s, the Third World today increasingly under-
stands itself not as a place but as a transnational underclass, as famously
described by Chimni.25 In this sense, it seems to me that the privileged in
24
Founex Report on Development and Environment, Submitted by a Panel of Experts
Convened by the Secretary-General of the United Nations Conference on the Human
Environment, June 4–12, 1971, Founex, Switzerland. (Founex Report) International
Conciliation, January 1972, No. 586, pp. 7–36, 10.
25
Bhupinder Chimni, “Third World Approaches to International Law: A Manifesto” in Antony
Anghie, Bhupinder Chimni, Karin Mickelson, and Obiora Okafor (eds.), The Third World and
International Order: Law, Politics and Globalization (2003).
the North and South have faith that they can indeed insulate themselves from
the negative consequences of environmental change. We already see
changing ocean temperatures, currents, and acidity levels; rising sea levels;
mass species extinctions; increasing and more severe droughts and famines;
more natural disasters; exacerbation of conflict; spread of disease; mass migra-
tion; and other destabilizing phenomena. Despite overwhelming scientific
evidence that the global environment is in the process of a major shift,
stalemates in every area of international environmental law – from climate
change to biodiversity protection, from desertification to deforestation – show
that those with the power to effect change are not sufficiently incentivized to
do so.
Can we say that the environment is still a bargaining chip in the hands of
the Third World and, if so, in what sense? On some level I feel that we both
still think so, as we have both gravitated toward this field as our disciplinary
battleground for Third World interests. Yet, looking back at our inheritance
from Bandung and the inspiring Third World jurists examined in “Rhetoric
and Rage,” the lessons I draw are that ultimately the promises of economic
order and human rights failed the peoples of the Third World. They have
proven Trojan horses for the privileged of the North and South to pillage the
natural resources and exploit the labor of the masses through severely limiting
peoples’ political choices by means of economic, political, and, in extreme
cases, military intervention.
When it comes to the environment, Anand’s position that environment and
development always go hand in hand has been staunchly defended by Third
World states and activists, and enshrined in the international law principles of
sustainable development and common but differentiated responsibilities
(CBDR) for the global environment. But instead of compelling the West to
alter its development patterns, the result has instead been a stalemate in
international environmental cooperation. For instance, in climate change
negotiations, the trends are ominous indeed. Climate change is negotiated
under the United Nations Framework Convention for Climate Change
(UNFCCC). Despite the existence of a binding legal regime for greenhouse
gas emission reductions, with clear commitments to CBDR under the
UNFCCC’s Kyoto Protocol, the international community is now moving
toward nonbinding emission reductions instead.
Interestingly, states have not called for abandoning the UNFCCC. They
have also not said what they will do about their existing unfulfilled legal
commitments under the Kyoto Protocol and the requisite penalties for non-
performance outlined therein. Rather, the North and South are keen to
preserve the pretense of multilateralism, and clothe their nonbinding emis-

sions reductions with the illusion that it is indeed international law under-
taken under the auspices of the UNFCCC. In recent years, Western states and
environmental activists have increasingly called for emerging economies such
as China and India to transcend the South-North dichotomy and abandon
CBDR. The United States in particular has pointed to impending environ-
mental doom and argued that the urgency of the situation makes fairness and
justice a luxury the Third World can ill afford. One can easily see an
international environmental law of this sort going in the same direction as
human rights. Stripped of all emancipatory potential, it will further restrict
Third World peoples’ control over the fundamentals of their life such as clean
air, water, and food.
Given these trends in international environmental law, can the environ-
mental question provide a means of destabilizing legal structures of oppres-
sion? In “Rhetoric and Rage” you observed that “[a]ll too frequently, the view
taken is that international environmental law has had to respond to Third
World concerns, but that those concerns have not been embraced as in part
defining the discipline itself.” Do you see Third World peoples and states
influencing the discipline differently today compared with Anand and with
when you wrote “Rhetoric and Rage”?
KM: I share your sense of frustration with the current state of play in
international environmental law, and the climate change negotiations in
particular. What is perhaps most frustrating is that we have actually gone
backward from earlier consensus on both equitable considerations and envir-
onmental imperatives. After all, concerns about equity have been part of the
discourse of climate change since the beginnings of international discussion of
the topic. Think back to the 1988 Toronto Conference on the Changing
Atmosphere, one of the first and most influential international gatherings,
which highlighted this in the clearest possible terms: “Climate change is being
induced by the prosperous, but its effects are suffered most acutely by the
poor.”26 And then the Conference went on to link this insight to the Global
South-North divide, stating that “[t]he countries of the industrially developed
world are the main source of greenhouse gases and therefore bear the main
responsibility to the world community for ensuring that measures are imple-
mented to address the issues posed by climate change.”27 That was almost
26
“The Changing Atmosphere: Implications for Global Security,” Conference Statement,
available at www.cmos.ca/ChangingAtmosphere1988e.pdf.
27
Ibid.
thirty years ago, and while of course the situation has changed in some ways,
I would have liked to think that by now we would have an international
response to the problem that simply took this for granted and moved on.
Instead, the debates surrounding the current climate change negotiations
reveal a widespread misunderstanding of Third World concerns, and an
alarming tendency to characterize those concerns as narrow and self-serving.
In my view, this makes a serious engagement with Third World approaches,
and an exploration of their possibilities and limitations, more crucial than
ever. To begin, I think we need to challenge the view that the Third World
“now” lacks cohesiveness. The truth is that the Third World has never
constituted or acted like a monolithic bloc. It has nonetheless attempted to
present a generally united front in negotiating with the North, and there are
good practical reasons for this: A collective challenge from the states that
represent the majority of the world’s population is difficult to ignore. And this
is not simply a matter of convenience; there are considerable commonalities
at the intergovernmental level, and in many instances this common ground
extends beyond the governmental sector to encompass civil society.
It is even more important to take issue with those who see nothing beyond
posturing and hypocrisy. Without denying that there are elements of this – just
as similar inconsistencies can be discerned in the stance of “First World”
states – I would argue that those who reduce all Third World demands to this
are guilty of willful (and selective) blindness. It is also essential to resist the
view that paying attention to the ongoing divide between the Global South
and Global North is inconsistent with – or at least in tension with – a
commitment to justice that extends beyond the interstate context. In fact,
one of the great advantages of taking Third World concerns seriously is that
their underlying logic requires an engagement with justice at all levels: global,
national, and subnational. You can certainly see indications of that in the
work of the classic Third World scholars, even if their immediate focus was on
making justice claims at the international level.
Finally, while core principles like CBDR remain critically important,
I would also argue that in order to truly “destabilize legal structures of
oppression” we desperately need voices from the Third World to articulate
new visions of global environmental responsibility. Think of how Pope Fran-
cis – the first pope from the Global South – was able to do this in his recent
encyclical Laudato Si. While I am not a Catholic, I was inspired not only by
his appeal for a “new and universal solidarity” and the connections he draws
between human suffering and environmental degradation but also by his
willingness to unflinchingly confront current economic structures and those
who benefit from them. This is reminiscent of classic Third World critiques of
the international system, and it is thrilling to see them articulated by such an

influential spokesperson. Similarly, I find it fascinating how Bolivia has been
willing to consistently – some might say infuriatingly – articulate alternative
understandings on climate justice, the rights of Pachamama (Mother Earth),
and the need to take seriously the traditional wisdom of indigenous peoples.
I realize that there has been criticism of the extent to which the Morales
government has acted in a manner consistent with these ideals, but the fact
remains that Bolivia has been one of the very few states that has been willing to
take stands that are perceived as extreme or radical. And to my mind, it is
refreshing and important to have those views expressed in intergovernmental
gatherings rather than just out in civil society.
conclusion
UN: Your own message in “Rhetoric and Rage” is complex, nuanced, exten-
sive, and entirely compelling, and I have not done it full justice here, but I will
conclude by turning to your title, which in my mind has resonances with
Bandung and with contemporary Third World environmental struggles. What
you observed then holds true today, that outrage in the face of injustice must
be maintained, despite efforts to disarm, quell, shame, and distract. You quote
from Marquez to explain the Third World’s recourse to rhetoric:28
Poets and beggars, musicians and prophets, warriors and scoundrels, all the
creatures of that unbridled reality have had to ask a little of our imagination,
for our crucial problem has been a lack of conventional means to render our
lives believable. This, my friends, is the crux of our solitude . . . The inter-
pretation of our reality through patterns not our own serves only to make us
ever more unknown, ever less free, ever more solitary.
Bandung epitomizes Third World rhetoric and rage. In face of an inter-

national political and economic order where the odds were stacked against
them, Third World states consciously and strategically affected a united and
oppositional stance. When it comes to the Third World environment, the
challenges are equally if not more daunting. At its essence, the environmental
question challenges the ways we have heretofore understood our relationships
with each other and with the world. It demands a reconfiguration of Western
theories of knowledge because mainstream disciplines – from law to
28
“Rhetoric and Rage,” at 418–419, quoting from The Solitude of Latin America, translation of
Nobel Lecture by Marina Castaneda in Gabriel Garcia Marquez and the Powers of Fiction
(Julio Ortega ed. 1988), pp. 87, 89.
economics to politics – take for granted the stability of the underlying natural
order and this is no longer a feasible assumption. How can Third World
peoples articulate their suffering or create alternative understandings of ecol-
ogy and economy, when “the environment” (that is to say, the world we live
in) is itself in its entirety now subject to a form of international regulation that
systemically disempowers them? In such a situation, the turn to rhetoric
remains a strategy of communication, a means of forging solidarity, and a
source of hope in the struggle to imagine and articulate development alterna-
tives. You stated:
This is the challenge posed to those of us who . . . locate ourselves within the
stream of Third World approaches . . . to remember our roots, to choose
whether or not to take a place within what might be said to be a Third World
Tradition. It involves a realization that to question the hegemonic discourse
of international law is to take a place in a long line of those who have, in a
variety of ways and not always successfully, challenged the marginalization of
their nations and peoples.29
For those of us who would be international lawyers, and wish neither to

participate in an oppressive discourse nor to surrender it to our oppressors,
we have no choice but to continue in the traditions of Bandung and those that
followed. After the Cold War ended, Boutros-Ghali stated at the 1996 meeting
of the Non-Aligned Movement, and as quoted in your article: “Now is the
time for a renaissance of non-alignment. Even though the Cold War is no
more, and even though decolonization is nearly complete, our goal of a just,
peaceful and equitable global order is far from being realized.”30 The move
made in Bandung to construct commonalities from among an infinite diver-
sity of interests, understandings, and experiences is essentially the same move
you make in your article when you construct threads between Bedjaoui,
M’Beye, and Anand to assert the existence of Third World Approaches to
International Law (TWAIL), and it is the move we need to make again and
again to destabilize, provincialize, and remake the disciplinary mainstream.
29
Ibid. at 416.
30
“Rhetoric and Rage,” at 358, quoting from The renaissance of Non-Alignment can transform
international relations, Secretary-General tells NAM Commemorative Meeting, UN Press
Release SG/SM/6064.
29
From Statesmen to Technocrats to Financiers

Development Agents in the Third World
priya s. gupta*
Economic co-operation.
The Asian-African Conference recognised the urgency of promoting economic

development in the Asian-African region. There was general desire for economic
co-operation among the participating countries on the basis of mutual interest and respect
for national sovereignty. The proposals with regard to economic co-operation within the
participating countries do not preclude either the desirability or the need for co-operation
with countries outside the region, including the investment of foreign capital...
Bandung Final Communiqué1
introduction
And so, an audacious vision of economic cooperation and political respect was
memorialized in the Final Communiqué of the Bandung Conference in 1955.
The hopes for cooperation, respect for sovereignty, and foreign capital are
worthy of revisiting, especially in light of attempts to assess the Washington
Consensus’ ambiguous legacies and afterlife and the continuing dominance
of foreign investment and related disputes. The opening quotation is a
reminder that the conference participants had envisioned a world of eco-
nomic development and cooperation between Asian and African countries
with a view to their participation in global economic and political forums on
*
Thank you to Bryant Garth, Matt Glasser, Vik Kanwar, Peer Zumbansen, and the editors of
this volume for conversations, comments, and continuing exchanges of ideas in relation to this
project. I am also grateful to the participants of the 2015 Heterodox Traditions: Global Law and
Policy Conference, hosted by the Institute for Global Law and Policy at Harvard Law School,
for their insights and suggestions.
1
Bandung Final Communiqué, available at http://franke.uchicago.edu/Final_Communique_
Bandung_1955.pdf.
481
482 Priya S. Gupta
an equal footing. From today’s perspective, what has become of these

aspirations?
This inquiry necessitates a two-directional orientation. One requires
turning toward the past to recapture the spirit at a particular moment and in
a particular space. The other involves tracing the developments of this spirit,
moment, and place into our current political, economic, and legal systems, all
of which have undergone tremendous changes since then. Both orientations
demonstrate, however, that there are a myriad of ways to count time, measure
development, evaluate progress, and judge economic prosperity. Bandung
captures the seed of an alternative paradigm of development, political, and
economic emancipation and, by consequence, global ordering.2 Bandung
was – and in this reconstruction continues to represent – a counterpoint to
dominant milestones such as the advent of the Bretton Woods system in 1944,
the creation of the International Centre for Settlement of Investment Disputes
(ICSID) in 1966, the structural adjustment policies of the Washington
Consensus of the 1980s and 1990s, and the strengthening of the International
Financial Institutions (IFIs) over the past six decades, including the creation of
the World Trade Organization (WTO) in 1994.
Observing today’s increasing investment and capital flows from and toward
the Global South,3 we can reflect on the fate of the participatory and emanci-
patory hopes as they found expression in Bandung. What is the status and role
of international economic cooperative efforts in today’s capital flows? More
specifically, in what ways is the rise of foreign capital investments in the
Global South an accomplishment of the participation of Global South coun-
tries in the IFIs – primarily the World Bank, IMF, WTO, and UNCTAD?
Who exercises the agency to effectively shape these flows?
Considering the evolution of these questions over the past six decades
reveals plural and diverse engagements with, and resistance against, dominant
Western claims as to what is considered essential for development, and what
countries should do when pursuing the goal of increasing their collective
wealth. We begin our inquiry, then, by understanding Bandung’s legacy in
relation to the ideas, actors, and forces against which the African and Asian
2
Michael Hardt, “Porto Alegre – Today’s Bandung?” in Louise Amoore (ed.), The Global
Resistance Reader (New York: Routledge, 2005), pp. 190–193.
3
In 2014, FDI totaled more than US$1.4 trillion globally, 54 percent of which went to so-called
developing countries, approximately 8 percent to “transition economies” (in Southeast Europe
and the former Soviet Republics), and 39 percent to developed countries. FDI outflows from
developing and transition economies also reached a record level of more than US$553 billion
(which represented 39 percent of global outflows). Compare the latter figure to their 12 percent
share of global flows in the early 2000s. UNCTAD World Investment Report 2014, p. ix.
From Statesmen to Technocrats to Financiers 483
leaders in 1955 sought to resist and to oppose. We seek a clearer picture of the
historical actors with the power and agency to shape and ultimately determine
the language and direction of development policies for the Third World. This
attention to the terminology and the assumptions behind it will allow us to
connect present-day assertions of expertise with those that were dominant sixty
years ago.
This chapter traces three sets of actors who – drawing on different values,
practices, and forms of knowledge – successively advanced and complicated
Bandung’s legacy from 1955 to the present. The interplay between them is best
understood as a series of transformations of development expertise in that
period that reflected in the ascendancy of three types of agents of develop-
ment, each with its own form of expertise: statesmen, technocrats, and finan-
ciers. These transformations – and the foregrounding of particular agents in
particular moments – reflect the emergence of new forms of knowledge, ideas,
and practices regarding development, as embodied in new sites of expertise
and resources. The transition between the first two of these agents, well
documented elsewhere,4 resembles to some degree a kind of “routinization
of charisma,” to borrow Weber’s formulation: a movement from charismatic
statesmen to bureaucratic technocrats. The second transformation – from
technocracy to the dominance of finance and from technocrats to financiers –
is still unfolding and being understood today. A central claim of this chapter is
that this move, however, was not external to the project of the Third World,
but was in large part a consequence of its trajectory. Each transformation
reflects continuations and breaks from the one before it. By looking at the
latest site – that of the financiers – we can see how the expertise that is valued
today both reflects and distinguishes itself from particular attributes of the
expertise previous two actors.
A few observations about the fluidity immersed in this typology are war-
ranted. No one agent is all powerful, as they constitute themselves against
each other, shift in membership, reconstitute themselves and adapt with
changing times, and may hold multiple roles at once – and each trajectory
unfolds in particular local circumstances. They exist simultaneously, although
this chapter aims to draw attention to how one has particular caché at a given
time. They are deeply interconnected and dependent on one another, both for
definition and for resources, and in more materially traceable ways through
4
Yves Dezalay and Bryant G. Garth, Asian Legal Revivals (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 2010); Timothy Mitchell, Rule of Experts: Egypt, Techno-Politics, Modernity (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 2002); Gilbert Rist, The History of Development: From Western
Origins to Global Faith, 4th ed. (London: Zed Books, 2014).
484 Priya S. Gupta
education abroad, colonial powers’ support of local elites,5 and capital flows.
The terms are meant to be illustrative of what each category represents and
exaggerates – the ideal type in each form. Statesmen are purposefully mascu-
line and illustrative of strength and charisma; technocrats are purportedly
apolitical, highly trained, and specialized (in short, not laypersons); and
financiers loosely encompass the wide range of actors involved with foreign
capital today – investment banks, private equity and investment funds, sover-
eign wealth funds, and real estate developers, to name a few.
Despite this fluidity, the rough chronological typology of statesmen,
technocrats, and financiers helps us see what forms of development agency –
what constellations of power and expertise – were in ascendancy at a given
point, and relatedly, what happened to the Bandung-inspired plans and hopes.
Through these shifts across statesmen to technocrats to financiers, we can
observe how particular types of knowledge, the nature of the resources at
hand, and the legitimate practices and methods employed in the enterprise of
development have been used by each successive group and enabled the
emergence of the next one.
The agents explored here make crucial judgments as to which knowledge is
relevant to their projects – the actual knowledge or information, the forms in
which it is presented, and, significantly, the fields that inform it (here,
primarily economics or law).6 The analysis highlights the appeal of (seem-
ingly) scientific forms of rationality: how what appears to be objective and
deductive attracts leaders, polities, and therefore resources, and how a reliance
on apparent objectivity often masks political choices and prioritizations
behind neutral-sounding rhetoric.7 Therefore, this inquiry also illustrates the
power of experts in their institutions to shape ideas and populations in ways
that are not always apparent, and in ways that enable certain actors to rise in
power. That said, this account is not meant to offer a singular grand narrative,
theory of causation, or sigh of inevitability. The appeal to historical transform-
ations is, to paraphrase Edward Said, meant as a strategy of interpretation of
the present. These appeals are animated not only by disagreements about what
happened – “what the past was” – but also of “uncertainty about whether the
5
See Dezalay and Garth, Asian Legal Revivals.
6
Regarding the determination of which forms of (legal) knowledge are relevant as an exercise of
politics and power, see Peer Zumbansen, “Law & Society and the Politics of Relevance: Facts
and Field Boundaries in ‘Transnational Legal Theory in Context’” (2014) 11 No Foundation, at
1–37.
7
Sheila Jasanoff, “The Practices of Objectivity in Regulatory Science,” in C. Camic, N. Gross,
and M. Lamont (eds.), Social Knowledge in the Making (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
2011), pp. 307–337.
past really is past, over and concluded, or whether it continues, albeit in

different forms.”8 The aim is to offer an understanding of how the past
(Bandung and its legacies) cannot be quarantined9 from the present (the
world of financiers) as it continues to inform the rise of these actors.
statesmen
Recollections of Bandung often have a wistful, reverent tone in depicting the
great personalities10 who gathered at the Conference and the great causes that
drew them together. To engage with the Third World as a political project, it
seems natural to begin with the wellsprings of hope and solidarity that drew
leaders across Asia and Africa to Bandung and that continue to draw gener-
ations of scholars, students, and commentators to try to understand the many
meanings of that moment and what followed. The grandness of the visions at
that time is not surprising. Many of the same leaders who brought their
countries from colonialism to freedom were then the ones who tried to unite
in solidarity with other Third World countries. Those who retained a role
from anticolonial struggle through state-building were imbibed, very nearly in
the Weberian sense, with a quality of charisma.11 The leaders of the most
active delegations – Jawaharlal Nehru, Gamal Abdel Nasser, Sukarno – come
to mind. Those outside this circle were also in attendance, such as Zhou
Enlai, the first Premier of China, whom a leading Indian newspaper described
as a “consummate diplomat” with an “all-knowing smile.”12 Striking, too, to
the modern eye is the particular masculinity that appears entwined with this
charisma – strong, attractive, charming leaders who brought their countries to
freedom. In deliberate recognition of that constellation of charisma at the
8 9
Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism (New York: Vintage Books, 1993), pp. 3–4. Ibid.
10
Editorial, “Bandung,” The Economic Weekly: A Journal of Current Economic and Political
Affairs, Vol. 7 No. 17 (Apr. 23, 1955), at 483–484; Editorial, “Bandung and After,” The Economic
Weekly: A Journal of Current Economic and Political Affairs, Vol. 7, No. 18 (Apr. 30, 1955), at
507–508; “Memories of Bandung,” Economic and Political Weekly, Vol. 20, No. 18 (May 4,
1985), at 777; Vijay Prashad, The Darker Nations: A Biography of the Short-Lived Third World
(New Delhi: Left Word Books, 2007).
11
In Weber’s words, “The term ‘charisma’ will be applied to a certain quality of an individual
personality by virtue of which he is considered extraordinary and treated as endowed with
supernatural, superhuman, or at least specifically exceptional powers or qualities.” Max Weber,
Economy and Society: An Outline of Interpretive Sociology (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1922), p. 241.
12
“Memories of Bandung,” at 777. In 1955, the same newspaper described him as having left an
“extremely favourable impression on the participants in the Bandung Conference,” despite
“insinuations [of] ulterior designs.” See “Bandung and After.”
486 Priya S. Gupta
time, referring to them as statesmen rather than statespersons seems more

fitting as an ideal type.
Bandung is typically narrated as a story about political alternatives forged by
leaders of anticolonial struggles ready to get on with the business of equal
sovereignty. At the beginning, and persistent in our imaginations, were these
statesmen, who provided not just a counterbalance to the prevailing political
systems but, at least collectively, aspired toward counter principles. The
struggle to theoretically and institutionally challenge the prevailing and aptly
named modernization theory of development – whereby it was believed that
states ought to linearly progress toward a decidedly European form of mod-
ernity – was born of the same struggle to assert a sovereignty that recognized
and respected the heterogeneity of countries in the international legal order,
and that enabled new ones to emerge.13 In the world inhabited by the
Bandung leaders in 1955, it was as true as it is now that struggles for political
legitimacy at the UN cannot really be separated from the struggles for a more
equitable world economic system.14
A look at the economic mission, as articulated at Bandung, reveals its
entwinement with the political. As articulated in the Final Communiqué,
the Statesmen present at the Conference sought not only to challenge set
(Eurocentric) notions of what it meant to be modern and deserve a seat at the
table, but also to participate in the international system as independent,
sovereign entities. Particularly telling is the perceived importance of the
economic in the goals of the geo-political,15 and what that meant for future
institutions and valued forms of expertise. While the Conference had been
called in the name of political cooperation and voice, as the Final Commu-
niqué articulates in its opening paragraphs, the way forward – a primary way to
gain political legitimacy – was envisioned to be through economic develop-
ment and cooperation. The way to get a seat at the table was to be seen as
economically legitimate. The way to economic legitimacy was through devel-
opment and institutions.
The Final Communiqué proposed a number of goals and institutions for
the African and Asian countries that sought to further ideas of cooperation and
participation. It opened with Economic Development in the first section,
including recognition of the importance of cooperation regarding expertise
13
Partha Chatterjee, Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World (Shibuya, Japan: United
Nations University, 1986); Partha Chatterjee, The Nation and its Fragments (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1993).
14
Sundhya Pahuja, Decolonizing International Law (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2011).
15
Ibid.
and resources – both within the group, and with countries on the outside. In
particular it noted the “valuable contribution” that development assistance has
played so far and it called for the sharing of “technical expertise” in the forms
of “experts, trainees, pilot projects and equipment.”16 The emphasis on devel-
opment as a joint regional endeavor is present in the call for “exchange of
know-how” and in the commitment to “establishment of national, and where
possible, regional training and research institutes for imparting technical
knowledge and skills.” It is also emphasized in the commitment to build
trade-related institutions at the multilateral level. Presciently, or perhaps
purposely, the particular industries noted in the Communiqué are banking,
finance, and oil.17 It is worth noting that as articulated, the intent was not to
separate from the existing multilateral legal and economic systems, or to be
anti-West, but rather to enjoy respect and to participate in it, from a space set
apart and imagined and constructed by the emerging Third World.18
The lure of the Grand Missions of Bandung (emancipation through egali-
tarian participation) and its Statesman begins to lose some of its luster,
however, if we take note of three complications. First, in addition to the vision
of egalitarian economic participation on the international plane, each of these
figures is associated with a top-down developmental modernism, an orienta-
tion19 that would have lasting effects in perpetuating inequality. The legacy of
this inequality continues today, as documented by the rich literature in
development,20 property and urban governance,21 and human rights22 and
16
Final Communiqué.
17
The document also specifically calls for respect for cultural and educational cooperation,
human rights, and the end of racialism (as racism was then called) and colonialism. Finally,
reflective of the Cold War, it seeks to promote world peace, including nuclear disarmament,
and more egalitarian participation at the UN.
18
“True to the age-old tradition of tolerance and universality, the Conference believed that Asian
and African cultural co-operation should be developed in the larger context of world co-
operation.” Final Communiqué.
19
See generally Dipesh Chakrabarty, “The Legacies of Bandung: Decolonization and the
Politics of Culture,” in Christopher J. Lee (ed.), Making a World after Empire: The Bandung
Moment and Its Political Afterlives (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2010), pp. 45–68; Prashad,
The Darker Nations; for a more general treatment, not specific to these leaders, see James C.
Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed
(New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999).
20
Mitchell, Rule of Experts; Arturo Escobar, Encountering Development: The Making and
Unmaking of the Third World, 2nd ed. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2012).
21
Ananya Roy and Aihwa Ong, Worlding Cities: Asian Experiments and the Art of Being Global
(Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2011); Usha Ramanathan, “Demolition Drive,” 40 Economic and
Political Weekly 27 (Jul. 2–8, 2005), at 2908–2912.
22
Boaventura de Sousa Santos and César A. Rodríguez-Garavito (eds.), Law and Globalization
from Below: Towards a Cosmopolitan Legality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005);
488 Priya S. Gupta
social movements23. This literature also displays very different modes of valued
knowledge and expertise – drawing on the experiences of the non-elite in
everyday lives and resistance, and narrating it in ethnographic modes of
scholarship.
This leads to the second complication regarding the legacy of the third
worldist image of statesmen and struggle-through-sovereignty. In many ways
the myriad of Third World projects today are unmoored from the Third World
state.24 The current site – or, more accurately, sites – of third worldism are
diffused across a wide range of actors. Its contours no longer defined by the
statespersons in the halls of new governments and in their diplomatic encoun-
ters, or in the formations of IFIs. Ambitious, new third worldesque sentiments
regarding an end to imperialist politics and economics are found today in the
protests of social movements and in everyday life across the world – in both the
Global South and the Global North.25
Third, is the Global North in the South, as well as the Global South within
the North. Elite classes in the Global South – both then and now – often have
similar or wealth-surpassing lives to those of elite classes in Global North
countries. Elites in the very countries who attended Bandung have often been
accused of replicating the colonial state by hoarding resources and exploiting
laboring classes.
Despite powerful goals articulated at Bandung, this brief inquiry into the
charismatic statesman begins to reveal some of the unevenness of the distribu-
tions of development, and how those distributions get further entrenched.
technocrats
The motivations of Bandung leaders and their successors to institutionalize,
bureaucratize, and technocratize these political goals into economic forums,
experts, and policies reflect developmental thought at the time. While there
were varied ideas on how best to achieve economic growth, that growth itself
should be the goal was central to development thought. The power of this
idea – that development entailed yearly GDP increases – is best contextual-
ized within the larger stage-ist development theory that dominated the middle
Balakrishnan Rajagopal, International Law from Below: Development, Social Movements and
Third World Resistance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003).
23
Ibid.; Escobar, Encountering Development.
24
See Prashad, The Darker Nations; Kanwar, Chapter 8 in this volume.
25
David Harvey, Rebel Cities: From the Right to the City to the Urban Revolution (New York:
Verso, 2012).
of the twentieth century.26 According to the modernization theory – most

closely associated with W.W. Rostow in 196027 – countries developed in linear
stages; under this theory, lesser-developed nations should aim to catch up to
more developed ones through economic growth. Achieving growth, it was
believed, required technology, capital, and appropriate experts and expertise
to guide that process – namely, economists and economics. The rise of
economics to provide purported apolitical rationality that would guide policy
is not entirely surprising, given the ascendency of the ideas of modernity and
rationality as universal approaches to ways of thinking and being – as we can
also see in science and law for example. The appeal of universal rules
regarding growth rested on a comfortable assumption that development
involved knowable replicable scientific economic laws.28 Development then,
was meant to be achieved by applying laws of growth to practice.
The politics of the time also furthered this theory. As Dezalay and Garth
have shown, modernization theory fit well with the foreign policy of the
(newly hegemonic) United States during the Cold War.29 As the theory called
for expertise and training, U.S. strategy could (and did) provide educational
and technical support to many countries in Latin America and Asia in order to
build allies. While this unfolded in different ways and places, the encounters
of economists, local elites, and geopolitical interests worked to reinforce each
other’s power and legitimacy.30 Dezalay and Garth note that the focus was on
building friendly leaders rather than reforming state or state policies. In short,
“support of elites armed with economics knowledge” made sense as Cold War
foreign policy strategy and reinforced the hold of domestic elites over state
policy.
The pervasive power of modernization also led to an entwinement of
economics with an aspirational vision of modernity, manifested through a
social pedagogy project.31 The emphasis on modernization through growth,
driven by industry rather than agriculture, entailed massive shifts of popula-
tions and their ways of life and their rural or urban distribution – changes that
were seen as transformations necessary to catch up, rather than
26
Rist, History of Development, pp. 93–109; Prashad, The Darker Nations, pp. 80–81.
27
W.W. Rostow, The Stages of Economic Growth: A Non-Communist Manifesto (Cambridge:
28
William Easterly, The Elusive Quest for Growth: Economists’ Adventures and Misadventures in
the Tropics (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002).
29
Dezalay and Garth, Asian Legal Revivals, p. 114.
30
For example, in Korea and Indonesia, economists were promoted as “the appropriate leaders of
a military-led modernization” at the expense of lawyers in those countries. Ibid. at 117.
31
Chakrabarty, “The Legacies of Bandung.”
490 Priya S. Gupta
transformations that caused vast inequality to grow and be perpetuated.32

Nearly every aspect of life was subject to change under the new national
commitments to development. Old ways of life and work were meant to give
way to new. The idea of modernization in development as a way of life was a
pedagogy that national leaders used to change the behaviors of their popula-
tions.33 As Dipesh Chakrabarty notes, this “accent on modernization” in
developmental politics made “the engineer one of the eroticized figures of
the postcolonial developmentalist imagination”34 – the engineer who could
build the large nationalistic projects (such as dams and power plants) that were
meant to indicate that a nation was indeed catching up.
The perception that modernity encompassed both economic and social
aspects is evident in the post-war explosion of international forums of negoti-
ation. Here, tensions between the goals of emancipation and participation
came to the foreground. To be able to challenge the economic world order,
one had to be in the room where rules were made. However, in order to
participate and be taken seriously, a state and its representatives had to be seen
as legitimate. That legitimacy required one to ascribe the many contradictions
of modernity, foremost of which was – regardless of whether one fully sub-
scribed to modernization theory or even its nascent challengers – an aspiration
toward growth and ensuing economic power. This dynamic worked to
reinforce the power of (modern) internal elites (and their forms of knowledge,
expertise, and even personality) through control of industrialization and
resources, all with an apparent legitimacy.
If there was a multilateral economic forum meant to embody an alterna-
tive school of thought and power structure, perhaps it was UNCTAD.
Established in 1964, the institutional child in the lineage of Bandung, it
was the platform of the G77, and the launching pad of the New Inter-
national Economic Order (NIEO). The first Secretary General of
UNCTAD was Raul Prebisch, a prominent member of the Dependencia
school of economics. Los dependentistas argued that the world economic
system was divided into an industrial center and an agrarian periphery,35 and
that the center was benefiting at the expense of the periphery, causing a
widening gap between them. The Third World could not, in fact, catch up
under those conditions. This challenged the purported value of comparative
32
Easterly, The Elusive Quest for Growth.
33
Escobar, Encountering Development, p. 3; Chakrabarty, “The Legacies of Bandung.”
34
Chakrabarty, “The Legacies of Bandung,” p. 53.
35
David Simon (ed.), Fifty Key Thinkers on Development (New York: Routledge, 2009), p. 202.
advantage and free trade. Prebisch and others criticized the economic
orthodoxy of their time for solidifying the status quo and colonial-imposed
tracks of primary goods production.36 They advocated that countries should
industrialize and build or, in some cases, rebuild their capacity to manufac-
ture finished goods for internal markets.
These structural challenges to modernization were reported by Prebisch in
UNCTAD’s early years. And so, we might observe that the institution of
UNCTAD itself embodied the spirit of Bandung themes – participation in
the UN and other forums, but from a new position of solidarity and challenge,
both institutionally and theoretically. Even today, we see the power of creation
mythologies in how UNCTAD recognizes the importance of Bandung as the
inspirational tipping point.37
A closer look at UNCTAD’s operations, however, reveals how it reflects
various characteristics of institutions that embody the project of moderniza-
tion.38 Such institutions are, by Marc Galanter’s account, hierarchical (with
a supervised network to apply rules and appeals in a predicable way),
bureaucratic (with an emphasis on uniformity, impersonality, and actions
according to rules), and rational (the system embodies rules that produce
chosen ends). They were, and still are, “run by professionals,” who are
trained and operate full time, not on sporadic occasions. As the functions
of such organizations become more technical and complex, specialists are
brought in to the system.
UNCTAD’s mission, in its own words, is to “further the understanding of
the nature of transnational corporations and their contribution to develop-
ment and to create an enabling environment for international investment and
enterprise development,” which is “carried out” by “intergovernmental delib-
erations, technical assistance activities, seminars, workshops and conferences.”
Technical assistance, deliberation, and the dissemination of information are
important goals. However, too much faith placed in information-based assist-
ance and deliberations rather than in transformations of values and power
36
See, e.g., Celso Furtado, Development and Underdevelopment (Los Angeles: University of
California Press, 1964).
37
In histories of UNCTAD at its fiftieth anniversary, they trace their history to Bandung, noting
that the “spirit of the Bandung conference marked the beginning of the rise of a confident
south,” which would lead to the Non-Aligned Movement and then UNCTAD itself. Mukhisa
Kituyi, Secretary-General of UNCTAD, 50 Years of UNCTAD: Trade as an Engine of
Sustainable Growth and Development Symposium in Jakarta (Apr. 20, 2014).
38
Marc Galanter, “The Modernization of Law,” in Myron Weiner (ed.), Modernization (New
York: Basic Books, 1966), pp. 153–165. He also notes that there is the potential for change in
such institutions, an idea not explored here.
492 Priya S. Gupta
reflects the kinds of expertise valued in bureaucracies of modernization to

which Galanter refers. The turn to purportedly apolitical economics know-
ledge and economics-based policies, and the faith that more perfect infor-
mation will lead to more rational decisions, invisibilizes the slowing down of
the pursuit of emancipatory projects. The modernization characteristics
exhibited here – bureaucracy, rationality, technicalization, specialized know-
ledge – further reinforce that invisibility. Information gathering – and the
gathering of experts, facilitating meetings, and the assembling of reports – is
necessary as a means to participation, but not sufficient to the ends of
emancipation. Such acts work, at least partly, to equip others to act, but
do not take responsibility or lend themselves to political standing to act
in solidarity or as an institution. They are in fact meant to be apolitical
in that they are inoffensive to donors and appear to work to socialize and
guide developing countries to participation in the current multilateral
trading world.
the financiers
In the latest transformation of development agency, expertise, resources, and
decision-making capabilities are diffused across a range of actors. Develop-
ment agency can be found in those who control capital that crosses borders in
increasing amounts; in the regional trade organizations that support them; in
the governments that set trade, financial, and social policies; and in the social
movements that have a place at the table in intergovernmental organizations
and domestic governmental forums. Despite this proliferation and plurality,
the increasing agency of one constellation of actors has become clear – private
investors, or, the financiers.
The power of private and foreign capital’s place in development lies in the
fact that not only does it make its own decisions with regard to material
projects and resources, but also the decisions of the other actors are in many
ways shaped by responses to it. This power is reflected in a myriad of ways: it
is the power exerted when everyone speaks their language and caters to their
perceived needs; progress is articulated in financial terms; indexes are used
to show how attractive a state is to foreign capital; investment rating agencies
make statements about decreasing violence in nations for better ratings;
domestic service providers are trained with an eye to meet the needs of
investors; states include Investor State Dispute Settlement (ISDS) provisions
in trade and investment treaties; and, most of all, it is reflected in the
increases in one primary form of investment of foreign capital – Foreign
Direct Investment (FDI) in recent years, particularly regarding flows from
the Global South.39 This is the capacious power of financiers in this

moment.40
In the 1980s and 1990s, IFIs and their member states coalesced around a
logic of the empowerment of private capital – and therefore the attraction of
foreign capital in particular – as the way forward for development.41 By the late
1990s, this had become development orthodoxy. In 1997, we can trace this
phenomenon across annual publications of the IFIs. Both of UNCTAD’s
major annual reports – The World Investment Report and The Trade and
Development Report – recognized the role of government as a facilitator and
focused their observations on the furtherance of those functions.42 The World
Bank’s 1997 World Development Report (WDR), The State in a Changing
World, expounded a similar philosophy of state as enabler of finance in order
to develop. According to the Bank, “development requires an effective state”
that plays a facilitator role in encouraging and complementing the activities of
private businesses and individuals; and “understanding the role the state plays
in this institutional environment – for example, its ability to enforce the rule of
law to underpin market transactions – will be essential to making government
contribute more effectively to development.”43 The WDR 2002, titled Build-
ing Institutions for Markets, continued this trend.44 The capsule summary
offered a diagnosis of “[w]eak institutions – tangled laws, corrupt courts,
deeply biased credit systems, and elaborate business registration requirements”
that “hurt poor people and hinder development”45 and offered a prescription
that directed countries to “create new institutions suited to local needs” that
ranged from “unwritten customs and traditions to complex legal codes that
39
See UNCTAD World Investment Report 2014, p. 6.
40
It should also be noted that with the entry of this capital, many countries have been able to
better living standards overall (while internal inequality has sometimes increased). The
Economist, “The World Economy: For richer, for poorer” (Oct. 11, 2012). The aim is here,
however, is to map the rise of this power and understand the pervasiveness of its grasp on
development logic today.
41
John Williamson, “What Washington Means by Policy Reform,” in John Williamson (ed.),
Latin American Readjustment: How Much Has Happened (Washington, DC: Institute for
International Economics, 1989).
42
UNCTAD, World Investment Report 1997: Transnational Corporations, Market Structure and
Competition Policy (1997); UNCTAD, Trade and Development Report, 1997 (1997), which was
centered around “the key role played by investment in achieving rapid growth” as well as the
role of “appropriate government policies.”
43
World Bank, World Development Report 1997: The State in a Changing World (New York:
Oxford University Press, 1997).
44
World Bank, World Development Report 2002: Building Institutions for Markets (New York:
45
Ibid.
494 Priya S. Gupta
regulate international commerce” in order to “dramatically increase incomes

and reduce poverty.”46
By 2015, the idea that states should place their faith in private capital by
enabling it to flourish continues, although in different language. The most
recent WDR, Mind, Society, and Behavior, focused on changing behaviors of
society to enable development through the attraction of foreign capital.47 The
Bank’s Ease of Doing Business Index is another example of this form of
expertise at work, as it enables financiers to assess attractive locations for
capital and for countries to modify conditions accordingly.48 This approach
envisions the World Bank as expert and adviser, as opposed to lender – a
position that places it to the side of the action, guiding countries to best take
appropriate steps not for the Bank but for private investors. Moreover, as the
missions in the international economic organizations evolved toward the
enablement of private capital to achieve development goals, so did domestic
policy programs that proclaim a country’s commitment to this approach49 as
well as the structures of public-private partnerships and financing.
Threads of expertise and institutionalization during the bureaucratic tech-
nocrat and the charismatic statesman phases continue to weave through the
world of financiers. Expertise, as opposed to everyday knowledge and life or
even politics, is still highly valued. The form of expertise is derivative of that of
technocracy, as it is hyper-technical. It is highly technical, data based, and
generated by elites with specialized education doing technology-enabled
analysis to determine investments. However, not only is “the expert” now
not a government technocrat, it is not always a living person – it is often the
(purportedly) apolitical market that is seen to know best. This makes the
market (or those in finance) in control of the flow of sources and further
invisibilizes the politics and accountability of investment and development
decisions. The impersonal logic of capital is prized as intuition itself – capital
will find its way to the right places if policymakers just allow it to do so. And
how does it find its way? What does it seek? Wealth maximization and
multiplication of its own resources, sometimes portions of which do benefit
host populations – but the agency behind such priorities are hidden from
the world.
46
Ibid.
47
World Bank, World Development Report 2015: Mind, Society, and Behavior (New York: Oxford
48
See Doing Business, Doing Business 2016: Measuring Regulatory Quality and Efficiency
(World Bank Group, 2015) and the index itself, available at www.doingbusiness.org/rankings.
49
See, e.g., Indian Ministry of External Affairs and KPMG, India in Business: Preferred
Investment Destination (New Delhi: Ministry of External Affairs, 2014).
The attractiveness of this stage – the apparent charisma – draws in part from
this impersonality. Institutional and societal changes are not made in the
name of powerful personalities such as before, but rather in pursuit of what
are perceived to be modern lifestyles for each citizen as an individual. In
contrast to the earlier phase, this is less about individuals and heroes and more
about diffuse associations and ways of life, which are in large part constituted
by participation in market activities. A good citizen might be a voting citizen,
but also a consumer, demonstrating a certain lifestyle. The (purported) ubi-
quity and accessibility of the market to the middle class enables it to partici-
pate by buying into new forms of everyday life – new spaces to live, new
appliances, new vehicles, and new activities such as shopping in city and
airports malls and eating in international-style cafés.
The flow of FDI into real estate development in particular enables those
lifestyle shifts in material ways – global-style offices, towering residences, and
luxury shopping centers are the physical manifestations of this latest phase of
development orthodoxy.50 Participation in development is associated less with
statesmens’ speeches, civil service jobs, or government-owned industry, than
with a job in the newly reordered economy and an everyday existence
reflective of the accompanying lifestyle.
The effects of FDI in receiving countries – including privatization, dis-
placement, restructuring, and environmental degradations – are at the center
of charged increasingly frequent disputes between private investors and host
governments under ISDS.51 The contested nature of foreign investment is
illustrated by these high-caliber arbitration disputes and by political leaders’
efforts to strengthen the discretionary power of capital-importing states vis-à-vis
their property rights trumpeting foreign investors. In this context, we need to
continue to ascertain the present conditions of the Global South’s economic
development from the perspective of historical development since 1955.
conclusion
Just as the leaders at Bandung challenged international law’s claims to be
rational, modern, and universal, so too was an alternative economic order
imagined and attempted. Here as well, the engagements and resistances are
complex and involve a multitude of actors and events, of triumphs, setbacks,
50
McKinsey Global Institute, Urban World: Cities and the Rise of the Consuming Class
(McKinsey & Co., June 2012).
51
Gus Van Harten, Investment Treaty Arbitration and Public Law (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2007).
496 Priya S. Gupta
and ambivalences. Here as well, the Third World sought to formulate alterna-
tive narratives and systems of international relations that would end imperial-
ism and inequality. Here as well, these struggles played out both theoretically
and materially in the form of new institutions and alliances. In fact, observing
the Bandung moment closely, we see law, politics, and economy intersecting
and tumbling forward together and, in turn, depending on one another for
momentum.
The questions and concerns raised in this chapter force a reckoning with
development (its uneven gifts and thefts, its re-orderings of societies, its evolu-
tions) and the Third World – not as a pure place of idealism but as a reality of
heterogeneity, power structures, and contradictions. These phenomena evi-
dence the continued relevance of Bandung’s goals and tensions – participa-
tion and emancipation – and the need to challenge claims of rationality,
modernity, and universality, now in new forms.
Considering these complicating narratives, the Third World project as
articulated in 1955 has succeeded in part, in that there is more participation
and integration of some countries in the Global South into world economic
and political forums.52 However, this participation and integration has brought
with it its own complications and exploitations. Even so, the so-called success-
ful Third World geographies and capital holders must be seen as part of the
Bandung legacy. To continue down a line of reasoning that would exclude
them from imagined Third World projects53 as articulated at Bandung,
however attractive, would fall trap to romanticizing the Third World projects –
both in the past and in their current forms. Attempts to protect the purity of
Third World sentiments through historical appeals are likely to be mis-
guidedly nostalgic, as there was always a concentration of domestic power
in, and exploitation through, the hands of elites within the Third World.
Perhaps the issue of the legacy of Bandung in Third World geographies is
not just a matter of the geography of capital and its elites, but rather of their
concerns and orientations. If they enabled a form of development that cap-
tured the labor of others through paying barely above-market wages, if they did
not invest in longer-term well-being of the places they were located in, then
perhaps that is where they exited the Third World projects. And so, it would
52
The increasing economic and political power of the BRICS countries – China and India in
particular – has been well documented. For evidence of their strength in numerical indexes,
see the disparities between these countries and other countries in the Third World in the GDP
ranking table maintained by the World Bank, or the disparities in FDI between “Developing
Asia” and “Africa” and “Latin America” in the UNCTAD World Investment Report 2014,
p. xix.
53
Prashad, The Darker Nations.
not be their economic power that separates them from the Third World
projects, but rather the exploitative nature of the exercise of that power.54
And yet, our task should not be simply focusing on the shortcomings of
accountability and distributive aspects of the operation of private capital but
rather crafting an emancipatory form of participation given the totalizing, and
ever more diffused yet still narrowing, projects of international law, finance,
and development.
54
B.S. Chimni, “Prolegomena to a Class Approach to International Law” (2010) 21 European
Journal of International Law, at 67–82.
30
Between Bandung and Doha

International Economic Law and Developing Countries
julio faundez
introduction
The Bandung Conference of 1955 initiated a period when developing coun-
tries, through concerted action, made their presence felt in the international
arena, reaffirmed their political independence, and demanded more effective
international assistance for their development objectives. In 1974, their efforts
were rewarded when the UN General Assembly adopted a series of Reso-
lutions that called for the establishment of a New International Economic
Order (NIEO). But success was short lived. Not long after the approval of
these Resolutions, the spirit that animated Bandung was swept aside by the
unstoppable energy of the emerging neoliberal economic orthodoxy. Today,
after more than three decades of neoliberal globalization, Bandung seems like
an anachronistic reminder of the quaint state-centric approach to develop-
ment that prevailed in the immediate aftermath of colonialism. Critically
inclined lawyers might dismiss Bandung and NIEO as a manifestation of
misguided belief in the capacity of international law to address the problems
of developing countries.
From the perspective of neoliberal globalization, the demands that develop-
ing countries made in the 1970s would be dismissed as ludicrously impractical
today. Who would realistically expect multinationals to be legally held to
account for their activities in developing countries or pay a fair share of taxes
to the countries where they extract natural resources? Such demands would be
dismissed as imprudent because they would deter foreign investors. Likewise,
the notion that multinationals transfer technology to help developing coun-
tries compete with foreign investors would be regarded as comically unrealis-
tic. Neoliberalism has forever buried the Bandung Spirit. Yet the underlying
issues that prompted the Conference persist. Even moderate voices – such as
those representing the UNCTAD, the UN Department of Social
498
Between Bandung and Doha 499
Development, and the ILO – have expressed concern about the negative
impact of the current global governance framework on the economic growth
prospects of developing countries.1 It is also concerning that the institutions of
neoliberal globalization are unable to arrest the impact of climate change,
especially among the most vulnerable people in the developing world. Despite
the strength and validity of these concerns, promoters of neoliberal globaliza-
tion have little reason to fear that the spirit that animated Bandung will
reemerge as a destabilizing factor in the global economy. Other forces seem
to be doing that.
From a historical perspective, however, to dismiss Bandung as the product
of naïve or misguided nationalism is shortsighted; it ignores the particular
conditions prevailing at the time. It is also a mistake to attribute the failure of
Bandung to the ideology of modernization2 or to the action of left-wing
political movements, which pushed governments into making unreasonable
demands, especially on matters concerning sovereignty over natural
resources.3
To understand Bandung, or what we could call the Bandung process, it is
necessary to take into account the international context. At the time of the
Conference, issues of international security as dictated by the terms of the
Cold War took precedence over all other matters on the international agenda.
As a consequence, developing countries had some flexibility in determining
the content and direction of their economic policies. This flexibility did not
directly challenge the interests of multinationals, which were few in number.
Their activities were largely restricted to mining and the agricultural sector.4
1
UNCTAD (2011), “Development-led globalization: Towards sustainable and inclusive
development paths, Report of the Secretary-General of UNCTAD to UNCTAD XIII,
UNCTAD XIII/1.” United Nations, World Economic and Social Survey 2010: Retooling Global
Development (New York: UN Department for Social & Economic Affairs, E/2010/50/Rev.1ST/
ESA/330. ILO (2008)), ILO Declaration on Social Justice for a Fair Globalization
(International Labour Conference, Ninety-Seventh Session), Geneva: ILO.
2
Samir Amin, Beyond US Hegemony (London: Zed Books, 2011); Mark T. Berger, “After the
Third World? History, Destiny and the Fate of Third Worldism” (2004) 25 Third World
Quarterly 1, at 9–39.
3
Harry G. Johnson, The New International Economic Order (University of Chicago: Business
School, Selected Papers No. 49, 1976), p. 16; Giorgio Sacerdoti, “New International Economic
Order (NIEO),” in Max Planck Encyclopedia of International Law (2011); Nico Schrijver,
“Natural Resource Management and Sustainable Development,” in Sam Daws and Thomas
Weiss (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of the United Nations (Oxford: Oxford Handbooks Online,
2009).
4
John H. Dunning and Sarianna M. Lundan, Multinational Enterprises and the Global
Economy, 2nd ed. (Cheltenham: E. Elgar. 2008), pp. 145–197.
500 Julio Faundez
The United Nations also provided developing countries with a useful

platform for voicing aspirations and pressing for the adoption of resolutions
that reflected their interests. As a consequence, between the end of the
Second World War and the mid-1970s, developing countries influenced
important areas of international law. The UN membership trebled from
51 states in 1945 to 152 in 1979, and all but a handful of these new members
had been colonial territories. By 1960, the Afro-Asian bloc, together with Latin
American countries, had a clear majority in the UN and made use of their
voting power.5 They made a particularly important contribution to ending the
colonial rule of recalcitrant powers such as Portugal and the apartheid regime
in South Africa. They also introduced important changes to the rules
governing international trade, which aimed at preventing free-trade principles
from trumping their economic development objectives. After successfully
lobbying for the establishment of the UN Conference on Trade and Develop-
ment (UNCTAD) in 1964, developing countries secured the approval of a
series of General Assembly resolutions on economic development, culminat-
ing in 1974 with the adoption by the General Assembly of a Declaration
calling for the establishment of a NIEO.
The NIEO Declaration calls for: (1) the right of states to choose their own
economic and social system on the basis of sovereign equality, (2) full and
effective participation on the basis of equality of all countries in solving world
economic problems, (3) the right of every country to adopt the economic
and social systems that it deems appropriate for its own development, (4) full
and permanent sovereignty over natural resources and economic activities free
from external coercion, (5) just and equitable relationship between the prices
of raw materials and primary commodities, (6) extension of assistance to
developing countries free of any political or military conditions, (7) preferen-
tial and nonreciprocal treatment for developing countries in all fields of
international economic cooperation, and (8) access to the achievements of
modern science and technology, and promoting the transfer of technology.6
This chapter explains the legal and political dilemmas facing developing
countries during the Cold War period and contrasts them with the inter-
national position today. The first part, covering the period between the
Bandung Conference and the adoption of NIEO, shows how developing
countries came together and influenced the development of international
5
Rupert Emerson, “Colonialism, Political Development, and the UN” (1965) 19 International
Organization, at 484–503.
6
UN General Assembly, Declaration on the Establishment of a New International Economic
Order, Official Records: Sixth Special Session, Supplement No. 1 (A/9559) (1974).
law. The second part, focusing on outlines of the legal framework of eco-
nomic globalization, identifies the factors responsible for the demise of the
Bandung Spirit among developing countries. In particular, it focuses on the
legal strategies developed countries employed to deepen the process of global-
ization and on the divisive consequences of global economic integration on
developing countries.
international law and policy space during

the cold war
The twenty-nine countries represented at Bandung wanted the existing super-
powers and their former colonial powers to respect their sovereignty and
political independence.7 They reaffirmed their adherence to the principle of
collective security, but rejected military alliances that served the interests of
the superpowers. The spirit of the conference was taken up by the Non-
Aligned Movement (NAM), a larger group of developing countries established
in 1961.8 NAM countries were linked by a concern with economic develop-
ment and a desire to distance themselves from the ideological and political
rifts between the superpowers. They insisted that greater attention be paid to
the division between rich and poor countries, and felt that industrialized
nations should commit to reform international rules governing trade, invest-
ment, and finance so as to further growth and development for all.9
A defining moment in the Bandung process was also the 1962 Cairo Con-
ference on the Problems of Developing Countries. This Conference, held
outside the framework of the UN, brought together for the first time Afro-Asian
and Latin American countries. The Conference called for a comprehensive
restructuring of the international rules governing trade and economic relations
between developed and developing countries.10 The plea for an overhaul of
rules governing the world economy was appealing to Latin American countries
as they shared the same frustration as the Afro-Asian nations – except they had
endured these rules for much longer and were still trying to find a successful
path to economic development more than a century after independence.
7
Robert Heuser, “Bandung Conference (1955),” Encyclopedia of International Law, Vol. 9
(1986), pp. 12–14.
8
Mohammed Bedjaoui, “Non-Aligned States,” Encyclopedia of International Law, Vol. 9 (1986),
pp. 270–276.
9
A.A. Fatouros, “International Law and the Third World” (1964) 50 Virginia Law Review 5, at
783–823.
10
John Toye, “Assessing the G77: 50 Years after UNCTAD and 40 Year after the NIEO” (2014) 35
Third World Quarterly 10, at 1760.
502 Julio Faundez
A common complaint about the consequences of the current process of

globalization is that the flood of international rules generated by the impera-
tives of deregulation and liberalization has restricted the policy space of
developing countries. If this assessment is correct, it would appear, paradoxic-
ally, that during the Cold War the position of developing countries was more
auspicious. During that time, developing countries outside the Soviet bloc
followed the economic model of import substitution. This was largely inward
looking and without major international repercussions because developing
countries were not fully inserted into the world economy. As a result, they had
some room to maneuver in designing their economic policies and supporting
common economic demands. In one form or another, all developing coun-
tries were trying to modernize their agriculture and establish a manufacturing
base to consolidate and expand their national markets; their demands were
similar and not divisive. They all wanted fair prices for their natural resources
and agricultural exports, preferential access to developed countries’ markets
for their manufactures, technology transfer, greater voice in international
financial decisions, sound investment regimens that would generate sufficient
resources to invest in other sectors of the economy, and more effective
technical mechanisms for the disbursement of economic aid.
The similarity and relative simplicity of the economic aspirations of
developing countries during this period explain the durability of their coali-
tions. Developing countries, however, had to lobby hard within the UN and
other international organizations to persuade rich countries that development
deserved a place on the international agenda.11 The tortuous diplomatic
relations between Latin America and the United States illustrate this point.
From the inception of the Cold War, Latin American countries requested
U.S. economic assistance. In 1947, during negotiations regarding the Rio
Treaty of Reciprocal Assistance, Latin American countries asked U.S. Secre-
tary of State George Marshall, present at the Conference, to establish a
Marshall Plan for Latin America similar to the reconstruction program he
had launched for Europe. Marshall rejected the request, arguing that security,
not development, was the priority for the region.12 Two years later, in 1949,
when President Truman launched a development aid program – the so-called
Point IV Program – the amount Congress allocated for the rest of the world
amounted to 1 percent of the sum allocated to Europe under the Marshall
11
UNCTAD, Beyond Conventional Wisdom in Development Policy: An Intellectual History of
UNCTAD 1964–2004 (Geneva: UNCTAD, 2004).
12
Keesings’ (1946/48), Keesings’ Contemporary Archives Vol. 6 (Bristol: Keesings’ Publications
Limited), p. 8881.
Plan.13 In 1948, a year after Marshall dismissed their request for comprehen-
sive economic support, Latin American countries persuaded the United States
to accept the Economic Agreement of Bogotá, a multilateral treaty that sets
out in considerable detail the economic aspirations of Latin American coun-
tries.14 The United States signed this treaty but did not take it seriously.
Throughout the 1950s, Latin American countries continued to request
financial and technical support for development, and the United States
continued to invoke security considerations to deflect their requests. It was
not until after the 1959 Cuban Revolution and the CIA’s botched attempt to
overthrow Fidel Castro in 1961 that the U.S. government, through John
F. Kennedy’s Alliance for Progress Program, began to show signs that it
understood that left-wing political movements were not instigated by the
Soviet Union, but were prompted by grossly unequal distribution of economic
and political power.15 The Alliance for Progress was also an attempt by the
United States to discourage Latin American states from establishing closer
links with the Afro-Asian countries linked to the Bandung process.16
The argument that the Cold War was kind to developing countries because
it allowed them a degree of flexibility to choose economic policies might be
appealing, but it is also misleading. During the Cold War, the principle of
multilateralism was widely proclaimed as the foundation of the postwar
settlement. The UN Security Council was entrusted with the responsibility
of managing the system of collective security and was thus formally entrusted
with the monopoly of the use of force to repel acts of aggression.
Under the UN Charter, the use of force by states or regional blocks was
prohibited unless authorized by the Security Council.17 As it turned out,
however, this ideal was never realized because the political rift between the
United States and the Soviet Union paralyzed the Council. Instead, regional
security pacts controlled by one superpower emerged as alternative mechan-
isms for maintaining international peace and security. Regional pacts,
13
Charles Maier, “The World Economy and the Cold War in the Middle of the Twentieth
Century,” in Melvin P. Leffler and Odd Arne Westad (eds.), The Cambridge History of the Cold
War, Vol. I: Origins (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), p. 49.
14
Gordon Connell-Smith, “The Organization of American States” (1995) 16 The World Today 10,
at 454.
15
Michael Dunne, “Perfect Failure: the USA, Cuba and the Bay of Pigs, 1961” (2011) 82 Political
Quarterly 3, at 448–458; Michael Dunne, “Kennedys’ Alliance for Progress: Countering
Revolution in Latin America” (2013) 89 International Affairs 6, at 1389–1409.
16
Toye, “Assessing the G77,” at 1760.
17
Stanley Hoffmann, “International Organization and the International System” (1970) 24
International Organization, at 389–413; Nicholas Tsagourias and Nigel D. White, Collective
Security (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013).
504 Julio Faundez
however, not only protected the external security of their members but were
also used to ensure that their members’ political regimes were in line with the
superpower’s economic interests and ideology.18 Countries within the Soviet
bloc were not allowed to open their economy to market mechanisms, and
those that defied this rule were promptly disciplined. Thus, the Soviet Union
did not hesitate to intervene forcefully whenever their satellite countries
departed from the unwritten rules of the game, as was the case of Hungary
in 1956 and Czechoslovakia in 1968.
In the West, under the policy of import substitution, developing countries
were allowed to design their own economic policies only if they did not upset
the prevailing alignment of forces at the international level. Real or alleged
socialist policies were ruled out of order and characterized as incompatible
with regional peace and security. The United States forcefully suppressed any
attempt to establish a political regime deemed to pose a threat to its political
values or economic interests. Although the United States preferred to assert its
power through the formal procedures established by the Organization of
American States (Guatemala, 1954; Dominican Republic, 1965), it resorted
to unilateral use of force (Bay of Pigs, 1961) and covert action (Chile, 1973)
when legal channels were unavailable.19
For the purpose of protecting their interests, the superpowers stretched the
concept of region beyond its ordinary geographical meaning, transforming it
into a flexible political concept that created frontiers defined by the reach of
their respective ideologies. This approach, blatantly inconsistent with the
collective security ideal contained in the UN Charter, prevailed over the rule
that prohibited enforcement measures unless authorized by the Security
Council. Thus, self-defense and containment through regional political pacts
were regularly invoked to protect the sphere of influence of the superpowers.20
The legal arguments the United States used in defense of its ill-fated
18
Charles G. Fenwick, “Collective Security: Universal and Regional” (1949) 112 World Affairs 2,
at 43–45; Linda B. Miller, “Regional Organization and the Regulation of Internal Conflict”
(1967) 19 World Politics 4, at 582–600.
19
Charles G. Fenwick, “The Dominican Republic: Intervention or Collective Self-Defense”
(1966) 60 American Journal of International Law 1, at 64–67; Organization of American States,
“Report of Special Committee on the Dominican Republic” (1965) 4 International Legal
Materials 3, at 557–577; Kathryn Rider Schmeltzer, “Soviet and American Attitudes Toward
Intervention: The Dominican Republic, Hungary and Czechoslovakia” (1970) 11 Virginia
Journal of International Law 1, at 97–124; Jerome Slater, “The United States, the Organization
of American States, and the Dominican Republic, 1961–1963” (1964) 18 International
Organization 2, at 268–291.
20
Quincy Wright, “Intervention, 1956” (1957) 51 American Journal of International Law, at
257–276.
intervention in Vietnam provided an eloquent illustration of the way the

superpowers manipulated international law during the Cold War.21 The
United States attempted to justify its actions in legal terms, but the Soviet
Union did not. In 1968, in a speech at the UN, Soviet Foreign Minister Andrei
Gromyko justified the invasion of Czechoslovakia as follows:
[T]he Soviet Union and other socialist countries have on many occasions
warned those who are tempted to try and roll back the socialist common-
wealth, to snatch at least one link from it, that we will neither tolerate nor
allow this to happen.22
At Bandung, the question of regional alliances with the superpowers was

firmly rejected on the ground that such alliances were inconsistent with the
principle of collective security, as reflected in the Charter of the United
Nations. A few months before the Bandung Conference, in 1954, Prime
Minister Nehru had categorically declined an invitation to participate in the
establishment of the South East Treaty Organization (SEATO) – an organiza-
tion promoted by the United States – because, in his view, the proposed treaty
was not a genuine collective security system, but a military alliance.23 Nehru’s
concern about regional security proved accurate, as borne out by contempor-
aneous developments in Latin America. In that region, the 1947 Rio Treaty of
Reciprocal Assistance provided the United States with a convenient legal
mechanism to safeguard its economic and political interests and to intervene
with impunity in the political affairs of Latin American states.24
Coincidentally, at the time that Nehru was denouncing SEATO as a sham
collective security arrangement, the United States was using the Rio Treaty to
justify the overthrow of a democratically elected government in Guatemala
21
Leonard Meeker, “The Legality of United States Participation in the Defense of Viet-Nam”
(1966) Department of State Bulletin, March 28, at 474–489; Richard A. Falk, “International Law
and the United States Role in the Vietnam War” (1966) 75 Yale Law Journal, at 1122–1160;
Wolfgang Friedmann, “United States Policy and the Crisis of International Law” (1967) 59
American Journal of International Law, at 857–871 (see pp. 868–869 on Dominican Republic);
Wolfgang Friedmann, “Intervention and the Developing Countries” (1969) 10 Virginia Journal
of International Law 2, at 205–222.
22
Henry M. Jackson, “The Soviet Invasion of Czechoslovakia and its Impact on NATO: Does
the Leopard Change his Spots?” (1969) 2 Cornell International Law Journal, at 111; M.
Richard Goodman, “The Invasion of Czechoslovakia: 1968” (1969–1970) 4 International
Lawyer 1, at 70.
23
Amitav Acharya, “Norm Subsidiarity and Regional Orders: Sovereignty, Regionalism, and
Rule-Making in the Third World” (2011) International Studies Quarterly, at 95–123.
24
Connell-Smith, “Organization of American States”; Francisco V. Garcia-Amador, “The Rio
De Janeiro Treaty: Genesis, Development, and Decline of a Regional System of Collective
Security” (1985) 17 University of Miami Inter-American Law Review 1, at 1–42.
506 Julio Faundez
that was attempting to introduce an agrarian reform program. The Guate-

malan government proposed land distribution that affected land owned by
United Fruit Company, which was based in the United States. Prior to
organizing the overthrow of the elected government of Guatemala, the United
States persuaded Latin American countries, at a meeting in Caracas, to adopt
a Resolution declaring that the influence of international communism in the
region constituted a threat to the integrity of Latin American states and was
incompatible with American notions of freedom. At the Caracas meeting, the
delegate from Guatemala noted that the alleged threat of communism was
merely a ploy to justify the suppression of the legitimate aspirations of the
Latin American people. He also predicted that, if approved, the Resolution
would place the Inter-American system at the service of the political and
economic interests of the United States.25 Sadly, this prediction was accurate.
Three months after the approval of this Resolution, a group of exiled “freedom
fighters,” sponsored and organized by the United States, overthrew the gov-
ernment and installed a dictatorship led by Colonel Carlos Castillo Armas,
who promptly restored the expropriated land to United Fruit and violently
repressed and killed supporters of the deposed government and trade union
leaders.26 These events vindicated Nehru’s characterization of SEATO and
other similar regional security pacts.
Throughout the Cold War, the United States continued to use the Inter-
American system to oppose and even overthrow left-leaning governments that
posed a real or imaginary threat to American interests or to the interests of
local elites. The United States’ attempt to overthrow Fidel Castro in 1961,
which was modeled on the Guatemala episode, further discredited U.S.
foreign policy among some of the progressive governments in the region. This
did not prevent Washington from intervening directly (Grenada, 1983) or
indirectly (Chile, 1970–1973; Nicaragua, 1981) in order to rid the continent
of even the remote possibility of left-wing groups taking power in the region.
Thus, although superficially the Cold War seemed to provide developing
countries with ample room to pursue their economic and political objectives,
this was not really the case. The superpowers defined their security interests so
broadly that regional collective security arrangements became powerful
devices that enabled them to impose political and economic policies consist-
ent with their own conception of security, giving them license to override any
25
Unión Panamericana (1954), Décima Conferencia Interamericana: Actas y Documentos, Vol. I,
tercera sesión plenaria, 5 de Marzo, pp. 121–122.
26
Nick Cullather, Secret History: The CIAs’ Classified Account of Its Operations in Guatemala
1952–1954 (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 1999).
political or economic choice that, in their view, might pose a threat to their
interests. From this perspective, the policy prescriptions of the Washington
Consensus seem positively mild, even progressive.
the paradox of globalization: economic

integration and political fragmentation
The current model of globalization calls for a drastic reduction of the role of
the state, as it assumes that the main engine of economic growth is the private
sector. As a consequence, while deregulation and liberalization drastically
reduce the size and functions of the state, contract law and property rights
have emerged as the main institutions expected to bring about economic
growth. Even after the 2008 financial crisis, when policymakers became more
open to some degree of regulation, the World Bank and IMF prioritized
private-sector development and improvements on the substance and enforce-
ment of private law as key development strategies.
The focus of the reform process on the size and functions of the state is
justified because states are seen as the main obstacle for the successful
integration of the world economy. In the early 1980s, at a time when World
Bank economists were beginning to develop the current model of globaliza-
tion, they concluded that economic stagnation in developing countries and
the endless succession of financial crises were caused by flawed domestic
policies rather than the inadequacy of the institutions of global governance.27
This analysis prompted the launch of the infamous structural adjustment
loans, which required developing countries to introduce radical changes to
public institutions in order to reduce state involvement in the economy.
This policy objective is reflected in the promulgated rules governing inter-
national trade, investment, and finance. The combined effect of these reforms
has been to transfer power over key economic decisions from nation-states to
the international sphere. This shift brought about a fundamental transform-
ation in the foundations of international law. From the perspective of develop-
ing countries, globalization covertly seized a massive slice of their hitherto
much-valued economic sovereignty. While globalization has reduced the
economic sovereignty of all countries, its impact on developing countries is
magnified because, with the exception of the so-called emerging economies,
these countries have little or no influence in the design or implementation of
these rules.
27
Shahid Yusuf, Development Economics through the Decades (Washington, DC: World Bank,
2009), p. 24.
508 Julio Faundez
fragile coalitions
In recent years, developing countries have engaged in important multilateral
negotiations on a range of issues relating to trade, climate change, regional
integration, and intellectual property. These negotiations have provided oppor-
tunities to establish coalitions. However, most of these coalitions have been short
lived, and their efficacy has been uncertain. The fragility of these coalitions can
be explained by the complexity and scope of the international agenda, which has
contributed to uncovering countless policy divisions among developing coun-
tries. These policy divisions, a consequence of their diverse economic structures
and different levels of development, are undoubtedly welcomed by the promoters
of neoliberal globalization, as they serve as reassurance that the type of concerted
action that led to the call for NIEO will never again resurface. Thus, ironically,
while global integration brings national economies closer together, it also gener-
ates widespread and unexpected divisions that pull developing countries apart.
For example, the failure to conclude the Doha Development Round
cannot be attributed to the reluctance of developing countries seriously to
engage in negotiations or to seek solutions through the establishment of
coalitions. Indeed, the Doha process has brought about the establishment of
twenty-six negotiating coalitions, of which sixteen consist entirely of develop-
ing countries.28 Thus, the problem is not that developing countries have been
uninvolved in coalitions, but rather that the complexity and breadth of the
negotiations creates divisions among them. During the GATT years, solidarity
among developing countries was easy to nourish because their demands were
relatively simple. In 1965, Part IV of the GATT introduced the concept of
nonreciprocity, according to which developing countries were not expected to
reciprocate tariff concessions that developed countries made. In 1971, the
GATT approved the Generalized System of Preferences, a waiver of the Most
Favored Clause that later became a permanent fixture of the GATT under the
so-called Enabling Clause. These were important mechanisms that clearly
favored the trading interests of developing countries.
By comparison to the simplicity of the development agenda of the 1960s,
the complexity of the current Doha Round is astonishing. It consists of more
than thirty items, including long-standing difficult topics such as agriculture,
dumping, subsidies, intellectual property, services, and environment. It is not
28
Amrita Narlikar, “The Doha Development Agenda,” in Andrew F. Cooper, Jorge Heine, and
Ramesh Thakur (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Modern Diplomacy (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2013), p. 863; Diana Tussie, “Trade Diplomacy,” in Oxford Handbook of
Modern Diplomacy, pp. 625–640.
surprising that the negotiations have encountered serious obstacles. From the
point of view of developing countries, these obstacles are caused by the sheer
breadth of an agenda that encompasses a range of conflicting economic and
political interests that did not arise when trade negotiations largely involved
exchanging tariff concessions on a limited number of products. As a conse-
quence, developing countries often find themselves in shifting alliances with
developed countries in some contexts; in coalitions with exporters of agricul-
tural products (the Cairns Group) in others; or, as part of the Friends of Fish,
in coalitions with developed countries that are fish exporters.29
An unexpectedly high level of solidarity among developing countries was
displayed at the Cancún Ministerial Meeting in 2003.30 At this meeting,
developing countries formed the G20+ coalition, led by influential countries
such as Brazil, South Africa, India, Argentina, and China. The G20+ was
instrumental in rejecting a compromise proposal on agriculture prepared by
the United States and the European Union.31 At Cancún, developing coun-
tries also removed from the Doha agenda three of the four issues introduced at
the 1996 Ministerial meeting in Singapore – investment, competition, and
procurement. Trade facilitation remained on the agenda and an agreement
on this issue, subject to ratification, was concluded in 2013 at the Ministerial
meeting in Bali. In 2003, African countries achieved an important victory in
the area of public health when they persuaded the WTO to approve a
temporary waiver allowing poor countries that do not have manufacturing
capacity to import generic drugs made under compulsory licensing.32 In 2005,
the waiver was transformed into an amendment of the TRIPS Agreement and
thus made permanent.
Some observers have considered the possibility that India, Brazil, and South
Africa (the so-called IBSA countries) might become leaders of a coalition of
developing countries, as they are undoubtedly important global economic
players. Their combined population is more than 1.2 billion and their GDP is
more than $1.3 trillion.33 Nevertheless, there is justified skepticism as to
29
Adil Najam, Mark Halle, and Ricardo Meléndez-Ortiz (eds.), Trade and Environment
(Geneva: International Centre for Trade and Sustainable Development, 2007).
30
Alan Matthews, “Agriculture after Cancun,” in Stefan Griller (ed.), At the Crossroads: The
World Trading System and the Doha Round (Vienna: Springer, 2007), pp. 315–337.
31
Najam, Trade and Environment, p. 31.
32
Bernard M. Hoekman and Petros C. Mavroidis, The World Trade Organization: Law,
Economics and Politics (New York: Routledge, 2007).
33
Fantu Cheru, “South-South Cooperation: What Prospects for another Bandung Consensus,”
in Renu Modi (ed.), South-South Cooperation, Africa on the Centre Stage (London: Palgrave,
2011), p. 46.
510 Julio Faundez
whether the IBSA countries can effectively represent the interests of all
developing countries. Because of their size and level of development, the
interests of the IBSA countries are markedly different from those of the
majority of developing countries – in particular, those that are classified as
Least Developed Countries (LDCs) – making it unlikely that they could
faithfully champion the interests of the majority of developing countries. Even
among themselves, IBSA countries have divergent trading interests. Brazil, as a
member of the Cairns Group, is a strong proponent of market access for
agriculture, while India is less enthusiastic because it has a large subsistence-
farming sector. South Africa, a food exporter, has conflicting interests with
many African countries dependent on food imports.34 The IBSA countries,
plus China and Russia, form the so-called BRICS. They have constituted
themselves as a group and are seeking to play a role in reforming global
economic relations. In terms of the Doha negotiations, however, the BRICS,
for reasons similar to the IBSA countries, do not represent the interests of the
vast majority of developing nations. As John Toye explains, the BRICS are
more interested in building links among themselves than in leading a coali-
tion of developing countries.35
Even well-established developing countries, such as Brazil and India, seem
unable to provide the required leadership, as evidenced by the failure of the
so-called G4 group. In 2007, the Director General of the WTO, along with the
United States and the European Union, invited India and Brazil to establish
an informal group (known as the G4 group) to break the deadlock in the
negotiations on agriculture. The negotiations failed, and India and Brazil were
strongly criticized by African, Caribbean, and Pacific countries (ACP) on the
familiar ground that the negotiations had not been transparent and that
neither India nor Brazil could effectively represent the interests of developing
countries.36 Referring to the role of India and Brazil, the ACP minister stated:
[A]lthough two developing countries are part of the G4, we cannot expect
them to carry the responsibility of representing the views and positions of all
developing countries. We have been told that the Geneva multilateral
process is central, but without knowledge of the political or technical aspects
of the G4 negotiations, it is not possible for the majority of members to
prepare themselves or provide inputs.37
34
Ibid. at 48. 35
Toye, “Assessing the G77,” at 1772.
36
Uche Ewelukwa Ofodile, “The Politics of African Trade Negotiations in the WTOs’ Doha
Round,” in Tomas Broude, Marc L. Busch, and Amelia Porges (eds.), The Politics of
International Economic Law (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), pp. 64–105.
37
Ibid.
African ministers expressed similar views in 2009. Although the ministers

acknowledged the value of informal consultations, they warned that they were
not “a substitute for a genuine multilateral process, nor should they affect the
consensus reached within the multilateral context. We also stress the need for
Africa’s full participation in all negotiating processes based on balanced and
consensually agreed agendas.”38
The complexity of the Doha negotiations has exposed, as a result, divisions
and conflicting interests among developing countries. Although developing
countries seem to prefer multilateral rather than bilateral negotiations, the
Doha process is a strong reminder that, under current conditions, the multi-
lateral route does not guarantee outcomes acceptable to all developing coun-
tries. It is possible, as some argue, that the “developing country” label is rapidly
becoming meaningless.39 This argument, although not entirely unfounded, is
an overstatement. As an entity, developing countries may have lost their
power, but developed countries continue to treat them as a group when
seeking to persuade them to adopt further measures of economic
liberalization.
bilateralism and regionalism revived

The failure to complete the Doha Round has not destroyed the WTO or
reduced the enthusiasm of neoliberalism promoters to pursue their objectives.
Indeed, while still proclaiming adherence to the ideal of multilateralism, they
have rediscovered the benefits of bilateralism and regionalism. This is a
familiar shift that proved useful during the Cold War. At that time, however,
this strategy was pursued because of the perceived need to protect the super-
powers’ respective spheres of influence. Today, bilateral and regional treaties
are employed to further the neoliberal agenda and to strengthen compliance
with its rules.
The GATT agreement embraced multilateralism in international trade in
1948. Under GATT, it was expected that liberalization would be progressively
achieved through centralized and nondiscriminatory trading concessions
based on the most favored nation and the national treatment principles.
38
Ibid. at 93.
39
Andy Sumner and Sergio Tezanos Vázquez, How Has the Developing World Changed since
the Late 1990s? A Dynamic and Multidimensional Taxonomy of Developing Countries (Centre
for Global Development: Working Paper No. 375, 2014); Joost Pauwelyn, “The End of
Differential Treatment for Developing Countries: Lessons from the Trade and Climate
Change Regimes” (2013) 22 Review of European Comparative and International Environmental
Law 1, at 29–41.
512 Julio Faundez
Article XXIV of GATT, however, allowed departures from these principles in

the case of the Contracting Parties deciding to establish closer economic
union through Regional Trade Agreements (RTAs), which GATT described
as either free trade areas or customs unions. A justification for allowing states
to grant each other preferential treatment is that it gives them the opportunity
to gradually adjust their economies until full liberalization is achieved. This
rationale also assumes that discrimination at the bilateral or regional level
would be temporary because such agreements would soon be replicated at the
multilateral level, thus reinforcing the principle of multilateralism.40 Whether
these arguments were valid was of no political concern; before the establish-
ment of the WTO, RTAs did not pose a threat to multilateralism. At the time,
GATT rules were not taken seriously, as they were not enforceable and few
RTAs were concluded.
Since the establishment of the WTO, however, RTAs have assumed enor-
mous importance, both to secure preferential market access and to secure
compliance with regulatory standards not traditionally associated with them.
In 1990, internal trade of RTAs accounted for only 18 percent of world trade in
goods, while in 2008 it accounted for more than 35 percent.41 With the
addition of intra-EU trade, this increased to 28 percent in 1990 and 50 percent
in 2008.42 Tariffs across the board have been reduced, so the scope for further
tariff reduction through RTAs is limited. As a consequence, an important
feature of the current spread of RTAs is that they have become devices to
introduce deep integration provisions that compensate for the failure to
conclude the Doha negotiations and often go beyond current liberal trade
rules of the WTO.43
In a survey of 100 RTAs, the WTO distinguishes between two types of deep
integration provisions: WTO+ in areas covered by the WTO, and WTO-X in
areas not covered by the WTO. WTO+ provisions include areas such as tariffs,
technical barriers to trade, services, intellectual property, and trade-related
investment measures. WTO-X provisions cover areas such as competition
policy, investment, and capital movement. The two current U.S.-led initia-
tives – the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) with the
European Union and the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) involving eleven
40
Jagdish Bhagwati, Termites in the Trading System (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008).
41
WTO, World Trade Report 2011 – The WTO and Preferential Trade Agreements: from
coexistence to coherence, p. 7.
42
Jagdish Bhagwati and Krishna Pravin, The World Trading System (2014), available at
www.columbia.edu/~jb38/papers/pdf/paper1-the_world_trading_system.pdf.
43
Iza Lejárraga, “Deep Provisions in Regional Trade Agreements: How Multilateral-friendly?: An
Overview of OECD Findings” (OECD: Trade Policy Papers, No. 168, 2014).
countries from the Asia-Pacific region (Australia, Brunei, Chile, Canada,

Japan, Malaysia, Mexico, New Zealand, Peru, Singapore, and Vietnam) –
indicate that enthusiasm for regional agreements has not declined. As Bhag-
wati has noted, the U.S. government appears to regard the TPP as an “open
regionalism” agreement, which, in due course, would be open to other
countries. As such, the intention is that the agreement should comprehen-
sively cover all trade-related areas, going beyond those covered by the WTO
and even beyond the U.S. bilateral free-trade agreements that are currently in
force.44 Thus, in terms of its content the TPP is undoubtedly a WTO-X. In
terms of the aspiration that it will become an open regionalism agreement, it is
similar to the ill-fated Multilateral Agreement on Investment, negotiated in
the 1990s by OECD countries, which was meant to codify state-of-the-art
investment rules for other countries to follow.
conclusion
Bandung marked the beginning of a twenty-year period of concerted inter-
national action by developing countries, during which they succeeded in
placing development firmly on the international agenda. They also made a
significant contribution toward securing the UN’s support to the process of
decolonization. During this period, however, the conflicting interpretations of
international security by the two superpowers took precedence over matters
relating to international economic cooperation. The relative disregard of
economic issues by developed countries provided developing countries with
space to engage in collective action in support of their demands for a more
equitable international economic order. An important feature of this period
was that the rules and principles of international economic law were mainly
concerned with procedural rather than substantive aspects of economic
policies.
The end of the Cold War and the inception of economic globalization
brought about a remarkable reversal of international priorities. Given that
politics and security considerations were no longer an obstacle to the expan-
sion of markets, international organizations, led by the World Bank and the
IMF, required states in developing countries to adapt their institutions to the
expanding international markets. As deregulation and liberalization were
implemented at the national level, a proliferation of new principles, rules,
and disciplines reinforced and consolidated the process of economic
44
Jagdish Bhagwati, “Dawn of a New System” (2013) 50 Finance and Development 4, at 9–13.
514 Julio Faundez
globalization at the international level. The expansion of international eco-

nomic law had two main consequences for developing countries. First, it
diminished their capacity to formulate economic policies, as key areas of
national economic policy fell within the scope of international disciplines;
second, it highlighted important divisions among developing countries
because of the breadth of the matters covered by international disciplines.
Thus, one of the unintended consequences of economic globalization is that
as developing countries become more closely integrated into the global
economy, they become more fragmented and less likely to form durable
alliances.
Although conditions for developing countries are radically different today
than sixty years ago, at the time of the Bandung Conference, the evolution of
the process of globalization is rapidly exposing the simplistic assumptions held
by some of the fervent political promoters of globalization. The expansion of
markets across the world is not only reducing the capacity of developing
countries to act in unison; it is also exposing divisions among rich countries.
It is empowering new actors (China), reopening old rivalries (Russia), and
revealing the weakness of seemingly strong emergent powers (India and
Brazil). It exposes the persistent inability of the international community to
manage conflict in regions of the world that have endured protracted conflict
since the end of the Second World War. It is uncertain whether the seemingly
intractable political scenario of the world today will, ultimately, benefit many
or even some developing countries. Unfortunately, what is plain is that most of
the underlying economic and political issues that prompted the unity of
developing countries in the 1950s and 1960s have yet to be seriously addressed
by the international community.
31
The Bandung Ethic and International

Human Rights Praxis
Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow
obiora chinedu okafor *
introduction
Between April 18 and 24, 1955, a group of twenty-nine African and Asian states
gathered in Bandung, Indonesia, for the very first Afro-Asian summit in
recorded human history.1 Almost every single African and Asian state that
was independent at the time was represented at Bandung.2 It is no wonder
then that this moment is widely regarded in the literature as “the foundational
moment of the Third World.”3 Issued on April 24, 1955, the Conference’s
Final Communiqué4 captured what I refer to in this chapter as the Bandung
ethic. This conference also inspired a long line of subsequent meetings of the
same kind and heralded the emergence of a relatively new political and
socioeconomic movement in world affairs5 – one that eventually included
Latin American and the Caribbean states.6 The Non-Aligned Movement
(NAM) and the Group of 77 states (or the G-77) represent differing (though
related) forms, dimensions, and iterations of this broad movement.7
*
I am grateful to Herman Gill for his excellent research assistance.
1
See The Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Republic of Indonesia (ed.), “Final Communiqué of
the Asian-African Conference of Bandung (April 24, 1955),” Asia-Africa Speak from Bandung,
pp. 161–169.
2
See G.M. Kahin, The Afro-Asian Conference: Bandung, Indonesia, April 1955 (Ithaca: Cornell
3
See R. Burke, “The Compelling Dialogue of Freedom: Human Rights at the Bandung
Conference” 28 Human Rights Quarterly 947 (2006), p. 948.
4
Ibid. 5
See Kahin, “The Afro-Asian Conference,” p. 2.
6
See R. Abdulgani, The Bandung Connection (Singapore: Gunung Agung, 1981), pp. v–vi.
7
Ibid. Regarding the Non-Aligned Movement, see the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM),
www.nam.gov.za (accessed June 26, 2014); and S. Morphet, “Multilateralism and the Non-
Aligned Movement: What Is the Global South Doing and Where Is It Going?” 10 Global
Governance 517 (2004). On the G-77, see www.g-77.org (accessed June 26, 2014); and
515
516 Obiora Chinedu Okafor
Although the Bandung Conference took place several decades ago, some
would maintain nevertheless that its spirit is not yet dead – that it remains as
relevant as ever today.8 Not everyone might fully agree, but whether or not the
Bandung Spirit is now yesterday’s affair, it is important to inquire whether the
nature of the inspirations and motivations behind the convening of Bandung,
the particular modes of struggle favored at that conference, and the specific
outcomes of that historic meeting suggest anything to us about the character
and orientation of international human rights praxis today, as compared to
yesterday? Has that praxis changed at all since and as a result of Bandung, and
if so, to what degree? Has it aligned to any extent with what might be styled the
Bandung ethic? From the perspective of what Bandung appears to have
represented to the bulk of those who convened that meeting, and from the
point of departure of the Bandung ethic, are there any continuities or discon-
tinuities from international human rights praxisis past that leap to the eye
when one trains one’s gaze on that praxis today? Has everything remained
more or less the same today with international human rights praxis in spite of
Bandung and the broad ethic it pushed to the fore of global relations? Or has
anything changed significantly as a result?
These related questions are especially relevant and important since “human
rights” was, so to speak, present at Bandung.9 Given this fact, it makes sense
that a book such as the current one, devoted as it partly is to the relationship
between Bandung and international law, pay some attention to the relation-
ship of the Bandung ethic to the character and orientation of international
human rights praxis today.
It should also be noted that much of the contents of this book does
constitute a timely and important addition to the critical Third World
approaches to international law (TWAIL) literature on Bandung. For, if
Makau Mutua is correct that critical TWAIL scholars like many of the
contributors to this book “stand on the shoulders of Bandung,”10 then it is
also appropriate that these scholars reflect systematically and publicly in this
way on Bandung, its spirit, and its broad ethic.
In a bid to achieve its objectives, the chapter is organized into five parts,
this introduction included. In the second section, the meaning, character,
M. Martin, “The Group of Seventy-Seven (G77) and a Third World Secretariat” 75

Commonwealth Journal of International Affairs 220(1986).
8
See Abdulgani, Bandung Connection, pp. 1–8.
9
See Burke, “Compelling Dialogue,” p. 948.
10
See M. Mutua, “What Is TWAIL?” 94 American Society of International Law 31(2004),
pp. 33–34.
The Bandung Ethic and International Human Rights Praxis 517
and orientation of the Bandung ethic are explored in the hopes of arriving at
a working understanding of that concept. The third section discusses the
continuities that might leap to the trained eye in the character and workings
of international human rights, despite the emergence decades before now of
the Bandung ethic and its propagation and circulation in international
relations since then. In the fourth section, the discontinuities that have
characterized international human rights praxis since, and (partly) as a
result of, the propagation and circulation of the Bandung ethic are exam-
ined.11 The fifth section ends the chapter by offering a few concluding
remarks.
the bandung ethic

Given the nature of the overarching goals of this chapter, it is important at this
juncture to develop a working understanding of the expression “the Bandung
ethic.” This is necessary if our discussion, in subsequent sections of the
chapter, of the relationship between that concept and contemporary inter-
national human right praxis is to make sense.
Some insight into aspects of what this expression, as it is used in this
chapter, might denote, is offered in Fouad Ajami’s decades-old conclusion
that “the men [and women] who met in Bandung were dreamers . . . who
wanted their societies to enter the world on more equitable terms.”12 The key
word here is equity, which in turn invokes the concept of equality (all on a
global scale).13 And an aspect of this ethic of global equality that was central to
the motivations and outcomes of the Bandung Conference was the insistence
on the part of the Afro-Asian states there gathered on the agency of their
peoples (whatever the gap between state and society in these countries), on
charting their own courses, on finding their own ways, and on the preservation
of their newfound autonomy and independence (howsoever porous and
illusory these later turned out to be).14
It is no wonder then that, as testified to by both its communiqué and studies
of its proceedings, in addition to some other issues and concerns that were on
11
Space constraints do not allow for a full analysis of the relationship between the Bandung ethic
and the international human rights praxis today. Only systematic and illustrative sketches of
some of these relationships are developed.
12
See F. Ajami, “The Fate of Nonalignment” 59 Foreign Affairs 366 (1980–1981), p. 368.
13
For a discussion of the concept of global (in)equality, see, e.g., T. Pogge, “An Egalitarian Law
of Peoples” 23 Philosophy and Public Affairs 195 (1994).
14
See The Ministry of Foreign Affairs, “Final Communiqué.”
the mind of participating delegations,15 the Conference considered and held

dear issues related to imperialism. This included issues such as the following:
colonialism (which at the time was still being experienced almost everywhere
in its bare-knuckle forms); self-determination (which stood normatively
opposed to colonialism); neocolonialism (which even then had begun to
trouble not a few of these countries); South-South cooperation (a necessary
bulwark against what was considered by many as the socioeconomic and
political tyranny of the great powers); sovereignty/nonintervention (seen as a
normative defense against undue outside manipulation and control); and
respect for fundamental human rights (howsoever differently contemplated
by the various delegations there represented).16
It is also no wonder then that, as others have noted, “Bandung [also]
signaled a refusal to accept the bipolar scheme, to join the superpower
competition, or subscribe to either of the mutually exclusive ideologies on
which that competition rested.”17 This was the stance that was later on
christened “non-alignment.”18
With regard to those aspects of the discussions, deliberations, and consensus
at Bandung that were explicitly framed in human rights terms, it is important
to underline some of the disagreements that were present at that meeting over
questions of the proper conception and praxis of human rights. Behind the
Communiqué’s broad and “full support of the fundamental principles of
human rights as set forth in the Charter of the United Nations”19 and the fact
that it “took note of the universal declaration of Human Rights as a common
standard of achievement for all peoples and all nations,”20 there was some
variation in the true attitudes of some delegations to these questions. For
example, it is clear that [then] Communist China could hardly have sub-
scribed fully to this very strong universalist approach, at least not at the relevant
time, and many other Afro-Asian states (such as Singapore and Malaysia)
would later reject this strong universalism, albeit to varying extents. Of course,
15
As, for example, the shadow that Communist China supposedly set over Asia. See D. Kimche,
The Afro-Asian Movement: Ideology and Foreign Policy of the Third World (New York: Praeger,
1966), p. 59.
16
See The Ministry of Foreign Affairs, “Final Communiqué.” See also http://franke.uchicago
.edu/Final_Communique_Bandung_1955.pdf (accessed June 27, 2014); and G.H. Jansen,
Nonalignment and the Afro-Asian States (New York: Praeger, 1966), Appendix A.4, p. 419. See
also Kahin, The Afro-Asian Conference, p. 1.
17
See H.W. Brands, The Specter of Neutralism: The United States and the Emergence of the Third
World, 1947–1960 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1989), p. 3.
18
See Ajami, “Fate of Nonalignment.”
19
See The Ministry of Foreign Affairs, “Final Communiqué,” Section C, pp. 5–6.
20
Ibid. See also Burke, “Compelling Dialogue,” p. 952.
almost needless to say, the issue of the actual human rights praxis of states has
always been a whole other matter, not just in the Third World but the world
over as well.21 And so the tension between the universality and relativity of
human rights (in almost all its shades) was present at Bandung, however
subtly.
At Bandung, Third World unity and South-South cooperation were con-
ceived in terms of “the ethic of solidarity.”22 Even since then, these particular
notions of unity and cooperation have remained key modes of the anti-
imperialist and pro–Third World struggle. This approach was inspired by
the work of great anti-imperialist theoreticians such as Amilcar Cabral, who
once declared that, “we consider that unity is a means but not an end.”23
Importantly, such an attempt at forging unity among the generally weaker
Third World states did not proceed in ignorance of the fact of great diversity
among Afro-Asian peoples and states, let alone in the entire geopolitical
South. Indeed, it proceeded precisely because of that diversity. The fact that
“Afro-Asia [let alone the entire Third World] provides a vast canvas to paint, so
vast, indeed, that individual details tend to blur and become indistinct,”24 and
that the diversity of the Third World was more or less on display at Bandung,25
should not lead inexorably to the conclusion that there was no political
solidarity on display at Bandung.26 In any case, this should not make us reject
the possibility of such solidarity manifesting in undulating fashion, in ebbs and
flows, depending on the issue and the context.27 For, the vast majority of Afro-
Asian (and Third World) peoples – and their states – almost always have
enough common concerns to almost always ensure that such solidarity is
achieved. The overall point here then is that to the extent that the Bandung
21
See O.C. Okafor and S.C. Agbakwa, “Re-Imagining International Human Rights Education in
Our Time: Beyond Three Constitutive Orthodoxies” 14 Leiden Journal of International Law
563 (2001), pp. 566–73. See also M. Mutua, “Savages, Victims and Saviors: The Metaphor of
Human Rights” 42 Harvard International Law Journal 201 (2001); Baxi, The Future of Human
Rights; U. Baxi, “‘A Work in Progress’?: The United States’ Report to the United Nations’
Human Rights Committee” 35 Indian Journal of International Law 34 (1995); U. Baxi,
“Random Reflections on the [Im]possibility of Human Rights,” www.pdhre.org/dialogue/
reflections.html (accessed October 30, 2013); and P. Houtondji, “The Master’s Voice –
Remarks on the Problem of Human Rights in Africa” in UNESCO, Philosophical Foundations
of Human Rights (Paris: UNESCO, 1986), pp. 320–332.
22
See Kimche, Afro-Asian Movement, p. v.
23
See A. Cabral, Unite et Lutte, II (1975), pp. 226–231, reproduced in P. Braillard and M.-R.
Djalili, The Third World and International Relations (London: Frances Pinter, 1984), p. 36.
24 25 26
See Kimche, Afro-Asian Movement, p. v. Ibid, pp. 66–67. Ibid, pp. 73–74.
27
See R. P. Anand, “Attitude of the Asian-African States toward Certain Problems of
International Law” 15 International and Comparative Law Quarterly 55 (1966).
ethic encompasses an aspect of solidarity, that aspect is not illusory and should
factor in some way into any analysis of Bandung and its effects on world affairs.
Thus, in sum, the Bandung ethic weaves together the aspects of anti-
imperialism, independence, agency, global equality, respect for fundamental
human rights (whatever the diversity in its conception at the Conference), the
uplifting of the material, political, and even psychological conditions of Afro-
Asian peoples, and Third World solidarity. Yet, the dominant strain within this
ethic is one of global equality, Third World independences/agencies, and the
improvement of the conditions of Third World peoples.
continuities
To what extent has international human rights praxis remained impervious
over time to the dictates of this broad Bandung ethic? To what extent has that
discipline resisted successfully the changes that should have occurred if it were
to imbibe, internalize, and be firmly oriented toward the Bandung ethic?
Have continuities marked (and even marred) the discipline in spite of the
circulation and projection since 1955 of the Bandung ethic? While space
constraints do not allow a full treatment of these questions here, the consider-
ation of a few examples of the kinds of continuities referred to above will
suffice to illustrate the position.
First, international human rights praxis is (with ebbs and flows) still as
captive today as it was at the time of the Bandung Conference to what might
be referred to as the Western (and great power) super-gaze (i.e., the gaze of the
dominant elements in the West). With rare exceptions such as apartheid and
perhaps the dumping of toxic waste, what even gets to be viewed and named
in the dominant discourse as a human right violation, what gets assigned that
consequential appellation, has been disproportionately (though not totally)
shaped by Western opinion and imprimatur. And even when the struggle to
style certain conduct a human rights violation has been initiated or led by one
of more Third World states (such as African states in relation to apartheid and
the dumping of toxic waste), without the imprimatur of the strongest Western
states (who constitute a tiny percentage of the number of states in the world
and house a relatively puny number of the world’s population), that struggle
has tended to face a huge – and sometimes insurmountable – obstacle to its
success.28 In spite of the undulating but persistent projection of the Bandung
28
See, e.g., A. Klotz, Norms in International Relations: The Struggle against Apartheid (Ithaca:
Cornell University Press, 1995); and C.U. Gwam, Toxic Waste and Human Rights
(Bloomington: Authorhouse, 2010).
ethic in global relations by many forces (states, groups such as the G-77,
peoples, social movements, NGOs, and so on), little has changed in this
regard. In the circumstances, the only reasonable explanation for this kind
of relative stasis in the character and orientation of international human rights
praxis is the vastly disproportionate global power that is wielded by these most
powerful Western states, peoples, and groups (where “power” is seen not
merely in military, economic, and political terms, but also in ideational and
social senses).
A recent demonstration of the ways in which the exertion of such global
power has tended to work in the period between Bandung and today to almost
pervert our vision of social reality and shape what gets viewed as a human
rights violation, is the difference in the ways in which the crushing of protests
in Egypt and the Ukraine has been received in the dominant (and especially,
the popular) human rights discourse. The Egyptian Army (led by a general
considered to be friendly to the West) brutally crushes a peaceful sit-in and in
the process kills hundreds of clearly peaceful Islamists who were protesting
what is by any reasonable measure a military coup against the freely elected
but Islamist Morsi government, and this massacre is followed, at best, by a
whimper of protest, and largely by equivocation and ambivalence, in official
and mass media circles, as well as within civil society itself, in the most
powerful Western countries.29 But when the Ukrainian police under the
Victor Yanukovich government (considered unfriendly to the West) storms a
more or less peaceful protest in Kiev, with comparatively far less casualties, a
deluge of Western leaders’, civil society and mass media voices is raised in the
loudest possible decibels, with very little or no equivocation or ambivalence,
against this “outrage on human rights.”30 To be sure, some in Western and
non-Western civil society did condemn both incidents (whatever the differ-
ences in their intensity and sincerity),31 but the more powerful of the Western
29
See, e.g., “Kerry Says Egypt Military Was ‘Restoring Democracy’ in Ousting Morsi,” New York
Times (Aug. 1, 2013), www.nytimes.com/2013/08/02/world/middleeast/egypt-warns-morsi-
supporters-to-end-protests.html?_r=0 (accessed July 4, 2014); and “Violent Crackdown
in Egypt Crushes Hope for Political Reconciliation,” Globe and Mail (Aug. 14, 2013),
www.theglobeandmail.com/news/world/violent-crackdown-in-egypt-crushes-hope-for-political-
reconciliation/article13778066/ (accessed July 4, 2014).
30
See, e.g., “Ukraine Forces Retreat ceding Square to Protests,” New York Times (Dec. 11, 2013),
www.nytimes.com/2013/12/12/world/europe/police-storm-kiev-square-as-crisis-grows.html?
pagewanted=all (accessed July 4, 2014); and “World Leaders Condemn Ukraine Bloodshed,”
Time (Feb. 19, 2014), http://world.time.com/2014/02/19/world-leaders-condemn-ukraine-
bloodshed/ (accessed July 4, 2014).
31
See, e.g., the recent report by Amnesty International on the serious and widespread human
rights violations by the new el Sissi regime in Egypt, which is essentially the same regime that
leaders and mass media, and the bulk of civil society, tended to exhibit the
kind of bias outlined above. To the discerning mind, this should exemplify the
ways in which the Western super gaze plays a disproportionately powerful role
in shaping the living international human rights discourse and praxis. The
gaze of the less powerful agents in our largely hierarchical world did not really
matter all that much here, and is almost completely displaced by the super
gaze of the most powerful Western agents.
A related continuity in the character and orientation of international
human rights praxis is that, despite the insistence at Bandung (and since then)
on global equality, Third World agency and anti-imperialism, that praxis
is still virtually as unidirectional in flow as it was at the time of Bandung. As
has been argued elsewhere, international human rights praxis (past and
present) has tended to be defined by a one-way traffic paradigm in which
human rights knowledge, scrutiny, and supervision tend to flow from those
parts of the world, largely the West (which supposedly invented human rights,
know almost everything about it already, and observe it almost to the letter), in
the direction of those regions of the world, largely the Third World (which
apparently did not invent human rights, which tend to know very little – if
anything – about it, and which hardly ever observe its tenets).32 It has also been
pointed out in support of this argument that international human rights
programs and clinics in North America tend to focus heavily on the Third
World and not on their own region;33 and that the United States – at one
extreme – rarely thinks of itself as a proper candidate for human rights
scrutiny.34
As importantly, it is noteworthy that in spite of the aspect of solidarity that
co-constitutes the broad Bandung ethic, South-South (i.e., intra–Third
World) human rights cooperation, be it ideational or practical, is still in its
youth today, and has not grown nearly as much as might have been expected
by those who foresaw the imperative and promise of Third World unity at
crushed the peaceful sit-ins of the Islamists. See “Egypt ‘Failing at Every Level’ of Human
Rights,” BBC News (July 3, 2014), www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-28147913 (accessed
July 4, 2014).
32
See Okafor, “Re-Imagining International Human Rights.” See also Mutua, “Savages, Victims
and Saviors; U. Baxi, The Future of Human Rights; Baxi, “Work in Progress”; Baxi, “Random
Reflections”; and Houtondji, “The Master’s Voice,” 320–332.
33
See T. Ezer and S. Deller Ross, “Fact-Finding as a Lawmaking Tool for Advancing Women’s
Human Rights” 7 Georgetown Journal of Gender & Law 331 (2006), p. 331; and J. Bond,
“Global Classroom: International Human Rights Fact-Finding as Clinical Method” 28
William Mitchell Law Review 317 (2001), pp. 320–324. For a critique of this tendency, see
Okafor, “Re-Imagining International Human Rights,” pp. 566–583.
34
Baxi, “Work in Progress.”
Bandung, as a bulwark against the overall rapaciousness of the global power

environment. This is a startling continuity since the Bandung era in the
inability of the Third World to muster as common a front as is possible (their
main means of effective resistance) against the domination of international
human rights praxis by the most powerful Western states. To be sure, continu-
ous efforts at South-South human rights cooperation have been made, and
have even succeeded at times (e.g., in pushing the anticolonial, anti-
apartheid, anti–toxic waste, anti–unilateral sanctions agendas through the
UN Human Rights Council).35 But these efforts are nowhere near their
optimal, and are in fact closer to the Bandung baseline for assessment than
to their optimal point. While here is not the place to discuss the reasons for the
existence of this wide gap, suffice it to note that the propagation and circula-
tion of the Bandung ethic has not, thus far, led to the optimization of the
practical forms of human rights solidarity that is possible among Third World
countries and their peoples. It is no wonder then that a recent Report of the
UN Human Rights Council Advisory Committee has called for much greater
efforts to be made in the direction of South-South human rights
cooperation.36
Another feature (or perhaps orientation) of international human rights
praxis that has persisted in spite of the Bandung ethic is that to the extent that
it sets out to help author the wiping out of global impoverishment and
material want, the geographic focus of this aspect of its work has hardly shifted.
This is largely because what Upendra Baxi has mellifluously styled the “geog-
raphies of injustice”37 has remained more or less stable in the sixty years or
so since the Bandung conference. By this is meant the fact that the vast
majority of the extremely “impoverished” and “deprived” peoples of this
world still inhabit a broad geographic zone that closely maps onto the territor-
ies in which the vast majority of the poor people lived at the time of the
Bandung conference. This has been so notwithstanding the huge gains made
since Bandung in the area of the alleviation of extreme poverty in countries
like China and Brazil, and despite the similar but much less dramatic
rising tides in some other Third World countries. This level of geographic
continuity in the incidence of extreme poverty is simply indisputable. At the
35
See, e.g., Klotz, Norms in International Relations; and Gwam, Toxic Waste.
36
See Preliminary Study of the Human Rights Council Advisory Committee on the Enhancement
of International Cooperation in the Field of Human Rights, A/HRC/AC/12/CRP.2 (June 2014),
section vi.
37
See U. Baxi, “Operation Enduring Freedom: Toward a New International Law and Order?” in
A. Anghie, B. Chimni, K. Mickelson, and O. Okafor (eds.), The Third World and International
Order: Law, Politics and Globalization (Leiden: Martinus Nijhoff, 2003), p. 46.
very least, such Third World–centered global socioeconomic inequality

remains “as acute as ever.”38
A related continuity in international human rights praxis since Bandung is
that economic and social (ES) rights remain more or less marginalized today
in the relevant texts, discourses, and practices, in spite of the Bandung ethic’s
insistence on global socioeconomic equity and the uplifting of the material
conditions of Third World peoples. The fuller enjoyment of ES rights is of
course an important, if not minimum, condition for the elimination of
extreme poverty. Now, the extent of the marginalization of ES rights has of
course lessened in the time between Bandung and today, in part as a result
of the struggles of both Third World and like-minded states/activists/
peoples.39 For instance, ES rights are now justiciable within the legal systems
of a number of countries, such as South Africa40; the African Commission
on Human and Peoples’ Rights has issued a number of forward-looking
decisions which take ES rights very seriously41; the Court of Justice of the
Economic Community of West African States has acted similarly42; the UN
Committee on Economic Social and Cultural Rights has worked assiduously
to bridge the conceptual gap between civil/political (CP) rights and ES rights
(including through innovations such as the concept of minimum core
obligations)43; and UN documents now consistently proclaim the equality,
indivisibility, and interdependence of all categories of human rights.44 Yet,
even the mere fact that only a relatively small number of countries have
thought it fit to place ES rights on the same footing as CP rights in their
constitutions is most telling as to the continued marginalization of ES rights
in our time.45
Lastly, given the strong pro-autonomy/agency and anti-imperialist streak of
the Bandung ethic, it is significant that in all-too-many cases (if not in almost
all cases), the framework (and not necessarily the details) of the socioeconomic
and political policies of Third World states still tend to be directed from
outside their borders, usually by one or more of the most powerful Western
states, or by some institution under their effective collective direction and
38
See Ajami, “Fate of Nonalignment.”
39
See P. Alston and R. Goodman, International Human Rights (New York: Oxford University
Press, 2012).
40
Ibid.
41
See, e.g., Social and Economic Rights Action Centre v. Nigeria (referred to as the Ogoni Case),
15th Activity Report 2001–2002, Annex V.
42
See, e.g., SERAP v. Nigeria, Suit No. ECW/CCJ/APP/0808 (on the right to education).
43 44 45
See Alston, International Human Rights. Ibid. Ibid.
control.46 This has remained so, with ebbs and flows, since and in spite of
Bandung, and despite the flow of much smaller, intra–Third World counter-
currents such as the rise of China to a significant measure of global power47;
Chinese influence across the Third World (especially on the African contin-
ent)48; a more modest measure of Indian economic influence around the
world49; the subregional sway of Nigeria in West Africa50; the rise of South
Africa to a modest measure of regional economic power51; and the open
resistance of some Third World states (such as Venezuela) to such great power
influence at one or more points in their existence.52 Kwame Nkrumah, one of
the great anti-imperialist theorists once wrote that
the essence of neo-colonialism is that the State which is subject to it is, in
theory, independent and has all the outward trappings of international
sovereignty. In reality its economic system and thus its political policy is
directed from the outside . . . Neo-Colonialism is also the worst form of
imperialism. For those who praxis it, it means power without responsibility
and for those who suffer from it, it means exploitation without redress.53
Given this time-hallowed and accurate definition, it becomes fairly clear from
the above discussion that sixty years or so after Bandung, almost all of the
Third World peoples are – to varying degrees – still in the throes of neocolo-
nialism. It is no wonder that former UN Assistant Secretary-General Sashi
Tharoor recently warned that it would be most mistaken even today to
46
See, e.g., O.C. Okafor, “Re-Conceiving ‘Third World’ Legitimate Governance Struggles in
Our Time: Emergent Imperatives for Rights Activism” 6 Buffalo Human Rights Law Review
1(2000).
47
See D. Shambaugh, China Goes Global: The Partial Power (New York: Oxford University
Press, 2013).
48
See, e.g., A.C. Alves, “China’s ‘Win-Win’ Cooperation: Unpacking the Impact of
Infrastructure for Resources Deals in Africa” 20 South African Journal of International Affairs
207 (2013).
49
See D. Wagner and D. Jackman, “China and India’s Battle for Influence in Asia,” The
Huffington Post, www.huffingtonpost.com/daniel-wagner/china-and-indias-battle-f_b_833371
.html (accessed July 4, 2014).
50
See CNN, “Nigeria: West Africa’s Economic Powerhouse” (Sept. 27, 2010), www.cnn.com/
2010/WORLD/africa/09/17/nigeria.country.profile/; and BBC News, “How Nigeria has
Affected the Rest of Africa” (Sept. 20, 2010), www.bbc.com/news/world-africa-11429067
(accessed July 4, 2014).
51
See IMF Survey Magazine (Oct. 25, 2012), www.imf.org/external/pubs/ft/survey/so/2012/
car102412a.htm (accessed July 4, 2014).
52
See, e.g., The Guardian (Feb. 18, 2006), www.theguardian.com/world/2006/feb/18/usa
.venezuela (accessed July 4, 2014).
53
See K. Nkrumah, Neo-Colonialism: The Last Stage of Imperialism (London: Thomas Nelson,
1965), p. xi.
discount “the messy afterlife of colonialism” in our study of and reactions to

international relations.54
These are some of the ways in which international human rights praxis has
remained impervious to the dictates of the Bandung ethic, and resisted
successfully the changes that should have occurred if that praxis were to
imbibe, internalize, and be firmly oriented toward that ethic.
discontinuities 55
Having established in the last section that, despite the propagation and
circulation of the Bandung ethic over the last sixty or so years, there is a
significant measure of continuity even until this day in the nature and
orientation of international human rights praxis, the question that remains is
whether there has been significant changes or alterations in the character or
orientation of international human rights praxis, or in the major tasks that
confront it, since and because of Bandung? While there have, of course, been
a number of such alterations, not all of them may be viewed as positive from
the point of view of Third World states/peoples. And here again, space
constraints dictate that only a number of them will be discussed.
One of the more noticeable changes that have occurred since, and in part
because of, Bandung is an important alteration in the nature of the major task
that confronts international human rights praxis. Formal colonialism has been
delegitimized and the blatant forms of that institution have suffered near-total
eradication in real life. Except for Palestine, the Western Sahara, and perhaps
two or three other places, it would be extremely difficult to find formal
colonialism anywhere in the world today. Fouad Ajami was correct is pointing
this out in 1981, and Sashi Taroor was even more justified in announcing it
about two decades later.56 In any case, this is now so obviously a truism that its
adumbration should not detain us here. Suffice it to say that even mere formal
independence has had its benefits for Third World states and peoples, and has
helped reshape the list of major tasks that confront international human rights
praxis. With a few exceptions, formal colonialism – an egregious human rights
violation – is no longer one of these tasks.
54
See S. Tharoor, “The Messy Afterlife of Colonialism” 8 Global Governance 1 (2002).
55
A small portion of this section is taken from O.C. Okafor, “On the Patchiness, Promise and
Perils of ‘Global’ Human Rights Law,” Diaspora Scholars Lecture, Nigerian Institute of
Advanced Legal Studies (2011), pp. 41–43.
56
See Ajami, “Fate of Nonalignment,” p. 368; and Tharoor, “Messy Afterlife.”
What is more, this huge alteration in the level of unacceptability of formal

colonialism has meant that global power (howsoever stable, morphed, or
transformed) is today not nearly as free as it was at the time of the Bandung
Conference to write international human rights texts or author international
human rights praxis. Global power must now contend with one or two new
Third World power centers,57 as well as with the emergence into formal
international life of nearly two hundred (Third World) states with a tendency
to dominate the membership of many (though clearly not all) of the bodies
that write the relevant texts and author the related praxis.58 This situation has
helped alter the global power matrices within which international human
rights praxis must circulate and operate, and reorient that praxis itself
(however modestly) toward greater alignment with the Bandung ethic. Global
power must now also contend with the existence and activities of peoples’
movements in the Global South and the transnational networks they have
sometimes formed to leverage forms of Western civil society influence in the
service of Third World goals (e.g., the anti-land mines and anti-damn
movements).59
Another way in which the global power matrices that help shape the
content and orientation of international human rights praxis, and against
which that praxis often operates, have altered significantly in the period
between Bandung and the present is through a socioeconomic and political
development that is largely internal to the Third World itself.60 The rise to a
measure of global socioeconomic and political influence (however limited) of
57
For example, the rise of China has altered many global political and socioeconomic
calculations. See Shambaugh, China Goes Global.
58
For example, although sponsored by Russia, the study conducted by the Human Rights
Council Advisory Committee (HRCAC) on the highly controversial issue of “Promoting
Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms through a Better Understanding of Traditional
Values of Humankind,” pursuant to Human Rights Council Resolution A/HRC/RES/16/3 of
April 8, 2011, was largely pushed through by the large Third World majority on the UN Human
Rights Council. While the necessity for this study appeared to make a lot of sense to almost all
Third World states and some others, it was opposed to varying degrees by most Western
countries and most Western NGOs. The HRCAC’s Report on this study is documented as UN
Doc. A/HRC/22/71, of Dec. 6, 2012.
59
See, e.g., B. Rajagopal, International Law from Below (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2003); and M. Cameron, To Walk without Fear: The Global Movement to Ban
Landmines (Don Mills: Oxford University Press, 1998).
60
This is an internal Third World development for the most part because, aside from Russia, all
the countries that are exerting significant power and all the countries against which power is
being exerted continue to identify with the Third World (either as part of the Non-Aligned
Movement and/or the G-77).
the “BRICS” (i.e., Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa),61 and the
more recent and less robust emergence of the MINTs (i.e., Mexico, Indo-
nesia, Nigeria, and Turkey),62 has led to the concretization in our time of
newer global human rights battlefronts, newer axes of power along which both
familiar and unfamiliar human rights axes will increasingly be ground. When
the Chinese build factories or mine crude oil in parts of Africa,63 or Nigerian
banks dominate much of the West African and East African markets,64 labor
and other human rights issues are triggered across a power divide that, though
not quite as acutely asymmetrical as the North-South one, is still significantly
so. While these kinds of relationships have always existed within the Third
World, they have never been as acute as they are today or are likely to become
in the near to mid-term. So, there is a sense in which the albeit limited success
of the project of South-South socioeconomic cooperation that was, under-
standably, favored so strongly at Bandung has produced its own pathology,
created new global fronts in the struggle for human rights, and triggered the
shift of some human rights struggles from a predominantly North-South to
certain South-South axes. Critical Third World international human rights
scholars will do well to pay greater attention to these developments.
Another change that has occurred in international human rights praxis
since, and in part as a result of, Bandung is the significant augmentation of
the capacity of Third World states, civil society groups and peoples to “discip-
line” global power and influence the behavior of the stronger states that has
occurred. Human rights languages are being increasingly harnessed by the
weaker Third World states as they have sought, sometimes with significant
success, to “discipline” the behavior of the stronger states.65 They have sought
to make the stronger states internalize certain values, and reorient their
61
See W. Dan, “Common Development Strategies for Asian and Latin American Developing
Countries: From the Perspective of Foreign Trade” 4 Journal of International Commercial Law
and Technology 143(2009).
62
See “The Mint Countries: Next Economic Giants?” BBC News (Jan. 5, 2014), www.bbc.com/
news/magazine-25548060 (accessed July 4, 2014).
63
See C. Alessi and S. Hanson, “Expanding China-Africa Oil Tie,” Council of Foreign Relations
Backgrounder (Feb. 8, 2012), www.cfr.org/china/expanding-china-africa-oil-ties/p9557
64
See D. O’Neil, “Nigerian Banks Battle for Pan-African Dominance,” Euromoney (Apr. 2013),
www.euromoney.com/Article/3181918/Nigerian-banks-battle-for-pan-African-dominance.htm
65
Here the word discipline is used in a Foucaldian sense. To Foucault, “Discipline ‘makes’
individuals; it is the specific technique of a power that regards individuals both as objects and as
instruments of its exercise. It is not a triumphant power...it is a modest, suspicious power,
which functions as a calculated, but permanent economy.” See M. Foucault, Discipline and
Punish: The Birth of the Prison (London: Allen Lane, 1977)
conduct accordingly – even if not completely. Sensing the hold that human
rights languages now seem to have over the mentalities of the leaders and
peoples of many of these (largely) Western states, Third World states, move-
ments, and NGOs have for long framed and couched in human rights terms
many of the issues that are important to them and, many at time, their
peoples.66 They have also placed many of those issues on the human rights
agenda of various UN organs, such as the General Assembly, the Human
Rights Council, and the Commission on Human Rights (the predecessor of
the second body).67 Thus, this increased capacity of international human
rights praxis to provide a way in which weaker states, peoples, and NGOs
can seek (however modestly) to project their more important ethical, equity,
and other concerns is yet another way in which that praxis has changed in the
intervening years since 1955. While these developments may not be easily or
entirely attributable to the circulation and effect of the Bandung ethic, it
certainly aligns with the strong desire at Bandung to rein in the stronger states
to some degree and enhance Third World agency and global influence. It also
promotes the actualization of that ethic.
66
For example, the issue of controlling their resources and protecting them from colonial-era
style dispossession by stronger states has been framed as the peoples’ right to permanent
sovereignty over resources or the peoples’ right to economic self-determination. See Article 1,
International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights; Article 1, International Covenant on
Economic, Social and Cultural Rights; Article 21, African Charter. Note that although the
African Charter is not legally binding on any of the stronger states of the North that have
traditionally benefited from the exploitation of the resources of African peoples, the document
also functions as a formulation/statement of the ideology of human rights that African states
want to project to the world; i.e., their sense of what should and should not be included in the
list of human rights. The great concern of the Third World for improvements in their living
standards has also been framed as the right of peoples to development. See the UN Declaration
on the Right to Development, Dec. 4, 1986, A/RES/41/128; and Article 22, African Charter. See
also O.C. Okafor, “‘Righting’ the Right to Development: A Socio-Legal Analysis of Article 22 of
the African Charter on Human and Peoples’ Rights” in S. Marks (eds.), Implementing the
Right to Development: The Role of International Law (Geneva and Cambridge: Frederich
Ebert Stiftung and Harvard University, 2008).
67
For example, the concern of the weaker Third World states over the dumping of toxic waste
from the industrialized and more powerful states in the territories has been framed as a human
rights issue and placed squarely on the agenda of the UN Human Rights Council. See U.
Gwam, “Adverse Effects of Illicit Movement and Dumping of Toxic and Dangerous Products
and Wastes on the Enjoyment of Human Rights” 14 Florida Journal of International Law
427(2002), p. 441. And colonialism was delegitimized by a General Assembly resolution. See
the Declaration on the Granting of Independence to Colonial Countries and Peoples, UNGA
Resolution 1514 (XV), Dec. 14, 1960. Importantly, and definitely not coincidentally, this
resolution was passed in the very same year in which the largest number of African states
gained their independence and became UN member states.
Similarly, new methodologies and dramaturgies of international human

rights struggle have also augmented the capacity of Third World states, civil
society, and peoples to reshape our world. The significant success achieved by
global social movements in favor of human rights, in partnership with most of
the weaker Third World states and some other like-minded states, in recon-
structing the normative discourse and realities related to the relationship of
intellectual property rights and essential medicines (especially anti-HIV/AIDS
drugs), and in securing important concessions from the stronger developed
countries, is now very well known.68 The more recent example of the way in
which the Twitter hashtag “bringbackourgirls,” which was conceived by a
female Nigerian activist, “forced” many world powers to take some (albeit
extremely modest and inadequate) action to better support the efforts of the
Nigerian government to rescue about 200 kidnapped Nigerian school girls
further illustrates this point.69 Here, the Bandung ethic’s insistence on Third
World agency and on the need to discipline and constrain global power stands
vindicated in our time, howsoever modestly.
These are some illustrative examples of the discontinuities that characterize
international human rights praxis from the perspective of its relationship to the
Bandung ethic; of the changes that have occurred since, and in part as a result
of, Bandung in the character or orientation of that praxis, or in the main list of
tasks that it confronts.
conclusion
As we have seen, the set of Afro-Asian leaders who gathered at Bandung in
April 1955 in the shadows of global power were certainly quite diverse (though
not as diverse as the group of Third World leaders of our time). Yet, as diverse
as they were in political, social, and economic terms, they were nevertheless
inspired, animated, and later united (in large measure) by a set of common
concerns, aspirations, and stances. It was this relative commonality that
allowed the broad movement that they forged at Bandung to sire what later
became known as “the Third World,” and to, among other things, found its
Non-Aligned Movement and G-77 expressions. It was also this relative com-
monality that allowed them and their countries to more or less unify in
68
See J. Gathii, “Legal Status of the Doha Declaration on TRIPS and Public Health under the
Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties” 15 Harvard Journal of Law and Technology
291(2002).
69
See BBC News (May 7, 2014), www.bbc.com/news/blogs-trending-27315124 (accessed July
4, 2014).
articulating and propagating what I refer to in this chapter as the Bandung

ethic – one that has continued to insist on global equality, Third World
independence and agency, Third World solidarity, and the betterment of
the conditions of all Third World peoples.
The task this chapter tackled was to assess whether in the sixty or so years
since the Bandung Conference, much has really changed in international
human rights praxis when viewed from the perspective of the orientation of
the Bandung ethic and, and exactly to what extent. In any case, to what extent
is the Bandung ethic still relevant today? If formal colonialism is now over,
and international human rights praxis has now been entirely and satisfactorily
transformed in line with the Bandung ethic, and that ethic’s job is now done –
why would it still be relevant in our time? In any case, whatever its relevance
today, is the Bandung Spirit and the ethic it sired now dead? That spirit/ethic
has, of course, gone through ups and downs, and clearly the landscape in
which it operates is no longer exactly the same as it was at the time of the
Bandung Conference, but assertions of its decline have, in general, been
exaggerated. There is still a lot of work for the Bandung ethic to do today.
This is clearly evident from the map and analysis of the continuities and
discontinuities in the relationship of the Bandung ethic to international
human rights praxis that this chapter has provided. At best, there are as many
continuities as there are discontinuities in this relationship. Global power
(including in its newer forms) continues till this day to exert a highly signifi-
cant hold on the character of international human rights praxis and on its
orientation toward almost all of the Third World. Thus, if Amilcar Cabral was
correct in the 1970s that the anti-imperialist struggle “is for the building up of
our countries . . . a life of happiness, a life in which every [wo]man will have the
respect of all [wo]men, where discipline will not be imposed upon us . . . if we
do not achieve this, we will have failed in our duty, the objective of our
struggle,”70 then – in this sense at least – the anti-imperialist struggle is clearly
far from over. For, while imperialism today – including its workings in relation
to international human rights praxis – is more ideational than bare-knuckled, it
still exerts very strong influence in today’s world. The power relationships
“furniture” in our global sitting room has been rearranged, but we are still
largely left with much the same kind of imperialist furniture.
This is a realization that is rendered acute when the story of international
human rights takes for its baseline and adopts as its chief referent an alternative
(largely) anti-imperialist moment like Bandung.
70
See Cabral, Unite et Lutte.
part v.
Another International Law

32
Bandung and the Origins of Third World Sovereignty
antony anghie
introduction
It is surely tempting to treat the Bandung Conference, the historical meeting
of Asian and African states in 1955, as formulating a Third World vision of
sovereignty in much the same way as Westphalia articulated an idea of
sovereignty that dominated in relations among Western states thereafter. This
chapter sketches out the significance of Bandung and the concept of sover-
eignty that emerged from the Conference. First, the chapter studies the
Bandung version of sovereignty in terms of earlier efforts of non-European
states to adapt to international law and establish themselves within that system.
This version of sovereignty, which relied on the idea of Panchsheel or the
“Five Principles of Coexistence,” was devised to protect the interests of Third
World states in the external realm in relation to international affairs. It was
shaped by concerns about colonialism, self-determination, and development.
Next, the chapter assesses the impact of the Bandung moment on contempor-
ary debates and discussions relating to sovereignty and what might be termed
the Third World concept of sovereignty. While the Bandung version of
sovereignty can be seen as a crucial element of the anticolonial campaign of
the Bandung states, it also needs to be understood as adopting a particular idea
of the nation-state. In this respect, the focus is on the impact of the Bandung
version of sovereignty in the internal sphere – that is, the internal political
system of Third World states. The legacy of Bandung is the creation of a series
of tensions – most generally between external and internal sovereignty – that
continue to characterize the politics of developing states.
the background
The origins of Bandung can be traced to African and Asian countries’ fear that
they were left out of the major deliberations at San Francisco leading to the
535
536 Antony Anghie
creation of the United Nations, and that this inaugural omission could signal
their ongoing exclusion from any major role in the management of inter-
national affairs, and this despite decolonization and the emergence of a new
global order. Many of the attendees at Bandung were not part of the United
Nations. Of the fifty states at the San Francisco conference, only twelve were
from the Afro-Asian region.1 India was present, although still a British colony.
Asian and African states were concerned that the Great Powers would domin-
ate the system via the Security Council, and that they would also decide many
of the most crucial international questions outside the Security Council. As
Prime Minister of Ceylon (now Sri Lanka) Sir John Kotelawala asserted, in
the case of the major issues of the time (such as conflicts in Korea and
Southeast Asia), “negotiations for settlement had to be carried on outside
the framework of the United Nations.”2 Tension among the Great Powers
was the source of the greatest international instability, and yet, as a result of the
veto system in the Security Council, the United Nations was severely limited
in its ability to address this fundamental issue. Nehru argued that if the United
Nations proved ineffectual, Asian states might create an Asian Federation “for
their own protection against outside aggression.”3
Kotelawala was to play a major role in suggesting the need for an “Asian
Conference” and in boldly declaring that Ceylon “has important a part as any
to play in the conduct of Asian affairs.”4 He followed up by hosting the
Colombo Conference, held in April 1954 amid significant world events that
confirmed the need for Asian countries to unite and formulate a common
strategy. The Geneva Conference on Indochina began two days prior to the
opening of the Colombo Conference, and Dien Bien Phu fell two days after it
ended. Participants in the Geneva deliberations felt the need to keep the
participants at the Colombo Conference apprised of developments, as they
realized that peace in Southeast Asia would have better prospects for success
with the support of the Asian countries gathered at Colombo. Whatever the
divisions and tensions between the Asian states in Colombo – regarding
alliances and communism, to name but two challenges – the value of meeting
and discussing common concerns with other Asian states survived, and it was
unanimously agreed that Indonesia should host a Conference of Asian and
This chapter is dedicated to the memory of my first teacher of development politics, Herb
Feith – extraordinary teacher and champion of the Third World.
1
Godfrey Jansen, Nonalignment and the Afro-Asian States (Westport, CT: Praeger, 1966), p. 41.
2
See Amitav Acharya, “Norm Subsidiarity and Regional Orders: Sovereignty, Regionalism and
Rule Making in the Third World” (2011) 55 International Studies Quarterly, 1, p. 109.
3 4
Jansen, p. 42. Jansen, p. 144.
Bandung and the Origins of Third World Sovereignty 537
African states. Auspiciously, perhaps, the India-China agreement that

embodied the principles of Panchsheel was announced while the conference
was in session.5
sovereignty, civilization, and panchsheel

By the end of the nineteenth century, international law, authored by the West,
had established the doctrine that only “civilized states” were sovereign. All
states that failed to meet the criteria of civilization lacked proper sovereignty;
as a consequence, virtually all the states of Africa and Asia, including China
and Japan, were regarded as not fully sovereign and thus incapable of partici-
pating on completely equal terms in the international system and in the
making of international law. Non-European states developed different strat-
egies to be accepted as sovereign, civilized members of the community of
nations, and these efforts are now well documented.
Japan made extensive internal reforms to modernize along Western lines,
and fought various wars in Asia while claiming to strictly observe the laws of
war – an assertion not always shared by the victims of these conflicts.6 China,
burdened and humiliated by unequal treaties, sought to establish itself by
participating in various international conferences and in the activities of the
League of Nations.7 The King of Siam employed prominent European and
American lawyers to advise him on modernizing the Thai legal system and
negotiating the termination of unequal treaties. The Latin American states,
which had acquired sovereignty much earlier, argued that they were civilized
and attempted to establish a different “standard of civilization.” Whatever the
private reservations they felt about the validity and appropriateness of the
Western norms, these nations were forced to comply in order to establish that
they were civilized. Few of these states really challenged the West in this
regard, but rather sought to reconfigure their own political institutions in
order to win the ultimate prize of sovereignty. Within this historical trajectory,
Bandung, in its Final Communiqué, sought to outline a Third World vision
of sovereignty that was devised to protect the interests of both the Asian and
African countries and, more generally, assert their ambition to play a role in
the management of international affairs.
5
Ibid., p. 147.
6
Masaharu Yanagihara, “Japan,” in Bardo Fassbender and Anne Peters (eds.), The Oxford
Handbook of the History of International Law (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012),
pp. 475–500; Ibid. Kinji Akashi, “Japan-Europe,” pp. 724–744.
7
Ibid. Shin Kawashima, “China,” pp. 451–475; Ibid. Chi-Huang Tang, “China-Europe,”
pp. 701–724.
538 Antony Anghie
This vision of sovereignty and international relations was largely based on

the concept of Panchsheel, or the Five Principles of Coexistence. These
principles are (1) mutual respect for sovereignty and territorial integrity,
(2) nonaggression, (3) noninterference in internal affairs, (4) equality and
mutual benefit, and (5) peaceful coexistence.8
Nehru first referred to these principles as Panchsheel in September 1954,
purportedly after a meeting with Indonesian Premier Ali Sastroamidjojo, who
had visited India to persuade Nehru to participate in the conference that
would become Bandung. Sastroamidjojo had mentioned the principles,
Pantja Sila, which are the foundation of the Indonesian states: “nationalism,
humanism, freedom, social justice and faith in God.”9 Nehru responded by
propounding his own version of Panchsheel, which took on a different, more
historical, and even spiritual character – not by virtue of the content of the
principles, but because the very idea of five founding principles echoed the
Five Precepts (Panca-sila, from the Sanskrit, meaning five principles) that
represent the minimum moral obligation of a lay Buddhist.10 Nehru himself
appeared to take different positions about the lineage of Panchsheel, claiming
at one time that there was nothing original in the principles themselves, and
later, that the principles are “as old as our thought and culture.”11 Reference is
also made to the famous rock edicts of Asoka.12
In more legal terms, Panchsheel was the basis of relations between China
and India with regard to Tibet. These principles acquired a more elevated and
profound character when they were presented in a joint statement by Nehru
and Zhou Enlai on June 28, 1954, and asserted to be fundamental: “If these
principles are applied not only between various countries but also in inter-
national relations generally, they would form a solid foundation for peace and
security and the fears and apprehensions that exist today would give place to a
feeling of confidence.”13 The five principles became the basis of the agree-
ment between India and China, meant to alleviate tensions caused by border
disputes between the two countries. However, the origins of these principles
8
Jansen, p. 127; see also, George McTurnan Kahin, The Asian-African Conference, Bandung,
Indonesia, April 1955 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press: 1956), p. 8.
9
Jansen, p. 128.
10
See, e.g., Walpola Rahula, What the Buddha Taught (Sri Lanka: Buddhist Cultural Centre,
2006).
11
Jansen, p. 129.
12
For an account of Panchsheel and its ongoing significance, see External Publicity Division,
Ministry of External Affairs, Government of India, “Panchsheel” (2004), available at www.mea
.gov.in/Uploads/PublicationDocs/191_panchsheel.pdf.
13
Jansen, p. 128.
are not especially auspicious, given that war between China and India broke
out in 1962, and that many Indian commentators regarded the five principles
as a “tactic aimed at relaxing vigilance in the opponent by lulling him into a
sense of false security.”14 Nevertheless, the Panchsheel has been foundational
for the Non-Aligned Movement, and was reiterated at the 1961 Belgrade
Conference.
The five principles correspond to some of the most established doctrines
of classic international law as found in the UN Charter. The ideas of
noninterference and mutual respect for sovereignty and territorial integrity
correspond with principles found in Article 2(4) of the Charter, which
prohibits the use of force against the territorial sovereignty of a state; Article
2(7), which prohibits interference by the United Nations in matters within
the domestic jurisdiction of a state; and Article 2(1), which holds that all
sovereign states are equal.
However, the representatives at Bandung were not especially concerned
about the originality or derivation of the principles they were asserting. Their
emphasis on sovereignty and nonintervention is understandable given that
Asian and African countries were just emerging from the humiliations of
colonialism. Further, they believed these principles could be used to articu-
late a new vision of international relations and reform international law, now
that they could participate in numbers within the international system as
equal and sovereign states. The states attending the Conference felt strongly
that they were in a unique position to contribute to international peace and
security because they were not (at least officially) involved in the Cold War
that had so powerfully dominated international relations. These nations
believed they could relieve Cold War tensions by enabling and encouraging
China to enter the international arena. Further, the Bandung states thought
they could facilitate the ongoing process of decolonization, a project that was
far from complete, given the ongoing struggles of the people in Southeast Asia
and Africa.
Given Panchsheel’s heavy emphasis on noninterference, it may seem
anomalous that the Final Communiqué also included a section on human
rights and self-determination that, among other things, “affirmed full sup-
port for the fundamental principles of Human Rights” and took note of the
Universal Declaration of Human Rights. It is clear, however, that this
support was based on the Bandung states’ view that human rights could
be used (1) to advance the cause of self-determination and (2) to protect
14
Ibid.
540 Antony Anghie
colonized peoples from the colonial violence. The Bandung states viewed
self-determination, the acquisition of sovereignty, as “a pre-requisite of the
full enjoyment of all fundamental Human Rights.”15 Further, the Commu-
niqué used human rights to condemn South African apartheid. It is inter-
esting to note that Charles Malik, one of the drafters of the Universal
Declaration, was present at the Conference even though he did not play a
prominent role.
sovereignty, colonialism, and the nation-state

President Sukarno succinctly stated Bandung’s greatest achievement in his
opening speech. It was the first meeting of African-Asian states in history, and
it confronted those newly sovereign states with the question of what they stood
for, both individually and collectively. Sukarno declaimed: “We were sud-
denly confronted with the necessity of giving content and meaning to our
independence when it was finally attained and secured . . . Not material
content and meaning only, but also ethical and moral content.”16
Racism, poverty, and colonialism were the major themes of the
Conference.17 Sukarno warned that colonialism could take many different
forms:
I beg of you, do not think of colonialism only in the classic form which we of
Indonesia, and our brothers in different parts of Asia and Africa, knew.
Colonialism has also its modern dress, in the form of economic control,
intellectual control, actual physical control by a small but alien community
within a nation. It is a skillful and determined enemy, and it appears in many
guises. It does not give up its loot easily. Wherever, whenever and however it
appears, colonialism is an evil thing, and one which must be eradicated from
the earth.
He warns not only of the dangers of neocolonialism – that is, colonialism in

the economic rather than purely political realm – but also, foreshadowing
Fanon, hints that elites within the new nation could be agents of this force.
Sukarno’s concerns were well founded, for even as the United Nations was
promoting the cause of decolonization, real power was shifting to the Security
Council – and, more broadly, in the sphere of economic relations that were so
crucial to the Third World – to the World Bank and the International
15
See Communiqué, Part C.1; for further discussion of this approach to human rights, see
generally Roland Burke, Decolonization and the Evolution of International Human Rights
(Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010).
16 17
See Kahin, p. 41. Ibid., p. 12.
Monetary Fund.18 The newly independent states were hardly represented in

these organizations. The United Nations preserved and created its own
inequalities.
It is understandable that Bandung discussed and reinforced norms of non-
intervention and noninterference. The Bandung states were highly sensitive to
the problem of outright aggression, but also indirect pressure affecting the
states.19 As Acharya argues, furthermore, these “standard norms” – which are
found in the UN Charter, as mentioned earlier – acquire a different signifi-
cance in the particular context of the concerns of the Bandung states, which
were concerned about Western economic and political pressures, the instru-
ments of neocolonialism, and communist infiltration. It is notable that the
Final Communiqué calls for “abstention by any country from exerting pres-
sures on other countries,” a principle on which few comment but that is
radical in its implications, given that the exertion of pressure is an essential
tool of classic diplomacy. This idea that international law should prohibit
“pressure” or “coercion” emerges again in the context of the sustained but
unsuccessful attempts of the developing countries to include it in the Vienna
Convention on the Law of Treaties.
Questions about the meaning of colonialism and the character of sovereignty
emerged in a number of different contexts. Most immediately, Bandung took
place at a time of increasing anticolonial resistance; the British and French
empires were far from willing to relinquish their imperial power, notwithstand-
ing the emergence of countries such as Burma (now Myanmar), India, Pakistan,
and Ceylon (now Sri Lanka). The French had made their intent clear by their
ongoing fighting in Indochina, overcome only by the determination of the Viet
Minh. The British continued to battle nationalist movements in various coun-
tries, such as Kenya, with ferocity, the startling character of which is now made
rendered vivid by recent research and litigation in the English courts.20 Disputes
relating to race and self-determination were ongoing in Palestine, West Irian,
and French North Africa. The Bandung states affirmed the right of self-
determination of the peoples of Algeria, Morocco, and Tunisia.21 The issue of
colonialism, however, emerged in a more unexpected and ambiguous
18
For the broad argument that the UN essentially attempted to preserve the Empire, see Mark
Mazower, No Enchanted Palace: the End of Empire and the Ideological Origins of the United
Nations (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009).
19
Acharya, pp. 411–412.
20
Nkidi Mutua & others v. The Foreign and Commonwealth Office [2012] EWHC 2678 (QB) No.
HQ09X02666; see generally, Caroline Elkins, Imperial Reckoning: The Untold Story of
Britain’s Gulag in Kenya (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 2005).
21
Kahin, p. 17.
542 Antony Anghie
form, when Kotelawala raised the question of “communist colonialism” refer-

ring to “those satellite states under communist domination in Central and
Eastern Europe.”22 Sir John, referring to states such as Albania, Czechoslo-
vakia, Hungary, and Romania, demanded, “And if we are united in our
opposition to colonialism, should it not be our duty openly to declare our
opposition to Soviet colonialism as much as to Western imperialism?”23 The
Conference was thrown into disorder. Much debate exists as to whether in
raising this issue Kotelawala, who was pro-Western in many of his views even if
ardently anticolonial, was acting as an agent for the Western powers, who were
very concerned about Bandung and what it could represent. This position,
however underestimates his strong personality and staunchly ant-
communist views.
The issues of sovereignty and self-determination raised a number of unex-
pected and unresolved questions and problems. For example, while the
Bandung rendition of sovereignty was crucial to the external relations of Third
World states, it was equally important, in retrospect, for the internal political
arrangements and identity of those states. Commenting on the earlier Asian
Relations Conference in Delhi in 1947, Itty Abraham argues that the following
findings emerge:
The first is the absolute acceptance of the nation-state mold by all the
delegates present at the Asian Relations Conference. The Asian political
entities soon to be free were uniformly represented as states composed as
national majorities joined by ethnic or cultural minorities. . . . Communities
marked by difference from these national majorities were being recast as
aliens and outsiders, notwithstanding their long residence in these countries.24
Bandung did little to question this trend. Indeed, it seemed to reinforce it.
Participants at Bandung upheld not only the Western model of sovereignty
but, more specifically, a particular idea of the nation-state, as reflected by their
deliberations and approaches to crucial questions of population and territory.
At Bandung, the question of population and the “alliance” of populations
was important to states such as Indonesia and Thailand, which were extremely
uneasy about the presence of ethnic Chinese, many of whom had lived for
many generations within their borders but who were feared for possessing
divided loyalties. Under the laws of China, which adhered to the principle of
22
James Austin Copland Mackie, in Didier Millet (eds.), Bandung 1955: Non-Alignment and
Afro-Asian Solidarity (2005).
23
Mackie, p. 87.
24
Itty Abraham, How India Became Territorial: Foreign Policy, Diaspora, Geopolitics (Palo Alto:
Stanford University Press, 2014), p. 69.
jus sanguinis as a basis of nationality, these peoples had Chinese nationality.

Indonesia was threatened by the potential spread of communism through
these populations, as a result of which it negotiated agreements with China.
Zhou Enlai agreed that ethnic Chinese could become citizens of Indonesia,
and he urged these people to obey the laws of the countries in which they
were located.25 This initiative, and other reassurances that Zhou provided, did
not completely resolve the issue, but they offered some comfort to Thailand
and Cambodia, and suggested some degree of cooperation and the success of
China and Zhou Enlai in their diplomacy at Bandung. However, this episode
also demonstrates the great uncertainty Southeast Asian states experienced as
they set about the task of creating nation-states, understood to be relatively
homogenous populations that were completely loyal to the new post-
independence state.
Scholars such as Clifford Geertz have analyzed the nationalist challenges
confronting these states.26 The problem was how the “new state” could
present itself as an entity that credibly represented the interests and protected
the identities of the many different ethnic communities it now sought to
govern. Even more problematically, the Western nation-state model of the
sovereign state did not always correspond with indigenous visions of sover-
eignty that had prevailed in Asia for long periods of time. As Thongchai
Winichakul argues, the Thai polity of the nineteenth century had a some-
what different idea of sovereignty, territory, and people than those held by
European powers that relied on their own versions of these concepts for the
crucial purposes of international negotiation and treaty making. As Winicha-
kul points out, when discussing negotiations between the British and Thai-
land in the mid-nineteenth century: “It is evident that Siam did not lack the
terminology and concepts for dealing with the British proposals for boundar-
ies. But considering these definitions closely, we can see that none of them
meant exactly the boundary that the British had in mind.”27 It is not difficult
to imagine how the complex misunderstandings that led to the ongoing
dispute on the Temple of Preah Vihear/Pra Viharn may have arisen.28 Asian
25
Mackie, pp. 84–85; See also, Itty Abraham, “Bandung and State Formation in Post-Colonial
Asia” in Seng Tan and Amitav Acharya (eds.), Bandung Revisited: The Legacy of the 1955 Asian-
African Conference for International Order (Singapore: NUS Press, 2008) pp. 48–68, 58–64.
26
See generally, Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures: Selected Essays (New York: Basic
Books, 1973) Vol. 5019.
27
Thongchai Winichakul, Siam Mapped: A History of the Geo-Body of a Nation (Honolulu:
University of Hawaii Press, 1994), p. 75.
28
Case Concerning the Temple of Preah Vihear (Cambodia v. Thailand) [1962] ICJ Rep 6;
Request for the Interpretation of the Judgment of 15 June 1962 in the Case Concerning the
544 Antony Anghie
societies had distinctive and highly developed traditions of governance and

rule prior to the arrival of the European powers. However the embrace and
adoption of the Western concept of the nation-state that was a prerequisite
for becoming a sovereign state, a goal they all yearned to achieve, inevitably
demanded a transformation of these indigenous traditions, and not all new
states were successful in making these changes without experiencing
ongoing ethnic tensions and, in some cases, long and devastating civil wars.
An understanding of the legal efforts to address these challenges involves a
study not only of the doctrine of self-determination and international law,
but constitution making – an issue that inevitably involved, for most Asian
and African states, a detailed analysis of how to manage potential racial
tensions legally.29 In more extreme cases, the effect of colonialism was not
to transform existing political entities but create entirely new ones, as in the
case of Indonesia.
Many of these tensions emerged in debates about the scope and application
of the doctrine of self-determination. The complexities of the issue emerged
most directly in the case of West Irian, which was a topic at Bandung. The
Conference expressed its support for Indonesia’s position against the Nether-
lands in the dispute over West Irian.30 It was only over a period of time,
however, that the character and the extent of those complexities unfolded. As
Mackie points out, for Indonesia, the West Irian issue was “one of the most
important items on the Bandung agenda”31 and one of the principal reasons
why Indonesia had sought to host the Conference. Indonesia claimed that
West Irian was part of the state of Indonesia, as it had been part of the Dutch
East Indies, of which Indonesia was the successor state.32 The Dutch, for
strategic and other reasons, claimed that people of West Irian were of a
different ethnicity and therefore not part of Indonesia. The Dutch and
Indonesia had entered into an agreement in 1949 that dealt with this issue,
but the wording was vague enough for the Dutch to retain possession of West
Irian. The Dutch then claimed to be intent on fulfilling the requirements of
Article 73 of the United Nations, and guiding the people of West Irian toward
self-determination and independence. It is hard not to see the Dutch position
Temple of Preah Vihear (Cambodia v. Thailand), [2013] ICJ Rep 151, p. 281; Simon
Chesterman, “The International Court of Justice in Asia: Interpreting the Temple of Preah
Vihear Case” (2015) 5 Asian Journal of International Law, 1, pp. 1–6.
29
See, e.g., William Crawley, “A Political Legacy of the British Empire: Power and the
Parliamentary System in Post-Colonial India and Sri Lanka” (2013) 44 Asian Affairs, 2,
pp. 309–311.
30 31 32
See Communiqué, E.2. Mackie, p. 86. Ibid.
as calculated opportunism that had the potential for causing great instability.33
And the argument that ethnicity should be the basis of statehood surely
would have resulted in the destruction of almost every postcolonial Asian
and African state – not least Indonesia itself, which comprises so many
different ethnicities.
This dispute, as with so many in the region, originated with the activities of
the Dutch East India Company, which, in 1660, concluded a treaty with
Tidore, a small island in the Moluccas. Under the terms of the treaty, the
“Papuans, or all of their islands” were characterized as belonging to the king of
Tidore.34 The Dutch made no real attempt to control West New Guinea –
whatever the ostensible rights they acquired through treaties with Tidore –
until the twentieth century, or very close to Indonesian independence.
However, it is very uncertain as to whether these treaties could have provided
any sort of title, given, as a Dutch administrator reported, that the population
of West Papua had “never heard of Tidore.”35
A large range of arguments canvassed questions such as whether Papua was
“Malay” or “Australian” in terms of its flora and fauna, and whether the
population of Papua was racially separate from the people of Indonesia.
Inevitably, while distinctions could be made in the abstract, the Dutch
themselves had treated “Indonesians” and “Papuans” as part of the Dutch
Empire in the East Indies, and it seemed merely strategic to make these
distinctions precisely when the Indonesians were claiming independence
and succession to Dutch territories in the region. The agreement between
the Netherlands and Indonesia providing for the transfer of power to the new
state of Indonesia left the status of West Irian unresolved – or, rather, the
subject of dispute between the two parties. Indonesia claimed it had received
sovereignty over West Irian, whereas the Netherlands claimed that its status
was unresolved. The Dutch claimed that the “people” of West Irian were
entitled to “self-determination.”36
The West Irian issue was among the most sensitive discussed at Bandung.
Indonesia had been careful not to explicitly include it in the agenda, confi-
dent that other states would do so as part of a broader discussion of the central
theme of colonialism.37 Prior to Bandung, the United Nations had refused to
33
See generally, Kalana Senaratne, “Internal Self-Determination: A Critical Third World
Perspective” (2013) 3 Asian Journal of International Law, 2, pp. 331–332.
34
Arend Lijphart, The Trauma of Decolonization: the Dutch and West New Guinea, Vol. 17
(New Haven: Yale University Press, 1966), p. 23.
35 36
Lijphart, p. 24. See generally the range of arguments provided by Lijphart, p. 22–35.
37
See Roeslan Abdulgani, Bandung Spirit: Moving on the Tide of History ([Djakarta] Prapantja,
1964), p. 110.
546 Antony Anghie
support Indonesia’s call for a reopening of negotiations with the Netherlands

regarding the future of West Irian. Eventually, the Conference asserted that it
“supported the position of Indonesia in the case of West-Irian” and “expressed
the earnest hope that the United Nations would assist the parties concerned in
finding a peaceful solution to the dispute.”38
This was hardly the end of the matter. The status of West Irian remained
unresolved, and the New York Agreement of 1962 created a system by which
Indonesia took on the role of “full administrative responsibility” over West
Irian until such time as a referendum could be held in 1969.39 The choice
presented on this occasion was limited, as the question was whether the
people wished Indonesia’s status to be transformed from “administrator” to
“sovereign.”
Indonesia argued that the people of West Irian were too “primitive” to
exercise the right of self-determination in a conventional way;40 the conditions
were such that self-determination in the Irian context required consulting the
appropriate elders. Many African states were disturbed by this argument,
which echoed classic colonial sentiment regarding primitiveness and the
backward nature of the population, which GA Resolution 1514 had sought to
eliminate. Several African states, such as Sierra Leone, questioned Indonesia’s
position that the backwardness of the people and the difficulty of the terrain
justified a procedure that was more about consultation than self-determin-
ation.41 Some African states accused Indonesia of behaving like a colonial
power and betraying the sacred principles of Bandung.42 This episode illus-
trates the challenge that continues to confront many developing countries:
creating coherent and stable nation-states in the aftermath of independence.
The theme of colonialism, a central preoccupation of the Bandung states, is
now taken up by minorities and ethnic groups that regard themselves as
victims of “internal colonialism,” the violence committed by the post colonial
state.43 The communities within those states now assert their “right to self-
determination.”
38
Quoted in Abdulgani, p. 113.
39
The Dutch had proposed a plebiscite supervised by the UN after a period of UN
administration; see, Michla Pomerance, “Methods of Self-Determination and the Argument of
“Primitiveness’” (1974) 12 Canadian Yearbook of Int’l Law, 38, p. 47.
40
Pomerance, pp. 51–52; see in particular p. 55: “In West Iran there exists, as is generally known,
one of the most primitive and undeveloped communities in the world.”
41 42
Pomerance, p. 60. Pomerance, at n. 115.
43
See e.g., Mohammad Shahabuddin, “Liberal Self-determination, Postcolonial Statehood, and
Minorities: The Chittagong Hill Tribes in Context” (2013) 1 Jahangirnagar University Journal
of Law, pp. 77–96.
bandung and the development state

The Bandung states were inevitably concerned with development issues, but
the economic dimensions of the Conference are often overlooked.44 How-
ever, economic cooperation was the first issue in the Final Communiqué,
which began with the assertion: “The Asian African Conference recognized
the urgency of promoting economic development in the Asia-African
region.”45
The Communiqué mentioned the “general desire for economic cooper-
ation among the participating countries on the basis of mutual interest and
respect for national sovereignty.” It was very much outward looking, empha-
sizing that the proposals for cooperation among Bandung states “do not
preclude either the desirability or the need for co-operation outside the region,
including the investment of foreign capital.”46 Technical assistance was
requested; the World Bank was asked to allocate a greater part of its resources
to Asian and African countries, and the Conference recommended “the early
establishment of the Special United Nations Fund for Economic Develop-
ment” and “the International Finance Corporation which should in its activ-
ities the undertaking of equity investment.”47
All this suggests that the conference attendees believed that, as in the
political sphere, the developing countries’ needs and concerns were not
properly reflected in the activities of the existing international economic
institutions. However, it also demonstrates that the Conference was eager to
engage in international commerce. The theme of Permanent Sovereignty
Over Natural Resources, which was to be such a prominent part of the Third
World attempt to reform the international economic system from the 1960s
onward, was not mentioned at Bandung. This is true despite the fact that early
resolutions focusing on that topic had already been passed,48 and that many of
the states at Bandung were soon to be embroiled in conflicts over nationaliza-
tion: for example, Indonesia nationalized parts of the Dutch oil industry
in 1963.
The need to stabilize commodity trade was a crucial aspect of the Bandung
Economic Program. Point 5 of the Communiqué focused on this issue,
44
For a good overview of this dimension of Bandung, see Helen E.S. Nesadurai, “Bandung and
State Formation in Post-colonial Asia,” in Seng Tan and Amitav Acharya (eds.), Bandung
Revisited: the Legacy of the 1955 Asian African Conference for International Order (Singapore:
NUS Press, 2008), pp. 68–105.
45 46 47
Communiqué, Art 1. Communiqué, Art 1. Communiqué, Art 3.
48
General Assembly Res. 626, Right to exploit freely natural wealth and resources, 7th
Session, (1952).
548 Antony Anghie
calling for collective action among members directed at stabilizing commod-

ity prices “through bilateral and multilateral arrangements” and for the adop-
tion of a unified approach on this issue in international forums, including the
United Nations Permanent Advisory Commission on International Commod-
ity Trade. The Conference also called for the diversification of the export
trade of the Asian and African countries through the processing of their raw
materials prior to export, where possible. The view that commodity price
stability was crucial to the economic well-being of developing countries, for
example, was a central part of the UNCTAD initiative, which would serve as
the impetus for the New International Economic Order.
All these recommendations suggest that the Bandung states, while having
different affiliations, shared several common goals. All were intent on achiev-
ing “development” and, far from being internally oriented, regarded participa-
tion in the international economic system as a key aspect of their program.
They were far from “inward looking,” seeking instead to engage with the
international economic system.
The Bandung states adopted a moderate49 and, as in the case of the
Bandung vision of sovereignty, fairly orthodox stance. They sought to partici-
pate on more equal terms within the existing system, rather than to transform
it completely. At this stage, development policy had not become a fierce
subject of controversy, and the Bandung states, while alarmed at the polariza-
tion resulting from the Cold War, believed the existing system could be
suitably adjusted. However, it is most evident that the Bandung states saw no
contradiction or difficulty in articulating a vision of sovereignty that powerfully
asserted the importance of noninterference, even while seeking to further
global trade and investment. Further, if we consider the issue of sovereignty
and development together, we might see the beginnings of what might be
termed “developmental sovereignty” that was primarily focused on achieving
development and attempting to use the cause of development as a substitute
for nationalism.
conclusion
The term “Eastphalia,” coined by the South Korean scholar Kim Sung Won,
describes a model of sovereignty that is evident in the practice of East Asian
states. It emphasizes noninterference in internal affairs.50 Eastphalian
49
Nesadurai, p. 72.
50
See generally, Kim Sung Won, David Fidler, and Sumit Ganguly, “Eastphalia Rising? Asian
Influence and the Fate of Human Security” (2009) 26 World Policy Journal, pp. 53–64; Tom
sovereignty resembles the Bandung model in important respects. It is some-

what anomalous that Eastphalian sovereignty is asserted so forcefully even
when human rights has assumed such global significance, and when Euro-
pean, African, and Latin American states have (albeit in different ways)
subscribed to regional arrangements that impinge significantly on their sover-
eignty. It is clear that the Eastphalian model does not preclude engagement
with international economic affairs. While very unwilling to compromise
what they regard as their political sovereignty – as suggested by ongoing
territorial and maritime disputes in that region, and the reluctance of the
Association of South East Asian Nations to cede sovereignty to the a regional
authority – East Asian states have been most willing to participate in inter-
national economic relations and indeed, are seen as the model for developing
states to pursue.
The East Asian model of development combines a strong state with an
outward-oriented, market-friendly economic policy. We see this dual model
of sovereignty tentatively evident even in Bandung. This model is based on
the idea that a clear distinction can be made between political and
economic sovereignty. China, Japan, and the states of ASEAN are
extremely sensitive to any possible encroachment of political sovereignty,
which is associated with territorial and maritime boundaries. This is sug-
gested by the ongoing and apparently intractable disputes among the East
Asian and Southeast Asian states regarding maritime boundaries in the
South China Sea and disputes about the ownership of various islands. At
the same time, these states have inaugurated the East Asian model of
development, which involves entering into bilateral investment treaties,
free trade agreements, and the whole panoply of international instruments
that further the globalized trade and investment strategies that these coun-
tries have embraced.
In the Nicaragua Case, the International Court of Justice affirmed the
prohibition against intervention in resounding language, as the rule “forbids
all States or groups of States to intervene, directly or indirectly, in internal or
external affairs of other states.”51 The Bandung model of sovereignty con-
tinues to animate many developing countries and shapes their response to
human rights issues and debates about humanitarian intervention. Further,
Panchsheel continues to be invoked and celebrated as a doctrine that helps
Ginsburg, “Eastphalia as the Perfection of Westphalia” (2010) 17 Indiana Journal of Global

Legal Studies, 27, p. 147.
51
Case Concerning Military and Paramilitary Activities in and Around Nicaragua (Nicaragua v.
United States) [1986] ICJ Rep. 14, para. 205.
550 Antony Anghie
ensure a stable and peaceful world order.52 The sixtieth anniversary of the
“Five Principles of Peaceful Coexistence” was celebrated by the Chinese
Government in 2014 with much pomp and circumstance.53 Further, China
and Myanmar state that these basic principles govern their foreign policies,
and the Chinese government asserts that the principles are “diametrically
opposed to power politics” and “transcend social systems and ideologies.”54
Human rights continue to be a component of the modern version of the five
principles, which seems to be hold, understandably, that it is the function of
the state to protect human rights while also suggesting that no external
authority can intervene in the state’s activities in that sphere – unless, of
course, the state has consented to such intervention. The Five Principles
have thus resulted in powerful vision of sovereignty that extends beyond
classic Westphalian sovereignty in its absolutism. In his classis work on
Westphalian sovereignty, Leo Gross argues that it is mediated by the doc-
trine that sovereign states are under an obligation to protect minorities. No
such allowance is made in the Five Principles. Indeed, many developing
countries most fear the threat from within from minorities developing their
own nationalist aspirations and claims to self-determination. The West Irian
question at Bandung presaged a complex and as yet unresolved problem.
The question also arises as to how Panchsheel resolves disputes that arise
from a conflict over the extent of territorial or maritime sovereignty. Doctrines
of nonintervention were not only formulated against the West. Old conflicts
between various precolonial entities continued through the medium of the
nation-state; rivalries between the old Kingdoms of the Thais and Khmers now
emerge in battles between the nation-states of Cambodia and Thailand. In this
sense the precolonial past endured, with ancient battles being replaced
through new political entities. When these rival states claim historical title
52
For an account of how the five principles affected deliberations in the United Nations, and
subsequent instruments such as General Assembly Resolution No. 2625, the “Declaration on
Principles of International Law Concerning the Friendly Relations and Co-operation of States
in accordance with the Charter of the United Nations,” see Miguel de Serpa Soares, “Keynote
Speech at the International Colloquium on the Five Principles of Peaceful Co-existence and
the Development of International Law” (2014) 13 Chinese Journal of International Law 3,
pp. 481–484.
53
See Ankit Panda, “Reflecting on China’s Five Principles, 60 Years Later,” The Diplomat, June
26, 2014.
54
See Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the People’s Republic of China, “China’s Initiation of the
Five Principles of Peaceful Coexistence,” www.fmprc.gov.cn/mfa_eng/ziliao_665539/3602_
665543/3604_665547/t18053.shtml (last visited May 31, 2015); for an important collection of
essays commemorating the sixtieth anniversary, which reflect on the development and ongoing
importance of these principles, see the 2014 publication of the Chinese Journal of International
Law.
to territory or waters, the competing claims of sovereignty are the source of the
conflict. A question arises over whether the modern language of international
law can comprehend and address these conflicts, which originate in a time
that precedes the advent of European colonialism. At least in Southeast Asia,
these questions prove to be extremely difficult. The great achievements of
Bandung must be celebrated, for the Bandung states could only act within the
constraints and demands of their time.55 But in examining the origins of Third
World sovereignty, we might already detect the possibility that among the
most lasting inheritances of Bandung is a series of tensions that the postcolo-
nial state still struggles to resolve. There is a tension generated by the presence
of minorities in virtually all postcolonial states. The postcolonial state must
also assert its political sovereignty even while striving to achieve development,
a project that inevitably involves a loss of control over many of the most
important aspects of economic sovereignty.56 The complex interactions
between sovereignty, colonialism, and development thus continue to unfold.
55
For a superb meditation on the legacies of Bandung and how we should understand them, see
Khan, Chapter 6 in this volume.
56
For a powerful analysis of these themes, seen from the perspective of environmental
sustainability, see Prasenjit Duara, The Crisis of Global Modernity: Asian Traditions and a
Sustainable Future (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015).
33
Letters from Bandung

Encounters with Another International Law
sundhya pahuja*
To read history is good, but even more interesting and fascinating is to help in making
history. And you know that history is being made in our country to-day.
—Nehru, January 1, 19311
introduction
Between 1921 and 1945, Jawaharlal Nehru was imprisoned numerous times for
so-called crimes related to India’s struggle for independence, spending many
years in prison.2 While incarcerated for the second or third time, Nehru began
to write a series of letters to his ten-year-old daughter, Indira. Published not
long after they were written, the letters comprise two books: Letters from a
Father to His Daughter: Being a Brief Account of the Early Days of the World
Written for Children (hereafter Letters), written in 1928 and first published in
19303; and Glimpses of World History, Being Further Letters to His Daughter
Written in Prison, and Containing a Rambling Account of History for Young
*
Thank you to Shaun McVeigh, Adil Khan, Jeremy Baskin, and Om and Asha Pahuja for many
conversations about Nehru, international law, and the political imaginaries of a different time;
to Sara Dehm and Cait Storr for their patient assistance; to Kristen Bakker and the Melbourne
Law Library for excellent support in tracking down dusty old books; and to the participants in
this Bandung project for their enthusiasm and solidarity.
1
Jawaharlal Nehru, Glimpses of World History: Being Further Letters to His Daughter Written in
Prison, and Containing a Rambling Account of History for Young People, 18th ed. (Delhi:
Jawaharlal Nehru Memorial Fund, 2003), p. 4 (letter dated Jan. 1, 1931).
2
See generally Benjamin Zachariah, Nehru (New York: Routledge, 2004) (especially p. ix and
chapters 2–4).
3
Jawaharlal Nehru, Letters from a Father to His Daughter: Being a Brief Account of the Early
Days of the World Written for Children, 33rd ed. (Calcutta: Oxford University Press, 1966).
Letters was first printed by Allahabad Law Journal Press in 1930, then by Oxford University
Press India in 1945. It is still in print.
552
Letters from Bandung 553
People (hereafter Glimpses), written during additional periods of imprison-

ment between October 26, 1930 and August 9, 1933, and first published in
1934.4
This chapter takes those letters as a point of departure for reflecting on the
political work of history-telling in international law, and on the ways in which
people in the Third World may be called by their leaders into relation with
each other and with the world. The reflection is taken up in the context of the
Bandung Conference, an event at which Nehru played a major part. As one of
Nehru’s biographers observed, “If a person had the luxury of choosing a
moment in historical time in which to be remembered, Jawaharlal Nehru
ought to have chosen the year 1955,”5 not least because of his status as a leader
of the decolonizing world.6 This chapter explores the way that Nehru used
history-telling in his letters critically (to cast doubt on the authority of imperi-
alism and imperial law) and creatively (as a way of reauthoring the world). At
Bandung, a similar technique was used to critique the authority of an increas-
ingly post-imperial international law, as well as to authorize a different inter-
national law. In both Nehru’s letters and at Bandung, the people were
explicitly called into these prefigurations of law and world in certain ways,
through particular forms of address or techniques of interpellation,7 between
Third World leaders and their people.
In consideration of these questions, this chapter is speculative rather than
biographical, reflective rather than historical. The aim is to tease out a
juridical-political imaginary of a certain moment, which the reader may
juxtapose with what is imagined to be possible now for international law for,
in, and of the Global South. At the same time, the chapter invites reflection
on how we remember what was imagined then as well as the political effect of
that remembrance.8 Our sense of the variety of possible ways of being seems to
4
Jawaharlal Nehru, Glimpses of World History. Glimpses was first published in two volumes over
1934 and 1935 by Kitabistan in Allahabad, and has since been reprinted at least eighteen times.
5
Zachariah, Nehru, p. 1.
6
Nehru has become the subject of contemporary culture wars in India. For a pithy account of
the rise and fall of Nehru’s reputation written to mark the fiftieth anniversary of his death, see
Ramachandra Guha, Verdicts on Nehru: The Rise and Fall of a Reputation (Delhi: Penguin
Books India, 2014).
7
Louis Althusser, Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays (New York: Monthly Review Press,
1971), pp. 115–118.
8
This invitation to reflect is inspired by works such as Reinhart Koselleck, Futures Past: On the
Semantics of Historical Time, 2nd ed. (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004); David
Scott, Omens of Adversity: Tragedy, Time, Memory, Justice (Durham: Duke University Press,
2014); Susan Buck-Morss, Dreamworld and Catastrophe: The Passing of Mass Utopia in East
and West (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2000).
554 Sundhya Pahuja
have diminished. And the articulation of hopes for the future in the triangula-
tion of leaders, citizens, and world has shifted in significant ways since the
high-water mark of formal decolonization.9 But when we look back at the
previous generations from whom we inherit both our traditions and the future,
we tend to attribute to them a certain falseness of consciousness, or at least an
inability to see then what we see now. This dismissal of futures past10 tends,
inadvertently, to deradicalize our forebears and flatten out the world in which
we live.
This chapter argues that Nehru’s “international”11 was distinct from the
international-ism of European imperialism and its postwar continuation as
imperial-internationalism.12 It also differed from the putatively universal inter-
nationalisms emerging with the division of the world into two ideological
blocs. This division, called the Cold War from the perspective of American
foreign policy,13 came to be experienced from the Third World as much like a
9
This chapter finds echoes with those by Sayed, Chapter 26 and Khan, Chapter 6 in this
collection. Sayed’s concern is how it was possible to imagine something so radical, and so
political, as Bandung and NAM; Khan’s concern is how we, as international lawyers of the
Global South, should remember Bandung in order to take up our inheritance. It is also a
project that travels alongside the essay written at a different time by Upendra Baxi, “What May
the Third World Expect from International Law?” (2006) 27 Third World Quarterly 5, at
713–725. For a cognate project, see also Fleur Johns, Thomas Skouteris, and Wouter Werner,
“Editors’ Introduction: India and International Law in the Periphery Series” (2006) 23 Leiden
Journal of International Law 1, at 1–3, and essays in that symposium by Prabhakar Singh,
“Indian International Law: From a Colonized Apologist to a Subaltern Protagonist” (2010) 23
Leiden Journal of International Law 1, at 79–103; B.S. Chimni, “International Law Scholarship
in Post-colonial India: Coping with Dualism” (2010) 23 Leiden Journal of International Law 1,
at 23–51; and R.P. Anand, “The Formation of International Organizations and India:
A Historical Study” (2010) 23 Leiden Journal of International Law 1, at 5–21.
10
I borrow this phrase from Reinhart Koselleck, Futures Past, pp. 1–4.
11
In broad terms, the suffix “-ity” refers to a state or condition, whereas “-ism” refers to a practice,
theory, or doctrine. Nehru’s “international” is not an “ism” as such, but “internationality” is
perhaps too inelegant a neologism to coin. On the difference between an embrace of legal
pluralism as opposed to a jurisprudence that attends to legal plurality, see Paul D. Halliday,
“Laws’ Histories: Pluralisms, Pluralities and Diversity” in Lauren Benton and Richard J. Ross
(eds.), Legal Pluralism and Empires, 1500–1850 (New York: New York University Press, 2013),
pp. 261–278.
12
See Mark Mazower, No Enchanted Palace: The End of Empire and the Ideological Origins of
the United Nations (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009); Sundhya Pahuja,
Decolonising International Law: Development, Economic Growth and the Politics of
Universality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011).
13
The Cold War was an emanation of U.S. foreign policy; the Soviets did not use the term until
Glasnost. The term itself is commonly said to have first been used by George Orwell in 1945 in
a piece titled “You and the Atomic Bomb,” published in the democratic socialist newspaper
Tribune. See Odd Arne Westad, “The Cold War and the International History of the Twentieth
Century” in Melvyn P. Leffler and Odd Arne Westad (eds.), The Cambridge History of the Cold
War, Volume I: Origins (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), p. 3.
new phase of imperialism, in which a European project of civilization was

reshaped by an internecine disagreement between warring siblings, nominally
capitalist and communist, each set on a different version of (European)
modernization.14 In slightly different ways, both versions of internationalism
depended on and operationalized a singular universal to be administered –
and, latterly, policed – by international law.
Nehru’s international, on the other hand, is one in which rival modes of
existence, rival laws, and even rival cosmologies already coexist,15 but in which
it is not necessary to give up an idea of lawfulness in the interactions between
people with rival or different accounts of the world.16 The role imagined for
international law in this Third World is not to effect the transformation of the
others in the name of an idealized version of one way of life, but to allow
different peoples and nations, with different laws, to meet with dignity.17 It is a
law of encounter, not of inclusion. Nehru was not alone in imagining the
international in this way; Bandung can be read as a story of the collective
version of that project.18
This chapter teases out just a few of the intertwined accounts of history and
international law offered by Nehru, and at Bandung, in order to evoke the
political and jurisprudential imaginaries that flowed from those accounts.
These imaginaries suggest that neither Nehru nor those at Bandung believed
14
Angus Lockyer, “Reflections on the Cold War: The View from History,” talk given at the “Cold
War International Law” Workshop held at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS)
London on Nov. 27, 2014.
15
I take up the idea of thinking in terms of cosmologies from Christine Black, The Land Is the
Source of the Law: A Dialogic Encounter with Indigenous Jurisprudence (London: Routledge
Cavendish, 2011).
16
I use rival not to denote a conscious competition or contest, but to suggest the mutual
incompatibility of different explanations of the whole, or of cosmological accounts.
17
See Upendra Baxi, “The Recovery of Fire: Nehru and Legitimation of Power in India” (1990)
25 Economic and Political Weekly 2, at 107–112. It is important to note that Nehru’s stance
toward the possibility of a plurality of laws at the international level does not necessarily imply
that he appreciated legal plurality at home. Nehru’s nation-building project is not the explicit
focus of this piece, but it is not inconsistent with a posited plurality of laws at the international
level to approach the creation of a nation in much the same way as the creation of an empire.
As Peter Fitzpatrick might say, imperialism can be understood as an extraversion of
nationalism, just as nation-building can be understood as a form of internal colonization. See
Peter Fitzpatrick, “‘Gods Would Be Needed. . .’: American Empire and the Rule of
(International) Law” (2003) 16 Leiden Journal of International Law 3, at 430.
18
The collective attempt somewhat later, to reinvigorate the law of neutrality and apply it to the
principle of nonalignment is a version of this imagined possibility that lawful relations could
inhere between different “worlds.” See generally H.W. Brands, The Specter of Neutralism: The
United States and the Emergence of the Third World, 1947–1960 (New York: Columbia
556 Sundhya Pahuja
that European international law was the only law relating to conduct between
nations, or that it would be in the future. Nor did they experience it as such.
Renarrating history was a way to articulate the contest between their experi-
ence of a multiplicity of laws in the world, with the ostensibly universal
jurisdictional forms being actualized on the international plane, even as
struggles for decolonization were being waged and won.19 The chapter con-
cludes by reflecting briefly on the broader theoretical implications of this
account. In treating the prefigurations of another international law, and
another world, offered to us by Nehru and at Bandung, as an instance of a
jurisprudentially oriented renarration of history, we can see intimated a way of
engaging with the problem of Eurocentrism in international law that does
something different to the repertoire of approaches with which we have
become familiar today.20
reclaiming the world

Nehru’s gift to his young daughter is, on one level, a history of the world. On
another, it is an instruction manual telling her how to reclaim that world and
her place in it.21 A key element of this reclamation was the refutation of
newness endlessly attributed to Asian and African states, then the dominant
trope in the international institutions and contemporaneous Western books.
The characterization of the decolonizing states as new relies on a conflation
of the juridical form of European nation-statehood with the existence of
organized community and between European-style sovereignty with political
and legal authority. Nehru understood well the implications and risks of this
conflation – between state and organized community, as well as those inher-
ing in the conflation of European history with history. Speaking to an inde-
pendent Indian legislature in 1949, he remarks:
The Indian Union is an infant state, infant free state, a year and a half old, but
remember that India is not an infant country. India is a very ancient country
19
Here I am following Dorsett and McVeigh’s account of jurisdictional forms in Shaunnagh
Dorsett and Shaun McVeigh, Jurisdiction (Abingdon: Routledge, 2012).
20
For one particular, and characteristically elegant, survey of the repertoire of approaches to the
Eurocentrism of international law with which we are familiar, see Martti Koskeniemmi,
“Histories of International Law: Dealing with Eurocentrism” (2011) 19 Zeitschrift des Max-
Planck-Instituts für europäische Rechtsgeschichte 152.
21
Indeed, central to much anti- and postcolonial thought is the idea that “decolonization is
essentially about reclaiming a world and one’s place within the world”: see Michael Syrotinski
“‘Genealogical Misfortunes’: Achille Mbembe’s (Re-)writing of Postcolonial Africa” (2012) 35
Paragraph 3, at 416.
with millennia of history behind her – a history in which she has played a
vital part not only within her vast boundaries, but in the world and in Asia in
particular.22
From the perspective of the West,23 the novelty of the state form in Asia and
Africa was seen to encapsulate the history of those places in its entirety. Unless
there were forms recognizable in a European idiom, there was either nothing,
or at best, things that were pre-something. From this perspective, the proverb-
ial terra nullius thus translates at the end of formal empire into an idea that
people in the Third World were emerging from a condition of having been
fully determined by colonial domination,24 such that when the colonizer
departed, there was nothing but ruins25 or Truman’s conditions of “misery
and disease.”26
In its best version, the nothing became a radical newness. The lex nullius of
colonial domination became tabula rasa; these countries transformed into a
blank slate ready for the chalk of enlightenment. The writings of liberal
internationalist Eleanor Roosevelt27 neatly encapsulate this sentiment and its
uneasy combination of sympathy and condescension. Here Roosevelt is trying
to make sense of a rather matter-of-fact assertion by Asian and African
22
Jawaharlal Nehru, “Meeting Ground of East and West,” speech given in the Constituent
Assembly (Legislative) of India in New Delhi on March 8, 1949, reproduced in Ministry of
Information and Broadcasting, Jawaharlal Nehru’s Speeches, Volume I: September 1946–May
1949, 3rd ed. (Coimbatore: Government of India Press, 1967), p. 234.
23
I use “West” here as distinct from the Soviet Union, as well as Latin America, Asia, and Africa.
24
Consonant with this line of thought, it is no coincidence that “self-determination” is so closely
associated with achieving statehood. See, e.g. Duncan French (ed.), Statehood and Self-
Determination: Reconciling Tradition and Modernity in International Law (Cambridge:
25
This was most true of imperial Europe’s attitude to the decolonizing world. The reference to
ruins echoes Healy’s memorable phrase, “the ruins of colonialism.” See Chris Healy, From the
Ruins of Colonialism: History as Social Memory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1997).
26
This is a well-worn example, but it never ceases to surprise upon rereading. For the seminal
work, see Arturo Escobar, Encountering Development: The Making and Unmaking of the Third
World (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995), p. 3. For a recontextualization of
Truman’s declaration within Christian theology, see Jennifer L. Beard, The Political Economy
of Desire: International Law, Development and the Nation State (New York: Routledge
Cavendish, 1997), pp. 157–158. See also Pahuja, Decolonising International Law, p. 61.
27
Following her role as First Lady of the United States from 1933 to 1945, Eleanor Roosevelt was
appointed by Truman as U.S. delegate to the United Nations General Assembly in December
1945, and in April 1946 was appointed first chair of the United Nations Commission on Human
Rights, a role she performed until 1951. Roosevelt was instrumental in the drafting and adoption
of the United Nations Declaration on Human Rights in 1948.
558 Sundhya Pahuja
delegates to the United Nations of the racial bias ubiquitous in international

organizations, relations, and institutions:
They dislike the feeling that we do not consider them equals and do not
recognise the contributions they not only could make but have made for
centuries to the development of civilisation. The people of these countries
are realizing it is no longer necessary to live in misery and disease. But they
do not want charity. They belong to the United Nations; their vote is as good
as that of anyone else; they want what they consider their right – an equal
chance to develop to a point where life is worth living.28
Roosevelt’s attempt here to recognize the East and to accord it some dignity is
paradoxically coupled with a sense of the superiority of the United States
manifest in the developmentalism of its foreign policy. And yet the antiracist
paternalism of liberal internationalism contrasts favorably with the previous
era of explicitly racist understandings of other peoples and their putative
civilizations, in which the idea of Third World self-government was an almost
ludicrous notion. We have only to remember Churchill’s angry characteriza-
tion of Gandhi as a “half-naked fakir” to get a feel for that sentiment.29 But
even in this better version of an evolving world, Europe regains “its rightful
place at the forefront of civilization,”30 and the ravages of the war that must be
addressed. Imperialism had quickly become an historical footnote to the
emergence of the new states.
In stark contrast to both antiracist paternalism and direct racialism, for
Nehru independence was precisely about the reclamation of the rightful place
of India in the world, both in terms of independence from British rule and
conducting its own relationships with other nations. In Glimpses, he writes
under the heading “Wars and Revolt in India” that “the British in India and
elsewhere in the East today do not realize that their day is past, the day of
empire is past, and that the world marches onward relentlessly pushing the
28
Eleanor Roosevelt, India and the Awakening East (London : Hutchinson, 1954), p. 13.
29
In response to Gandhi’s visit to London in 1931 to meet with Lord Irwin, Churchill is quoted as
declaring that “it is alarming and also nauseating to see Mr. Gandhi, a seditious Middle
Temple lawyer, now posing as a fakir of a type well known in the East, striding half-naked up
the steps of the Viceregal palace, while he is still organising and conducting a defiant campaign
of civil disobedience, to parley on equal terms with the representative of the King Emperor.”
See James D. Hunt, Gandhi in London, 2nd ed. (New Delhi: Promilla and Company, 1993),
p. 176. For many more examples from Churchill, see Richard Toye, Churchill’s Empire: The
World That Made Him and the World He Made (London: Pan Macmillan, 2010).
30
President Harry S Truman, “Inaugural Address,” delivered at the Capitol, United States of
America, on Jan. 20, 1949. Reproduced in Pahuja, Decolonising International Law,
pp. 263–269.
British Empire into the “dustbin of history.”31 On the question of India’s own
diplomatic relations (free from determination by the colonizer), in a para-
graph preceding a section of letters dealing with Egypt’s “fight for freedom,”
the “Arab Countries,” Syria, Palestine, Trans Jordan, and several others,
Nehru writes to Indira that “[d]uring the last few years India has taken a
growing interest in international affairs and has sought to see its own problem
in relation to the world problem. The events in Abyssinia, Spain, China,
Czechoslovakia, and Palestine have moved the people of India deeply, and
the Congress is beginning to develop a foreign policy. This policy is one of
peace and of support of democracy. It is equally opposed to imperialism and
fascism.”32 Nehru’s tone could not be further from what might be expected
from the object of the various condescensions exemplified above, whether
sympathetic or hostile.
Nehru frequently made this claim on behalf of other civilizations too.
There are many references, in both Letters and Glimpses, to the greatness of
many and varied Asian, Arab, and African civilizations. Other Asian statesman
appreciated this publicly asserted respect in particular. As Brecher remarks,
Nehru was “the most articulate spokesman for a deep-seated urge to reassert
Asia’s rightful place in the world community.”33 The Final Communiqué
makes a similar gesture, casting imperialism as an “interruption” to both
ongoing civilizations and inter-civilizational encounters:
Asia and Africa have been the cradle of great religions and civilisations
which have enriched other cultures and civilisations while themselves
being enriched in the process. Thus the cultures of Asia and Africa are
based on spiritual and universal foundations. Unfortunately contacts
among Asian and African countries were interrupted during the past
centuries.34
Nehru was well aware of the lack of respect with which most of the West
regarded Bandung. But because collective efforts such as Bandung were part
of what Nandy has referred to as “the search for dignity and stature in the
world community,” the disdain and patronizing attitude coming from
much of the West had a clarifying effect on the symbolic valency of the
31 32
Nehru, Glimpses of World History, 413. Ibid. at 735.
33
Michael Brecher, Nehru: A Political Biography (London: Oxford University Press, 1959),
p. 593, quoted in R.P. Anand, Studies in International Law and History: An Asian Perspective
(Leiden: Nijhoff, 2004), p. 3.
34
Asian-African Conference, Selected Documents of the Bandung Conference Texts of Selected
Speeches and Final Communiqué of the Asian-African Conference, Bandung, Indonesia, Apr.
18–24, 1955 (New York: Institute of Pacific Relations, 1955).
560 Sundhya Pahuja
Conference.35 In a speech at a closed-door meeting of members of Congress

Parliamentary Party in New Delhi just after Bandung, Nehru commented on
responses to Bandung in foreign newspapers:
None of us who went to Bandung are quite the same now. . . . If you have
read any of the criticisms in some foreign newspapers, and which I have been
reading since I came back, mostly they are angry criticisms: “What business
have these people to meet without their elders and mentors.” “Oh! They are
going to meet like children away from their teacher, they want to play about
and misbehave,” – this kind of extraordinary mental approach.36
In the letters to his daughter, Nehru shows us that as a matter of technique,

the key to reclaiming a place in the world is to assert oneself as an author of
the story of that world, and not simply to insert oneself into a preexisting story
as either object or actor.37 This distinction between an actor who enters a
preexisting stage and an author who invents the scene is evident in the way
that Nehru insists that past and future must be written together if one is to
assert one’s own authority. Thus he writes:
And we shall dream of the past, and find our way to make the future
greater than the past. So on this New Year’s Day, let us resolve that, by the
time this year also grows old and dies, we shall have brought this bright
future dream of ours nearer to the present, and given to India’s past, a
shining page of history.38
Western commentators understood this assertion of authorship and of author-

ity, as a challenge to international law as they understood the meaning of that
term, rather than as the articulation of a distinct tradition of international law.
Perhaps by necessity, this tradition was a syncretic one rather than a hermetic-
ally sealed tradition authentic to precolonial difference. To rehearse just one
example, in Brierly’s now-classic statement of the anxiety this syncretism
typically occasioned in the West:
35
Ashis Nandy, “The Last Englishman to Rule India” (1998) 20 London Review of Books 10, at
14–15.
36
Jawaharlal Nehru, “Recollections of the Conference,” speech given at a closed-door meeting of
members of the Congress Parliamentary Party, New Delhi, May 3, 1955. Reproduced in
Sarvepalli Gopal (ed.), Selected Works of Jawaharlal Nehru – Second Series: Volume 28: 1
February–31 May 1955 (Delhi: Jawaharlal Nehru Memorial Fund, 1995).
37
See Vinay Lal, “Much Ado about Something: The New Malaise of World History” (2005)
Radical History Review 91, at 124–130; Dipesh Chakrabarty, “An Anti-Colonial History of the
Postcolonial Turn: An Essay in Memory of Greg Dening” (2009) 37 Melbourne Historical
Journal 1, at 1–23.
38
Nehru, Glimpses of World History, p. 5; emphasis added.
Some of these nations are at least inclined to look on international law as an

alien system which the Western nations, whose moral or intellectual leader-
ship they no longer recognize, are trying to impose on them, and in effect
they have begun to claim the right to select from among the rules only those
which suit their interests or which arise out of agreements to which they have
themselves been parties.39
Because Western states understood one European international law as the

only proper international law, this challenge could not be understood in
terms of a meeting between different laws of encounter, nor even between
different versions of international law that could (let alone should) be
engaged with as such. Instead, the partial uptake of elements of a European
international law and their syncretic adaptation to and by different legal
traditions was perceived as a crisis for the system. Although such a practice
is common within Europe (for example, German traditions of international
law are understood to be different to French traditions of international law),
differences of that kind are all in the family, so to speak.40 The West read the
Bandung Conference as a demonstration that international law was shifting
from being the law of the “small family of nations” among which it arose
into one that was worldwide, claiming the allegiance of nations that had no
part in building it up, nations that were understood as either never to have
known, or no longer to accept, the fundamental beliefs and sentiments on
which it was originally founded.41
A common retrospective response to this account of systemic crisis has
been to emphasize that those outside the “small family” did contribute to
the formation of international law,42 and that the Enlightenment values and
39
J.L. Brierly, The Law of Nations: An Introduction to the International Law of Peace, 6th ed.
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1963), p. 43, as quoted in J.J.G. Syatauw, “The Relationship
between the Newness of States and their Practices of International Law” in R.P. Anand (ed.),
Asian States and the Development of Universal International Law (Delhi: Vikas Publications,
1972).
40
Although recently, even these differences are being erased in the name of a putatively
international position. This erasure is probably a post-1989 phenomenon. See, e.g., Martti
Koskenniemi’s reflections on Finnish traditions of international law, and the idea of
comparative international law in Koskenniemi, “The Case for Comparative International Law”
(2009) 20 Finnish Yearbook of International Law, at 1–8.
41
Syatauw, “Relationship,” at 11–12.
42
This encompasses approaches that could be described as those that pluralize the origins and
development of international law, as well as those that trace the hybridization of its concepts.
See, e.g., Arnulf Becker Lorca, Mestizo International Law: A Global Intellectual History
1842–1933 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014); Shelley Wright, International
Human Rights, Decolonisation and Globalisation: Becoming Human (New York: Routledge,
2001).
562 Sundhya Pahuja
sentiments on which international law stands have historically been shared

by others.43 Such approaches respond to the affective dimension of the
insult felt by many in the Third World in the way the “crisis” is framed as
an accusation that these nations were refuting both objective legality and
civilizational standards.44 But a different kind of response, uncommon now
but not unusual in the years before and after Bandung, would be to accept
the analytical part of Brierly’s statement as correct but to separate it from the
normative conclusions drawn from within that particular frame. In other
words, it is possible to accept that one (European) version of international
law was actively being generalized to those outside the Euro-American
world as “international law” tout court by a number of means (including
means coercive,45 pedagogical,46 and corrupt47); and that those who were
now being asked to accept that particular international law as a preexisting
system of rules to govern the world did not (or did no longer) accept the
authority of those asking.
Having had experience of precisely that law as facilitative of colonial
domination, to repudiate those values and to assert the alien nature of that
particular law in its entirety would have been an entirely rational response.
Indeed, some did try to bring indigenous international laws to the table at
various points, including Bandopadhyay as early as the 1920s.48 And the
argument continues to be made for recognition of multiple Indian approaches
43
Amartya Sen is a famous proponent of this view. See Sen, The Argumentative Indian: Writings
on Indian History, Culture and Identity (London: Allen Lane, 2005).
44
There is a slightly different response that is driven less by the affective response to the insult,
and pushes back unromantically and quite powerfully against the nineteenth-century
historiography that produced a unified story of (European) origins, for Europe and European
values. One of the most eminent proponents of such an approach is Jack Goody, who spent his
long and distinguished career demonstrating that Europe was not the originator of much that it
claims, as well as revealing critically how such claims were made and what is at stake in making
them. See, e.g., Jack Goody, Renaissances: The One or the Many? (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2010); Jack Goody, The Theft of History (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2006).
45
Military and economic pressure was placed on those states that did not toe the line. Political
leaders who rejected the state form were sidelined completely.
46
Pedagogical means of asserting one international law were threaded through the development
project, for example.
47
Corrupt means include, for example, military and economic support for regimes that
supported particular systems.
48
One source often drawn on was Kautilyan International Law. See Pramathanath
Bandopadhyay, International Law and Custom in Ancient India (Calcutta: Calcutta University
Press, 1920). See also C.H. Alexandrowicz, An Introduction to the History of the Law of Nations
in the East Indies (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1967). See also Kautilya, The Arthashastra (trans.
and ed. L.N. Rangarajan) (New Delhi: Penguin Classics, 2000).
to international law.49 But even if it were possible to repudiate international

law as European, such a refusal need not be holus bolus in principle, nor
indeed was wholesale repudiation a freely available choice. This was at least
partly because many of the forms conditioning entry into the world were
drawn from practices of jurisdiction particular to European public law, lately
international law, not the least the form of the state.50 And so, accordingly,
those states were bound to challenge that law as belonging to the colonizer,
but to not challenge all of it.51 Such challenge was thus historically and
politically determined. It did not imply a lack of respect for principles of law
per se or for lawful encounter. Nor was it evidence of legal primitivism or any
necessary disrespect for particular principles of legality.52
epistolarity and ceremony

The letters from Nehru to his daughter were published almost the moment
they were written, suggesting that they were intended for a wider readership.
They join a long tradition of letters intended for a public audience that offer
moral instruction or training in conduct for office. Some letters were intended
to be private, but others, usually called epistles, were addressed to all whom
49
See B.S. Chimni, “Alternative Visions of Just World Order: Six Tales from India” (2005) 46
Harvard International Law Journal 2, at 389–402. R.C. Hingorani, The Indian Extradition Law
(Bombay: Asia Publishing House, 1969) and S. P. Sinha, Asylum and International Law (The
Hague: Martinus Nijhoff Publishers, 1971), cited in Prabhakar Singh, “Indian International
Law: From a Colonized Apologist to a Subaltern Protagonist” (2010) 23 Leiden Journal of
International Law 1, at 79–103.
50
For just one example of an expression of the way in which non-Europeans tried to remain
agnostic to the state form as the only way to claim legal personality, and to European
International Law as the only law of nations, see the All India Seminar on Possible
Contributions of Indian Traditions Concerning the Relations of Major Organised Groups to
Contemporary Problems of International Law in 1960. Referred to in Upendra Baxi, Kautilyan
Principles and the Law of Nations: A Comment, Materials for Postgraduate Studies (University
of Sydney, Faculty of Law, 1967). We can see from that title that the state form was by no
means taken for granted as axiomatic at the time of Bandung, but has become imaginatively
more determinative much more recently. As Burbank and Cooper remark, “We live in a world
of nearly two hundred states. Each flaunts symbols of sovereignty – its flag, its seat in the United
Nations – and each claims to represent a people. These states, big and small, are in principle
equal members of a global community, bound together by international law. Yet the world of
nation-states we take for granted is scarcely sixty years old.” Jane Burbank and Frederick
Cooper, Empires in World History: Power and the Politics of Difference (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 2010), p. 1. See also Luis Eslava and Sundhya Pahuja, Rethinking the State in
International Law (forthcoming).
51
See, e.g., David Scott, Conscripts of Modernity: The Tragedy of Colonial Enlightenment
(Durham: Duke University Press, 2004).
52
Compare Lorca, Mestizo International Law, pp. 7–8.
564 Sundhya Pahuja
they may have concerned.53 It seems probable that, like the Renaissance
humanists and many who followed, Nehru wrote at least the second volume,
Glimpses of World History, in full consciousness that the letters would be
published.54 A significant part of his imagined readership was likely the “boys
and girls,”55 now grown older, who read the Letters, but also their parents and
others, joining and being joined together at that time in the process of
becoming India. Many have written on the way that Nehru’s Autobiography
and Discovery of India called the postcolonial nation into being,56 but the
epistolary form of Letters and Glimpses does its own particular work with
regard to that readership, and the practices of nation-making that Nehru was
engaged in. That work is resonant with the interpellative work of the
Conference.
Specifically, the formal properties of the letter create meaning.57 Nehru’s
letters, in particular, join two subgenres: letters from fathers to daughters and
the more famous genre of the prison letter.58 In combination, the work done
by the epistolary form utilized resonates strongly with the work done by the
way the Bandung Conference was staged in ceremonial and performative
53
See the entry for “epistle” in Jack Myers and Michael Simms, Longman Dictionary of Poetic
Terms (New York: Longman Inc, 1989), p. 103.
54
The second book was written in prison after the first volume had already been published. On
the humanist tradition, see, e.g., Cecil H. Clough, “The Cult of Antiquity: Letters and Letter
Collections” in Cecil H. Clough (ed.), Cultural Aspects of the Italian Renaissance: Essays in
Honour of Paul Oskar Kristeller (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1976), pp. 33–34.
The essay describes the importance of the letter and the published collection of letters to the
Renaissance.
55
Nehru, Letters to My Daughter, “Foreword,” p. iii.
56
Elleke Boehmer, for example, has spoken eloquently of the way that independence leaders
such as Nehru, Kenyatta, Nkrumah, Kaunda, and, later, Mandela used the device of the
autobiographical text to “call the new postcolonial nation into being.” Elleke Boehmer,
“Making Freedom: Jawaharlal Nehru’s Autobiography and The Discovery of India, and Nelson
Mandela’s Long Walk to Freedom,” keynote address delivered at the Writers and Readers: Books
that Shaped and Subverted the British Empire Conference at the University of Melbourne,
Australia on May 8, 2015. The titles of the books these Statesmen wrote are illustrative of the
point; as just one example, Nkrumah titled his autobiography Ghana: The Autobiography of
Kwame Nkrumah (New York: International Publishers, 1957).
57
This paraphrases Janet Gurkin Altman, Epistolarity: Approaches to a Form (Columbus: Ohio
State University, 1982), p. 4.
58
Modern examples of the genre of prison letters include Rosa Luxemburg, Letters from Prison:
With a Portrait and a Facsimile (Berlin: Publishing House of the Young International, 1921);
Antonio Gramsci, Prison Notebooks (ed. Joseph A. Buttegieg) (New York: Columbia University
Press, 1996); and Oscar Wilde, De Profundis and Other Prison Writings (London: Penguin,
2013). Chinese dissident and Nobel Peace Prize winner Liu Xiaobo, currently serving a prison
sentence, is a contemporary practitioner of the form.
terms. In both instances, form created normative meaning.59 This normative

meaning carried difference valencies for each different audience, which
included the colonizer, the newly independent, and those still struggling to
free themselves from colonial rule.60 The intimacy of the epistolary form, in
Nehru’s letters-turned-books and the theatrical staging of the event as public at
Bandung, were each ways of inviting the people into relation with each other
as nation and into the world with the dignity of an encounter between equals.
Vis-à-vis the colonizer, this dignity was being asserted in contrast to the
humiliations of racial subjection.61
In Nehru’s letters, for example, the intimacy of family conversation is
shared with the reader in ways that weave together family and nation,
inviting readers to join both.62 The references to “Bapuji,” a word meaning
father and used to refer to Gandhi, intensify this cross-identification,
naturalizing the nation, relating it to the warmth of home, and identifying
the ties of kinship and filial duty with nationalist struggle all at the same
time: “Bapuji lies in prison, but the magic of his message steals into the
hearts of India’s millions, and men and women, and even little children,
come out of their shells and become India’s soldiers of freedom.”63 And in
the next letter:
I thought of Bapuji, who has made our old country young and vigorous
again by his magic touch, sitting in his prison cell in Yeravada. And
I thought of Dadu, [referring to Indira’s grandfather, Motilal Nehru] and
many others. And I especially thought of Mummie and you. Later in
the morning came the news that Mummie had been arrested and taken
to Gaol. It was a pleasant New Year’s gift for me. It had long been
expected and I have no doubt that Mummie is thoroughly happy and
contented.64
59
Naoko Shimazu, “Diplomacy as Theatre: Staging the Bandung Conference of 1955” (2013) 48
Modern Asian Studies 1, at 225–252.
60
It also carried specific meaning for Indonesia and Indonesians. See Roeslan Abdulgani, The
Bandung Connection: The Asia-Africa Conference in Bandung in 1955 (Gunung Aguung:
Singapore, 1985). See also Shimazu, “Diplomacy as Theatre,” and the references contained
therein.
61
Nandy, “The Last Englishman to Rule India.”
62
The family was often used as a metaphor for the nation, particularly by Gandhi as a way to stem
communal violence between Hindus and Muslims. See Gyan Prakash, Another Reason:
Science and the Imagination of Modern India (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999),
p. 218.
63
Nehru, Glimpses of World History, pp. 2–3 (letter dated Oct. 26, 1930).
64
Id. at 5 (letter dated Jan. 1, 1931).
566 Sundhya Pahuja
For the dignity of both family and nation, sacrifice is required:

In one of our old Sanskrit books, there is a verse which can be translated as
follows: “For the family sacrifice the individual, for the community the
family, for the country the community, and for the Soul the whole
world . . . the lesson the Sanskrit verse teaches us is the same lesson of co-
operation and sacrifice for the larger good. We in India had forgotten this
sovereign path to real greatness for many and day and so we had fallen. But
again we seem to have glimpses of it, and all the country is astir . . . and to
those who are fortunate comes the joy of great sacrifice also.”65
In both the letters and at Bandung, the family metaphor is extended from the
individual nation to the family of nations, a political imaginary distinct from
the emerging friend/enemy distinction of the Cold War, and almost
unimaginably far from today’s economically rationalized and politically
securitized world.66 The inclusive and participatory choreography of the
conference also reveals huge differences between then and now, in the
imagined relations between leaders, citizens, and world, and in the nature
of the democratic participation that operated as a key source of legitimacy for
states. Just one example of this is the way that the Conference was staged
specifically to require leaders to walk each morning from their hotels along
the renamed “Jalan Africa-Asia” to the conference venue at Merdeka (Free-
dom) House.67 Leaders understood the importance of this performance, and
behaved accordingly, stopping to wave, talk, smile, and greet people. Pedes-
trians could enter the zone unhindered as long as they were not obstructive.
The people of Bandung could approach conference delegates face to face, ask
for autographs, and have photographs taken. Sirens were sounded as delega-
tions passed to call people out to meet them from business and restaurants
nearby, and waiting areas were created to allow the public to wait to meet
delegates in person.68 As Shimazu describes it, the conference was a week-
long street theater performance with an atmosphere of celebration.69
65
Ibid. at 7 (letter dated Jan. 5, 1931).
66
For a telling example of the affective register of the international today, see United Nations,
“The Secretary General’s Five Year Action Agenda” released 25 January 2012, available at
www.un.org/sg/priorities/sg_agenda_2012.pdf.
67
The topography of the city was changed to facilitate the Conference. Streets and buildings
were renamed and new paths made.
68
As Shimazu observes, this was not the only event that did this; the Asian Relations Conference in
Delhi in 1947 also included huge numbers of the public in the ceremonial events of the conference,
accommodating people in huge marquees. Shimazu, “Diplomacy as Theatre,” at 238.
69
This account is drawn heavily from Shimazu, “Diplomacy as Theatre,” and the references
therein.
The way the epistolary genres work together, as well as the staging and
ceremony of Bandung, draws the contemporaneous public into the struggle,
into the postcolonial nation, and into the world in particular ways. The
subjects of the emerging Third World are drawn into these events, interpel-
lated through inclusion and celebration, both into their respective nations and
into relation with each other as world in a way that offers dignity and the
promise of participation after the indignities of imperialism. The message was
telegraphically clear to observers from the West, as well as to those still
engaged in struggles for independence. The internal-external aspect of the
communication is instructive in trying to understand the specific nature of
postcolonial (as opposed to European) statehood, which is, in jurisdictional
terms, externally rather than internally determined. The double-edged char-
acter of the internal/external nature of postcolonial statehood has become
manifest in particular ways since that euphoric moment.70 But there is no
need to be nostalgic about postcolonial nationalism, or romantic about the
past, to notice that the relation between leaders, citizens, and world was
imagined in quite a different way then as compared to now. It is interesting
to compare this kind of diplomatic event to those that occur now, which use
geographical separation, geographic isolation with strict visa controls, fences,
and guards to keep the public away from summits and meeting of all kinds.
The list of examples is long and universal.71
rethinking approaches to eurocentrism and

international law
Many have observed that European international law actively had to claim for
itself the proper name of law72 during the nineteenth century and earlier.73
70
For the point, see Sundhya Pahuja, “Laws of Encounter: a Jurisdictional Account of
International Law” (2013) 1 London Review of International Law 1, at 80–81. For a subtle and
persuasive elaborated account of the way in which the national is international in the Global
South, see Luis Eslava, Local Space, Global Life: the Everyday Operation of International Law
and Development (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015).
71
I suspect that in retrospect, the putative war on terror would be cited as a reason, nominating
September 11, 2001, as the inaugural date. However, it is likely that the shift can be traced back
much further, and at least one different precipitating event for the intensification of the security
around international institutional meetings, could be the WTO meetings in Seattle in
November 1999, at which popular protest against globalization made itself felt to the
discomforture of delegates.
72
By this I mean both the claim of European international law to be universal international law,
as well as the assertion in the face of the positivist critique, that international law was properly
called “law.”
73
See, e.g., Koskenniemi, “Histories of International Law,” p. 152.
568 Sundhya Pahuja
Far fewer have paid attention to the ways in which that claim and its
actualization are ongoing today.74 The idea that European international law
has no rivals is a recent one. And we need both to interrupt it as an assumption
and suspend it as an argument to see clearly what was going on in the 1940s
and 1950s, including during the Bandung moment. Neither Nehru nor those
at Bandung believed, accepted, or behaved as though European international
law was the only international law. This stance was manifest during colonial
times, but also continued afterward through the period of decolonization in
the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s. Instead, by word and deed, they described a
different world: a world made through lawful encounters. This stood in
contrast to the European75 account of a preexisting world governed by law,
into which nations gained entry through the assumption of state form. In other
words, not only was the Third World a project of world-making rather than a
place, as Prashad has suggested76; it was a juridical project as much as a
geopolitical one.
In this, Nehru and those at Bandung were exemplars of a way of thinking
about the Eurocentrism of international law that not only provincializes
Europe historically but parochializes European international law jurispruden-
tially.77 Koskenniemi has described provincializing European international
law as “mak[ing] that which presents itself as universal [understandable] as
contextually bound,” to show, as he puts it, that “French food is ethnic too.”78
This kind of approach generates what we might call “jurisprudentially
inflected history,” grounded in and grounding a contemporary jurispru-
dence.79 Parochializing European international law jurisprudentially, on the
other hand, means writing “historically inflected jurisprudence.”80 We can
practice historically inflected jurisprudence by researching and writing in
ways that notice the fact that European International Law is still just one
74
See generally Pahuja, “Laws of Encounter” and Luis Eslava, “Istanbul Vignettes: Observing
the Everyday Operation of International Law” (2014) 2 London Review of International Law 1,
at 3.
75
I am including the United States and the Soviet Union here as the rival heirs of Europe.
76
Press, 2007).
77
This is both an appropriation and extension of Chakrabarty’s seminal use of the term in
Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe.
78
Koskeniemmi, “Histories of International Law,” at 174.
79
I am borrowing this phrase, and its relationship to a contemporary jurisprudence (or prudence
of law), from Shaun McVeigh. Although he made me the gift of the phrase, I am not sure if
I mean exactly the same thing as he does in its usage.
80
Again, I borrow this phrase from McVeigh as part of the same conversation referred to above,
with the same disclaimer.
particular, parochial version of the broad group of practices that establish

lawful relations between organized groups of people.81 Noticing this fact
interrupts the story of international law at the moment in which the empirical
eurocentricity of colonial international law is typically understood (smoothly,
if disappointingly) to have become the ideological eurocentrism of a postco-
lonial international law,82 a transition of thought that allows “the severing of a
geographical Europe” from an idealized international community.83
Again, one needs neither nostalgia nor romance to be attentive to the
multiplicity of laws that existed during the colonial period, but are less
frequently understood as having endured as law during and after the
struggles for independence, and that lived on at the time of the Confer-
ence.84 That multiplicity was the lived experience of both leaders and
(international) lawyers of the Global South. Indeed, the Third World
leader and Third World international lawyer had no choice but to take
up the practice of international law in a syncretic and sometimes contra-
dictory way. For Nehru and at Bandung, renarrating history was a way to
articulate the contest between the knowledge, experience, and practice of
a plurality or multiplicity of laws in most of the world, and the putatively
universal jurisdictional forms being actualized on the international
plane.85
At Bandung and in Nehru’s account of world history, it is absolutely clear
that the fact of the contemporaneous existence of multiple laws was deeply
81
An interesting example of this is A.K. Pavithran, Substance of Public International Law:
Western and Eastern (Madras: A.P. Rajendran Publishers, 1965), a textbook on International
Law written by an Indian lawyer, lecturer, Judge, and member of Gray’s Inn, which refers to
four systems of international law, described as “Public International Law in the West,” “Public
International Law in Ancient India,” “Muslim Public International Law,” and “Chinese Public
International Law.” Each is described as a system with its own conceptions of legality, different
subjects, different sources, different accounts of the purpose of international law, and so on.
They are not variants of (European) international law.
82
After Baxi, Eurocentrism is used here to mean “accumulated habits of thought which have led
to acceptance of European (or Western) intellectual traditions as the invariable, if not superior,
framework of enquiry.” Upendra Baxi, “Kautilyan Principles and the Law of Nations:
A Comment,” materials prepared for postgraduate studies in the Department of Jurisprudence
and International Law in the Faculty of Law at the University of Sydney, 1967 (copy of file with
author).
83
Brent Nongbri, Before Religion: A History of a Modern Concept (New Haven: Yale University
Press, 2013), p. 13.
84
See, e.g., Peter Fitzpatrick, Law as Resistance: Modernism, Imperialism, Legalism (Aldershot:
Ashgate, 2008); Ian Duncanson, Historiography, Empire, and the Rule of Law: Imagined
Constitutions, Remembered Legalities (New York: Routledge, 2012).
85
This follows Dorsett and McVeigh’s account of jurisdictional forms in Shaunnagh Dorsett and
Shaun McVeigh, Jurisdiction (New York: Routledge, 2012).
570 Sundhya Pahuja
understood. The struggle was to work out a way to allow for the ongoing
existence of that multiplicity without the laws of most people in the world
being relegated to a nonlegal domain.86 Those domains of relegation
included the realm of culture as tradition and the realm of religion set up as
distinct from secular law,87 or simply realms on a continuum with law but
lower on the hierarchy because they were “primitive,” “uncivilized,” “back-
ward,” “underdeveloped,” or euphemistically, “developing.” Nehru and
others at Bandung tried to refuse these registers of relegation, while holding
on to an account of multiple forms of lawful conduct. But understanding their
actions is more difficult today (understood as after 1989) than at other times.
The horizons of the possible imaginaries of lawful life seem to have closed in,
and we have come too readily to accept the idea that there is no longer
anything outside Europe88 and the world of its making, and too quick to think
of inclusion and pluralization as the most appropriate gestures to the non-
European other.
conclusion
In some ways, Nehru’s letters to his daughter can be read as presenting exactly
the narrative we might expect from a person situated in his position and
located on “a hinge of history.”89 Educated in the elite institutions of the
metropole, at Harrow and Cambridge,90 with political leanings toward Fabian
86
The reference here to “most people” echoes Partha Chatterjee; see Chatterjee, The Politics of
the Governed: Reflections on Popular Politics in Most of the World (New York: Columbia
87
See generally Nongbri, Before Religion. Also on this point, see the persuasive argument made
by Bandhyopadhyay in 1920 about the way that rules of interstate relations underpinned by
Dharma were disqualified from consideration as “international law” according to a definition
too greatly influenced by Austin: “Followers of Austin have denied the title International Law
to rules based on religious sanction. They put their case too high.” Bandopadhyay,
International Law and Custom in Ancient India, pp. 7–8.
88
See generally Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press, 2000). I don’t mean the “constitutive outside,” our critical sensitivity to which is arguably
part of the problem of the forgetting about the outside.
89
This phrase is borrowed from Ivan Head, On a Hinge of History: The Mutual Vulnerability of
South and North (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1991).
90
Nehru was sent to Harrow at age fifteen, and began studying at Cambridge in October 1907 at
age eighteen. This is widely documented, and his experiences at both Harrow and Cambridge
have been much interpreted. See, e.g., Shashi Tharoor, Nehru: The Invention of India (New
York: Arcade Publishing, 2003), pp. 9–13. For Nehru’s own account, see Jawaharlal Nehru, An
Autobiography (London: John Lane The Bodley Head, 1936). Recall here too the resonance
with Frantz Fanon’s doctoral dissertation, “Essay on the Disalienation of the Black,” submitted
in philosophy at the University of Lyon in 1952, which was famously rejected, prompting
socialism, engaged in the political struggle for independence conducted in

the “derivative discourse”91 of anticolonial nationalism and committed to
some version of secular democracy, if we were so minded, we could see
expressed in the letters, Nehru’s existence entirely in terms of the postcolonial
hyphen and the paradoxes it presented. Nehru was, after all, both “the last
Englishman”92 and the first “Indian” to rule India.93 Even the genre reminds
us of Nehru’s education.94 Placing the letters in a continuum with Bandung
twenty years later, and punctuating the timeline with Nehru’s speeches before
and after Indian Independence and during the Bandung Conference and its
aftermath, could simply provide us with a familiar, if poetic, example of Scott’s
“tragic” narrative of colonial enlightenment. In that story, Nehru and his
fellow Bandungians are conscripted to the project of an expanding and
inescapable European modernity, rather than voluntary adherents to its super-
ior values.95
And yet it would be a pity, if not an outright mistake, to read the letters in
this way.96 Placed in the context of the struggle for independence and the
postindependence assertion of autonomous, indigenous political and
Fanon to publish the text as Black Skin, White Masks (New York: Grove Press, 1967); Alice
Cherki, Fanon: A Portrait (trans. Nadia Benabid) (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2006).
Thank you to Cait Storr for this reference.
91
Again, this phrase is borrowed from Chatterjee; see Nationalist Thought and the Colonial
World.
92
According to John Kenneth Galbraith, a Cambridge contemporary and later U.S. Ambassador
to India, Nehru described himself as “the last Englishman to rule India.” See Stanley Wolpert,
Nehru: A Tryst with Destiny (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), p. 23.
93
Ashis Nandy makes this point in his review of Wolpert’s biography of Nehru. Nandy, “The Last
Englishman to Rule India.”
94
Clough notes the significance of the pedagogical letter throughout the Italian Renaissance:
“The humanists wrote not only for their correspondents but with a view to the publication of
some, at least, of their correspondence during their own lifetime.” See Clough, “The Cult of
Antiquity,” at 34.
95
This chapter should not be taken at all to criticize that exceptionally important work. Instead,
I am trying to make something else visible from the same circumstances. In my view, an
important audience targeted by Scott’s intervention is those people who use the uptake of the
language of the colonizer as evidence of its virtue, and point to their inclusion as evidence of its
genuine universalization. This is common in the field of human rights scholarship, for
example. Reminding the colonizer that in the use of that language, the (formerly) colonized
are not volunteers but conscripts is salutary. This is an important argument. But in the years
after the moment of universalization, there is also a flattening of plurality that happens when
we forget that the world was not one, but many, and the struggle against the language of the
colonizer was not ceded by the attempt of its strategic use. See generally David Scott,
Conscripts of Modernity.
96
Or perhaps only in this way; as discussed in the previous footnote, the reason why one asks a
question, or makes a point of interpretation also shapes the point itself.
572 Sundhya Pahuja
economic authority expressed inevitably in the rubric of “sovereignty,”97 and

positioned as a kind of backdrop to what would be understood retrospectively
as “the spirit of Bandung,” the letters can be read as part of an attempt by
Nehru to prefigure a different world than the ones being imagined at the time
by Europe and its heirs, as he tries to navigate around what he experienced as
the obvious Eurocentricity of that world. Nehru’s letters and speeches, as well
as the conferences, can be read as an attempt not only to prefigure but also to
practice an international law that could exist with, if not within, the traditions –
both hybrid and syncretic – that Nehru and the Bandung leaders inherited,98
including both the “derivative” traditions of sovereignty and nationalism and
the “indigenous” ones of “ancient” Indian laws of nations.99 This approach
offers a distinct way to think about the problem, as alive today as it was sixty
years ago, of the Eurocentrism of international law. Its distinctiveness invites
us to tackle the Eurocentrism of International Law not only through jurispru-
dentially inflected history but through historically inflected jurisprudence. In
this, it may offer a repertoire of different ways to think from, and with the
Global South, about the practices of international laws.
epilogue
If history can be described as a story told about the past through the lens of the
present, this chapter attempts to pay attention to both ends of that optic at
the same time – In my story, there is at least a triple fold of past and present.
The first fold is the story Nehru himself tells about the past. It is from that story
that I seek to understand something about Nehru’s present, and the way the
international realm and its laws were imagined in the Bandung moment. The
second story is the one being told by other authors in this book about
Bandung, its legacies, and how we might take up an inheritance of Bandung
97
See generally Sundhya Pahuja, “Decolonization and the Eventness of International Law” in
Fleur Johns, Richard Joyce, and Sundhya Pahuja (eds.), Events: The Force of International
Law (New York: Routledge, 2011), pp. 91–105; Shaun McVeigh and Sundhya Pahuja, “Rival
Jurisdictions: The Promise and Loss of Sovereignty” in Charles Barbour and George Pavlich
(eds.), After Sovereignty: On the Question of Political Beginnings (New York: Routledge, 2010),
pp. 97–114.
98
The reference to hybridity follows Homi Bhabha, The Location of Culture (New York:
Routledge, 1994). On inheritance in this context, see Adil Hasan Khan, “Inheriting Persona:
Narrating the Conduct of Third World International Lawyers,” doctoral thesis submitted in
partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in International
Studies at the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies, Geneva, 2015.
Copy on file with the author.
99
Pramathanath Bandopadhyay, International Law and Custom in Ancient India.
today.100 The third is my own story, of my training as an international lawyer

in the tradition of European Public Law, from a location in the settler colonial
state of Australia, and of my relationship with my parents, particularly my
father, Om Prakash, born in British India, and himself a refugee during the
partition of India. He is key among those from whom I inherit a particular
sensibility in relation to the project of postcolonial state-making. My own story
is a story for another day, though its spectral presence may be felt both in these
pages, the archive upon which I draw, and in my own practice of international
law. Joining this collective project on Bandung, and writing this chapter, have
given me the opportunity to reflect on why, as a teacher of (international) law,
history has gradually become central to my pedagogical strategies. Intuitively,
it has always seemed to offer a way of revealing the relationship between
international law and power to be intrinsic rather than extrinsic, in a more
inclusive and less specialized language than critique. Upon reflection, I see
that historically inflected jurisprudence also allows me to make that revelation
without transcending the law through critique or forgetting my “place,” as it
were, and possibly even without disavowing the responsibility that comes with
my training,101 to make my (European) international law have dignity, and
treat other laws with dignity, rather than continue either to be murderous of
other forms of lawful life, or to palliate their extinction.
100
Khan, “Inheriting Persona.”
101
The attempt to accept ethical responsibility for one’s office as a critical jurist is sometimes
criticized as (unwittingly or pragmatically) redemptive, and therefore to be placed in the same
basket as work that is naively reformist or uncritically normative. Such criticisms miss the point
that one inevitably writes from a particular place, and that that placement creates ethical
obligations. One can, of course, not think about such an obligation by, for example, taking a
view from nowhere, a putatively universal location that implicitly refuses the ethical obligation
of (one’s) place. Instead, for me, questions about where I stand, where my worldly responsibility
lies, and how should I take up that responsibility are important to a reflective life. On the theme
of responsibility and inheritance, see Ann Genovese, “On Australian Feminist Tradition: Three
Notes on Conduct, Inheritance and the Relations of Historiography and Jurisprudence” (2013)
38 Journal of Australian Studies 4, at 430–444.
34
Altering International Law

Nasser, Bandung, and the Suez Crisis
charlotte peevers
“We believe in international law. But we will never submit. We shall show the world
how a small country can stand in the face of great powers threatening with armed
might.”1
The traditional narrative of the Suez Crisis begins on July 26, 1956, with
Gamal Abdel Nasser’s announcement of the nationalization of the Universal
Suez Canal Company; hits a crescendo with first Israeli and then Anglo-
French invasion of Egypt in late October 1956; and ends with a humiliating
cease-fire and replacement with a United Nations Emergency Force in
December 1956. The Suez Crisis now sits as something of a mythic monu-
ment to the folly of imperialist adventurism in the face of postwar decol-
onization and the UN Charter era. The orthodox memory of the Suez Crisis
and its ideational legacy have been mythologized into a cautionary tale of
using force to settle disputes because of the spectacular events at the climax
of international negotiations over nationalization, namely the Anglo-French
collusion with Israel in concocting a pretext for military invasion and
occupation.2
This chapter does not pose a counternarrative of the Crisis, but instead
offers up an alter-narrative, an other account that draws attention to the
Egyptian demand for equality, sovereignty, and independence in the
1
September 15, 1956, speech, www.fordham.edu/halsall/mod/1956nasser-suez1.html.
2
Here, orthodox memory refers to the disciplinary and institutional memory forged through the
production of historical narratives of the Suez Crisis that emphasize the illegality of the Israeli
and Anglo-French invasion (and collusion) and the pacific innovation of peacekeeping. See,
for example, the UN history of peacekeeping, available at www.un.org/en/peacekeeping/
missions/past/unefi.htm; or Robert Bowie’s Suez 1956 (International crises and the role of law)
(London: Oxford University Press, 1974)
574
Altering International Law 575
emerging Cold War decolonizing world.3 Such an alter-narrative pays closer

attention to the pre-climactic international negotiations in the aftermath of
nationalization. It focuses on the way that great powers – the United States,
France, and Britain – sought to “internationalize” the Canal and its operation,
and the ways in which Egypt resisted and rejected what it termed “collective
colonialism.” In retelling this narrative, reliance is placed on a reconstructed
archive: again, not a contrary site of authority, but one that sits alongside the
imperial archive.4
Between July 26 and October 1956, Nasser gave a series of speeches,
produced pamphlets, conducted interviews, made statements, and drafted
formal responses to the international negotiations over Egypt’s nationalization
of the Suez Canal Company. In these multiple forms, Egypt rejected foreign
interference in its sovereign affairs, citing international law and tenets of the
UN Charter as support for the legitimacy (and legality) of nationalization.
Throughout the Suez Crisis, Nasser articulated an alternative appraisal of
efforts at internationalization. In Egypt’s view, internationalization merely
sought the renewal of colonial domination over sovereign Egyptian territory
and interference in its economic independence (perhaps more so than solely
in terms of political independence). In particular, Nasser highlighted how the
great powers were determined to internationalize the Suez Canal in order to
sever the Canal from Egyptian territory. In speeches, interviews, and state-
ments, Nasser made a clear distinction between the colonial past and Egypt’s
guarantee to abide by international law. This distinction manifested in a
number of speeches, perhaps most notably in the July 26 speech announcing
the nationalization of the Company, the press conference held on August 12
3
This alter-narrative, which pays attention to the demand for reclaiming an authoritative legal
personhood through international law, has clear synergies with Pahuja, Chapter 33 in this
volume.
4
To that end, this chapter includes reference to the imperial recording of Egypt’s public
performances during the Suez Crisis, joined by an oral history archive constructed through a
collaboration between the Bibliotheca Alexandrina and the Gamal Abdel Nasser Foundation.
The site http://nasser.bibalex.org - includes audio-visual recordings, texts of speeches,
statements and press conferences, photos, and a press archive and is part of the Bibliotheca
Alexandrina’s archive digitization program. To these official archives are added the reflections
and diary records of Egyptian protagonists including Dr Mahmoud Fawzi’s Suez 1956: An
Egyptian Perspective (London: Shorouk International, 1986), Nasser’s Vice-President Abd al-
Latif al-Bughdadi’s memoirs, and Minister for Agrarian Reform, Sayyid Mar’i’s Political Papers,
these latter texts being extracted and translated in SI Troen. M. Shemesh The Suez-Sinai
Crisis, 1956: Retrospective and Reappraisal (City: F. Cass, 1990). The juxtaposition of these
distinct archives attests to the near-obsessive documentation of Egyptian activities by the British
Foreign Office and the Egyptian government’s highly attuned performance of sovereign
independence in multiple registers.
576 Charlotte Peevers
declining the invitation to the First London Conference, the statement issued
following the rejection of the Menzies delegation, and the speech denouncing
the proposal for a Users’ Association.
Nasser’s public statements sought not only to expose the transparently
colonial imagining of internationalization but also to highlight Egypt’s com-
pliance with international law. For instance, he juxtaposed historic colonial
flagrant disregard for international law through great power nonadherence to
the 1888 Constantinople Convention, with Egypt’s attested compliance with
free passage.5 In doing so, he articulated a distinct discourse of international-
ism that grew out of participation at Bandung. In other words, he articulated
an alter-imagining of “the international” and its relation to the place of the
Suez Canal (and, through this, Egyptian territory and sovereignty). Egypt
reclaimed international law from great power and, in the process, articulated
the renewed authority-through-authorship of an independent Egypt.
Further, Egypt countered the racist claim that “Arabs” were inherently
incompetent to govern themselves and their national territory in material
practice – by guaranteeing that transit through the canal was not interrupted.6
The government ensured the continued flow of ships through the canal, it
would arrange for compensation for the nationalization at a fair market rate,7
and was even willing to negotiate some degree of international oversight
through the UN and the office of Secretary-General. The government did
not consider that Egyptian sovereignty over the canal or control of its oper-
ation was mutually exclusive of the guarantee of free passage and respect for its
international users. In material terms, therefore, Egypt exercised sovereign
independence, generating a tangible legacy of Bandung: a functioning high-
way for international shipping within Egyptian sovereign territory that would
no longer provide the pretext for colonial, foreign interference.
5
The 1888 Constantinople Convention had been agreed between Britain, France, Germany,
Austro-Hungary, Spain, Italy, the Netherlands, Russia, and the Ottoman Empire to
“neutralize” the Suez Canal following the British occupation post-1882 and the competing
imperial rivalry between it and France. A discussion of its legal status – as dead letter, in-
abeyance, or revived – is beyond the scope of this contribution but suffice to say that its
applicability, whether from a positivistic doctrinal perspective or contextualist orientation was –
both prior to and during the Suez Crisis – highly contested.
6
Materiality, in this sense, refers to the “on the ground” realities effected by Egypt’s
nationalization. The very fabric of life on the canal, the routine, everyday transit of shipping
made concrete – real – the unspectacular and in some ways mundane result of
nationalization. This mundanity acted as attestation to the racist assumptions and imperial
prejudices that overlaid efforts at “internationalizing the canal” long before the spectacular
climax to the crisis.
7
The share price on the Paris Bourse the day before nationalization.
background
The Suez Canal Company had operated by virtue of a concession first
granted in 1854 by Muhammad Sa’id Pasha, Governor (Wali) of Egypt
and Sudan under Ottoman rule, to Ferdinand de Lesseps, a French
diplomat. The concession was reissued in 1856 and 1866 and was due to
expire in 1968.8 In 1875, the British government became the Suez Canal
Company’s largest single shareholder following Benjamin Disraeli’s pur-
chase of the bankrupt Egyptian shares.9 The British occupation and colon-
ization of Egypt from 1882 placed Britain in a prime position to direct and
control the operation of the canal and ensure limited Egyptian benefit,
particularly in profiting from the mass transit of shipping. Following the
Free Officers Movement of 1952 (which declared itself the Egyptian Revo-
lution on July 23, 1952), Nasser eventually emerged as Egypt’s unopposed
leader and agreed on the final withdrawal of British troops from Egypt in
1954 and from the Canal Zone in June 1956. In February 1955, Iraq and
Turkey signed a military defense agreement that became the “Baghdad
Pact” and that was immediately joined by Britain, Pakistan, and Iran. It
was in the wake of what Nasser saw as aggressive alliance-making in the
region that he traveled to Bandung in April 1955, where opposition to
“collective defence arrangements serving big powers” was to be articulated
in the Final Communiqué.
Throughout 1955 Egypt sought international assistance for loans to build
the Aswan Dam. At the same time, Egypt sought to negotiate arms deals first
with the United States and, failing these, with the Soviet Union to ensure
military capabilities in its ongoing confrontation with Israel. Relations with the
United States appeared to reach a nadir on July 19, 1956 when Secretary of
State Dulles announced the refusal of a loan to Egypt. Nasser was on a plane
with Nehru, returning from an informal conference with Tito in Brioni when
he heard of the U.S. refusal. In an interview with the BBC ten years later
Nasser explained that he was not surprised by the refusal itself but “by the
8
It is worth noting that the 1866 concession agreements were deemed “prime examples of the
unequal treaties through which the colonialists fettered and exploited oppressed people.” See
editorial in the [People’s Republic of China] People’s Daily July 30, 1956, the gist of which was
translated from Peking to the Foreign Office The National Archives, UK (TNA) FO 371/
119080.
9
Although the British government now owned a minority 44% of the shares, the remaining 56%
majority were made up of dispersed ownership, mainly in France, but not owned or controlled
by the French government.
insulting attitude with which the refusal was declared.”10 Just a few days later,
with the threat of military reprisals now offshore, Nasser nationalized the Suez
Canal Company and took over the administration and operation of the Suez
Canal, promising fair compensation, continued maintenance, and orderly
transit of cargo. There is debate about precisely when the decision to nation-
alize was taken, and whether the withdrawal of U.S. support for the Dam
project was a precipitate cause of nationalization, but in any case, it was clear
in July 1956 that Egypt would not be a financial position to assert its eco-
nomic – and therefore its political – independence in the absence of an
alternative source of development funding.11
In the immediate aftermath of nationalization, Britain, France, and the
United States issued a communiqué condemning Nasser’s “seizure” and
calling for an international conference to be held in London in response.
While Egypt was invited to attend, Britain and France’s bellicose language –
threatening force in the early days of the crisis – led Nasser to reject the
invitation and propose an alternative conference that would respect Egyptian
sovereign rights and at the same time reinvigorate the 1888 Constantinople
Convention. A select group of users of the canal (twenty-two states12) attended
the London Conference between August 16 and 23. Unable to reach a
unanimous decision, eighteen of the states (18 Powers)13 agreed to a resolution
originally put forward by U.S. Secretary of State John Foster Dulles, which
sought not simply international supervision of the canal but also control over
its operation, maintenance, and development. Five nations14 were selected by
the 18 Powers to take this proposal to Egypt. Robert Menzies, the Australian
10
There were eight broadcasts in “Third Programme” that were printed in a collection with an
additional explanatory text by Peter Calvocoressi, which included several interviews with the
Egyptian president. See Anthony Moncrieff (ed.), Suez ten years after: Broadcasts from the BBC
Third Programme (London: BBC, 1967) p. 42.
11
Dealing with the inconclusiveness of the various archives of nationalization, see Laura James,
Nasser at War (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006).
12
Australia, Ceylon, Denmark, Ethiopia, France, India, Indonesia, Iran, Italy, Japan, the
Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Pakistan, Portugal, Russia, Spain, Sweden, Turkey, United
Kingdom, United States, and West Germany. Egypt and Greece declined invitations to attend,
although Nasser sent Ali Sabri, wing commander and close adviser, to be briefed by India and
Indonesia as to progress in the Conference, and to hold his own “caucus” with participants from
Egypt, Iraq, Jordan, Lebanon, Libya, Saudi Arabia, Sudan, Syria, and Yemen.
13
These were Australia, Denmark, Ethiopia, France, Iran, Italy, Japan, the Netherlands, New
Zealand, Norway, Pakistan, Portugal, Spain, Sweden, Turkey, United Kingdom, United States,
and West Germany. Ceylon, India, Indonesia, and Russia had put forward an alternative
proposal and did not agree to the majority resolution.
14
Chaired by Australian Prime Minister Robert Menzies and including representatives from
Ethiopia, Iran, Sweden, and the United States.
premier, served as head of the mission (the Menzies Mission). The delegation
met with Nasser and several of his cabinet ministers in early September, and
on the ninth of that month Nasser published a formal rejection of the
proposal. He repeated his proposal for the formation of a negotiating body
that would be “representative of the different views” to review and bring up to
date the Constantinople Convention.15 The British Foreign Office dismissed
this proposal as designed to waste time, because there would first need to be
agreement as to the composition, venue, and timing of the meeting of such a
negotiating body.16
In the days that followed, Britain, France, and the United States
announced the impending establishment of a Users’ Association17 (variously
called SCUA and CASU18), which Nasser denounced as a clear pretext to
military action, both in speeches in Egypt and in a formal letter to the
President of the Security Council.19 At precisely the same time, the foreign
pilots still now working for the nationalized Company were instructed to
walk out of their jobs. The British and French governments had been aware
of plans for the walkout, and they made sure the timing coincided with
Operation Pile Up. British Prime Minister Anthony Eden to inundate the
canal with a convoy of fifty ships at the exact moment when pilots would be
in short supply.
Two days later, on September 19, a Second London Conference convened
to discuss the failure of the Menzies Mission and Dulles’ proposed Users’
15
The text of Nasser’s reply was forwarded to the Department of State in telegram 681 from Cairo,
September 9, 1956, Department of State, Central Files, 974.7301/9–456. For an editorial note
summarizing the text, see Foreign Relations of the United States, 1955–1957, Suez Crisis, July
26–December 31, 1956, Volume XVI, Document 194 (Editorial Note), https://history.state.gov/
historicaldocuments/frus1955-57v16/d194. For a synopsis and U.S. appraisal of Nasser’s response,
see FRUS, 1955–1957, Suez Crisis, July 26–December 31, 1956, Volume XVI, Document 195,
which is discussed subsequently. The British archive record of the text of Nasser’s response
appears in TNA PREM 11/1102.
16
Keith Kyle, Suez: Britain’s End of Empire in the Middle East (London: IB Tauris, 2003), p. 222.
17
In the first instance, this Association was to comprise the 18 Powers from the First London
Conference. However, even as the Conference convened on September 19, 1956, it was clear
that many of the prospective members, particularly the Scandinavian countries, preferred to
take the issue to the United Nations.
18
CASU stands for Cooperative Association of Suez Canal Users. Dulles’ paper proposal for such
an organization is contained in Foreign Relations of the United States 1955–1957, Suez Crisis,
July 26–December 31, 1956, Vol. XVI, Document 198, “Outline of Proposal for a Voluntary
Association of Suez Canal Users,” paper prepared by the Secretary of State, Washington DC,
September 9, 1956, available at https://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1955-57v16/
d198. In fact, during the Second London Conference, much was made of the similarity
between CASU and casus belli. See Kyle, Suez, p. 254.
19
September 15, 1956, speech and letter to the Security Council in TNA PREM 11/1102.
Association.20 The Conference did not reach any firm resolutions. Instead,
Britain and France agreed – without consulting the United States – to lodge a
request for a meeting of the Security Council on September 26 to discuss the
agenda item, “Situation created by the unilateral action of the Egyptian
Government,” and a further meeting on October 2 at which the Egyptians
would be allowed to attend (and which Kyle argues was likely designed to
allow time to coordinate great power tactics).21 Ultimately, Operation Pile Up
failed, and Egypt demonstrated yet again its effective control and management
of the canal. During the early days of October, Egypt engaged in UN
diplomacy with the great powers, facilitated by Secretary-General Dag Ham-
marskjöld, while Britain, France, and Israel colluded to generate a pretext for
invasion to take place at the end of October.
justifying nationalization – reclaiming

sovereign dignity
Early on in the extremely lengthy speech enacting the nationalization of the
Suez Canal Company on July 26, 1956, Nasser specifically referenced events
at Bandung and the informal conference at Brioni between Tito, Nehru, and
himself just days before. At Brioni, he explained, Egypt, Yugoslavia, and India
had agreed to make practical the resolutions and recommendations of the
Bandung conference by following the ten principles of the Final Commu-
nique, “a great victory for Egypt’s policy of non-alignment.” He set out in
lengthy detail those principles and explained that at Brioni, crucial progress
had been achieved in making concrete the cooperation of equal nations. The
three countries had agreed to an overarching commitment to the Bandung
principles through the UN Charter and to the development of the under-
developed areas of the world as one of the basic tasks in achieving lasting
peace and stability among nations.22
20
The 18 Powers from the First London Conference attended this Second Conference
September 19–21, 1956.
21
Kyle, Suez, p. 255.
22
The differences in the archival records are striking in this speech. Although a full examination
of issues of translation and recording cannot be fully explored here, it is important to note that
the divergences in the texts – between spoken word and imperial translation – center on the
amount of space given over to the exposition of the Bandung principles, particularly their
accord with – and Egypt’s commitment to – the UN Charter. It is already clear from the
imperial archive that Bandung was being relegated to the margins of historical recording as, in
the routinized wording of the telegram text itself, “repetitive.” This absence of recording marks
yet another failure to hear, and to listen, to the lawful voice of Egypt and of the other
participants at Bandung. One other critical “silence” was the way Nasser addressed his
The speech was also a strategic signal for nationalization to physically take
place. It contained a hidden message for a specially formed group of officers to
storm the company’s headquarters during the course of the speech, preempt-
ing any forceful reaction that might jeopardize nationalization. The code
word was “de Lesseps,” and only toward the end of the very lengthy speech
did Nasser actually announce the nationalization of the company.23 One of
the group later explained that Nasser had feared sabotage of the canal if the
officers did not first take over the company’s offices prior to announcing
nationalization.24 This so-called seizure illustrated the Egyptian government’s
recognition that foreign presence in the canal was likely to lead to foreign
interference, and generated a lack of certainty over sovereign territory. It was a
literal enactment of battling against “imperial domination to achieve eco-
nomic” and “political independence.” And as a further enactment of lawful
authority, Nasser included the full text of the Nationalization Decree toward
the end of the speech, “on behalf of the nation, as the nation, President of the
Republic.”25
In his July 26 nationalization speech, Nasser made clear that Egypt con-
sidered the Suez Canal Company to be Egyptian despite the fact that the
Company had clearly behaved as if it believed itself “a state inside the state.”26
He also justified nationalization by the historic denial of profits for the
Egyptian people by British usurpation and the fact that 120,000 workers had
died digging the canal: Egypt had “dug the Canal with our skulls, bones and
blood.”27 He emphasized that this sucking of Egyptian blood would not be
repeated, and that the past would be righted by the restoration of rights over
the Suez Canal; Egypt would “not allow imperialism and oppressors to
dominate,” and on its path to independence it would “demolish the relics of
audience, as “fellow citizens” and “brothers.” This, too, was deemed irrelevant, yet it speaks
precisely to the forms in which Nasser brought into being his legal authority: through the
appeal to revolutionary nationalism and equal dignity domestically as well as internationally.
23
July 26, 1956 speech.
24
Interview with Adel Ezzat, Canal Nationalization Group, The Other Side of Suez, BBC
Documentary broadcast in May 2004. The group was led by Mahmoud Younis, a military
colleague of Nasser, who organized thirty men to nationalize the canal company at its
headquarters in Ismailia during the course of the speech.
25
Again, this spoken text is missing from the imperial record.
26
For the text and sound recording of the July 26 speech, see the Nasser Archive, http://nasser
.bibalex.org/Speeches; for the British government’s imperial record, see “‘Speech by President
Nasser at Alexandria on July 26’ [1956] (full text apart from abbreviation of repetitive passages),”
TNA FO 371/119080, hereafter “July 26 Speech.” This Foreign Office record of telegraphic
correspondence includes the translated text of Nasser’s speech at Cairo on July 28, also
available on the Nasser Archive site, hereafter “July 28 Speech.”
27
July 26, 1956 Speech.
the past – the relics of enslavement, exploitation and domination.”28 This

rhetoric drew a distinction between de Lesseps – the “architect” of the canal
project – and the actual construction of the canal. Nasser personalized the
canal enterprise and linked it to colonial occupation and foreign domination.
He emphasized that Egyptians had paid for the canal through blood and
crippling loans, but that today true freedom meant economic freedom.
Further justification for nationalization came on July 28 with Nasser’s
speech in Cairo. He emphasized that Egypt knew independence and full
sovereignty, and was practicing its sovereignty by shaking off the tricks and
ambitions of imperialism and rejecting foreign interference in its internal
affairs.29 He delegitimized the “clamor” of London and Paris as lacking right
or support, acted out only by the habit of “sucking blood” and “usurping
rights” by the “intervention in other countries’ affairs.”30 He cited the numer-
ous acts of British nationalization of industry – iron, steel, and transport – as
simple manifestations of sovereign right in relation to their joint-stock com-
panies. In addition, he territorialized the assertion of full sovereignty, and
asked who was better placed to protect the canal than Egypt, noting that the
canal was “part of Egypt” in “Egypt’s territory,” and “part of [Egypt’s] . . . land.”
By exercising proprietary rights over the company, and raising the Egyptian
flag over its headquarters, Egypt would achieve dignity, a national economy,
and “real freedom.”31
In rejecting the Menzies Mission on September 9, Nasser stated that the
18 Powers proposal sought to effect the “amputation of a major part of the body
of Egypt.” The “goal [was] to deprive Egypt of an integral part of its territory.”32
Later, in rejecting the subsequent proposal of a Users’ Association, Nasser
repeated that Egypt insisted “her sovereignty must remain intact and refuse[d]
to give up any part of that sovereignty for the sake of money.”33 Egypt had
“resolved to show the world that when small nations decide to preserve their
sovereignty, they will do that all right.”34
collective colonialism contra international legality

The sanctity of Egyptian territory as a corollary of full sovereignty found its
most emphatic expression in Nasser’s opposition to the great powers’ attempts
28 29 30 31
July 26, 1956 Speech. July 28 speech TNA FO 371/119080. Ibid. Ibid.
32
Telegram 681 from Cairo to Washington, September 9, 1956, Department of State, Central
Files, 974.7301/9–456.
33
September 15, 1956, speech, www.fordham.edu/halsall/mod/1956nasser-suez1.html.
34
Ibid.
at internationalization. By convening a conference to discuss a matter purely

internal to Egyptian sovereignty, Britain, France, and the United States were
engaging in what Nasser termed “collective colonialism.” He rejected the
entire premise of the First London Conference in a speech on August 12,
suggesting that it was not an international conference at all.35 In addition, he
asserted that the “misleading statements to the effect of giving the Egyptian
Company an international character makes it clear that the three governments
wish to deprive Egypt of one its inherent and sovereign rights.” This, he said,
was a “planned conspiracy” that aimed “to force . . . [the Egyptian people] . . .
to give up a part of Egyptian territory and sovereignty to an international
authority which is in reality collective colonialism.” The threats that Britain
and France made were designed “as threats to all small countries” and were
condemned “in all free countries and by all the people who got rid of colonial
rule and are striving to protect their hard won independence and sovereignty.”
To counter these, Nasser proposed an alternative conference that would seek,
genuinely, to reach a peaceful resolution to the dispute.
In this speech of August 12, Bandung surfaced in two ways. First, Nasser
drew on the imagined solidarity of newly independent states and their like-
minded desire for true independence from colonialism. Second, and perhaps
more significantly from the legal perspective, he sought to deploy the prin-
cipled language of the Bandung Final Communiqué as a platform for
asserting the dedication of the Egyptian government to international law
and cooperation. Nasser’s speech echoed several specific principles articulated
in the Communiqué: the declaration that the evil of “colonialism in all its
manifestations” be brought to a speedy end; and the declaration on the
promotion of world peace and cooperation, which emphasized “the equality
of all nations large and small,” respect for sovereignty and territorial integrity,
the use of the UN Charter system of peaceful dispute settlement, respect “for
justice and international obligations,” and the abstention from interference
and the exertion of pressures over other countries.36 In this speech, Nasser
35
Transcription of News Conference held by Nasser on August 12, 1956, broadcast by BBC
Radio, audio, available at http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/5194576.stm. There is also a
text record of this statement in TNA FO 953/1692, a pamphlet published by the Egypt
Information Department titled “The Suez Canal: Facts and Documents,” Statement of the
Egyptian Government, August 12, 1956, pp. 20–22 (the pamphlet itself is undated but is
included in this archive file with telegram dispatches from late September 1956 through
November 1956).
36
“Final Communiqué of the Asian-African conference of Bandung (April 24, 1955),” The
Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Republic of Indonesia (Ed.). Asia-Africa speak from Bandung
(Djakarta: 1955), pp. 161–9, available at http://franke.uchicago.edu/Final_Communique_
Bandung_1955.pdf.
positioned historic and “new” (“collective”) colonialism as having operated

(and continuing to operate) contrary to international law, while placing the
“spirit of Bandung,” the Bandung Principles, the UN Charter, and an inde-
pendent Egypt as compliant with, even the champions of, international law.
Even before Britain, France, and the United States proposed a conference,
Nasser had emphasized Egypt’s compliance with international law in its
nationalization of the Suez Canal Company. On July 28, he emphasized that
the company would be fairly compensated and that Egypt would guarantee
free passage and noninterference.37 But from August onward he consistently
highlighted the great powers’ historic noncompliance with international law –
the British disregard of the 1888 Convention – and their current threats to
international peace and security; in other words, their threatened violation of
the UN Charter.
Nasser ridiculed the supposed claims of the colonialists as seeking a peace-
ful solution and free negotiations:
Need one emphasize the contradiction between the palpitating reality and
professed aim? If there is anything that flagrantly violated and disdained the
letter and spirit of the Charter of the United Nations it is such acts of
attempted intimidation, economic pressure and incitement to sabotage. In
distinct contrast to this the Government of Egypt has announced its full
readiness to negotiate a peaceful solution in conformity with the purposes
and principles of the Charter of the United Nations. This remains to be the
policy and the intent of the Egyptian Government . . . we keep constantly in
our mind the vital importance of genuine international cooperation as
distinct from domination of any country, be it single domination as the one
which Egypt just got rid of, or collective domination, as would inevitably be
considered the system proposed by the committee.38
He also referred to the more clandestine acts of Britain, France, and the
United States, namely the economic pressures placed on Egypt. By freezing
Egyptian assets held in their banks, these nations were “in violation of
international agreements and of the Charter of the United Nations.” He might
have added that Britain and France had also withheld the payment of dues,
despite their ongoing use of the canal for the transit of their shipping.39 Later,
37
July 28, 1956 speech TNA FO 371/119080.
38
Telegram 681 from Cairo, September 9, Department of State, Central Files, 974.7301/9–456.
39
Here the three nations diverged in their policy: the United States paid the dues but under
formal protest, whereas Britain and France had always paid dues in London or Paris, and so
they retained this practice, in effect depriving the Suez Canal Authority of payment. For
further exploration of the economic aspects of the crisis, see Diane B. Kunz, The Economic
Diplomacy of the Suez Crisis (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1991).
in a speech on July 26, 1957 marking the first anniversary of the nationalization
decree, Nasser referred to the continued U.S. policy of dumping cotton
surpluses and economic and financial isolation as “invasion from within.”40
These oppressive economic measures, Nasser argued, endangered inter-
national peace and security and therefore meant that these countries were
“taking a course inconsistent with the United Nations Charter which they
bound themselves to respect.”41
During the crisis Nasser used the 1888 Convention as a legal bolster to
Egypt’s assertion of sovereignty by making it the proposed basis of an alterna-
tive conference and, in the interim, as the basis on which Egypt would operate
and manage the canal. He proposed to sponsor a conference of the 1888 Con-
vention signatories together with all the users of the canal “for the purposes of
reviewing the Constantinople Convention and considering the conclusion of
an agreement between all these governments, reaffirming and guaranteeing
the freedom of navigation on the Suez Canal.”42 This proposal reaffirmed
Egypt’s “true devotion” to the UN Charter. Egyptian support for the 1888
Convention’s ‘free passage’ guarantees was described contemporaneously in
an editorial by Anwar Sadat as the real problem for Britain: she was not used to
impartiality and continued to expect special treatment.43
In his September 15 speech, Nasser condemned the Users’ Association.
He argued that it was impossible to have two bodies organizing the canal
and that this was yet another example of imperial domination. He also
articulated a wider vision of great power efforts at internationalization as
reflective of “international chaos where powers of evil domination and
imperialism have prevailed.” Nasser spoke “in the name of every Egyptian
Arab and in the name of all free countries” when he determined to
“shoulder the responsibility of reaffirming and establishing anew” the prin-
ciples proclaimed by the “imperialist” countries in the Atlantic Charter –
the same principles these nations were violating.44 Nasser took ownership of
international law in striking form, stating that while Egypt believed in
Settlement of compensation arrangements following nationalization was finally agreed on

through World Bank mediation in July 1958.
40
Quoted in Keith Wheelock, Nasser’s new Egypt: A critical analysis (London: Atlantic Books,
Stevens & Sons Limited, 1960) p. 256.
41
Transcription of August 12, 1956, News Conference broadcast by BBC Radio, audio, available
at http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/5194576.stm; speech also available at Nasser online
archive op cit.
42
Ibid.
43
Anwar Sadat was then editor of the state-owned Al Gomhouria and Minister of State. TNA
FO371/118090
44
September 15, 1956 speech, www.fordham.edu/halsall/mod/1956nasser-suez1.html.
international law, it would not submit to great power threats even if it was
only a small country.45
International law, in Nasser’s conception, would not be a tool for oppression,
but a tool of emancipation used to protect sovereignty. This rhetorical position
reflected that Nasser was genuinely prepared to concede some degree of inter-
national oversight, but was not prepared to allow for management or control, as
this was obviously either a precursor to military occupation or at the very least an
economic stranglehold. In his memoirs, Egyptian Foreign Minister Dr. Mah-
moud Fawzi recalled that the entire premise of the Menzies Mission had been
that Nasser ought to accept the inherent incompetence of Egyptians and his own
untrustworthiness. Fawzi opined that Menzies (and presumably the great powers)
had no concept of “the raw sensitivities of Afro-Asian nationalities that he thought
it a sufficient inducement to assure Nasser that the proposed international board
would do all the work of the canal while Egypt would get all the profits.”46
the materiality of equal sovereignty through

the canal and the un
During the Suez Crisis, Nasser’s rhetoric was matched with a universal
guarantee of free passage through the canal to all its users, in line with Egypt’s
international obligations.47 He also engaged Foreign Minister Fawzi at the
UN to try to provide Western states “an honourable means of retreat from their
ideal of internationalisation.”48 These material practices were a form of
counterpoint and, in fact, bolstered Nasser’s largely rhetorical performances.
Here, materiality refers to the concrete, physically grounded acts of equal
sovereignty and international legality, rather than to words or rhetoric con-
tained in his speeches and press statements.
While to some extent a distinction between rhetorical and material practice
is artificial, Egypt’s conduct at home – specifically at the canal – and on the
international plane is particularly instructive in demonstrating the functional,
concrete legacy of Bandung. The experience of Bandung, and the apparent
genesis of a Bandung bloc,49 arguably emboldened the Egyptian leader not
45
Ibid.
46
Mahmoud Fawzi, Suez 1956: An Egyptian Perspective (London: Shorouk International, 1986)
pp. 57–58.
47
Egypt continued to deny full access to Israeli shipping pursuant to legal arguments put forward
in Security Council debates between July and September 1951. See in particular Dr Fawzi’s
speeches at 549th (26 July 1951 S/PV.549), 550th (1 August 1951 S/PV.550), and 553rd (16 August
1951 S/PV.553) meetings of the Security Council.
48
Kyle, Suez, p. 279.
49
FRUS, 1955–1957, Suez Crisis, July 26–December 31, 1956, Volume XVI, Document 195,
Draft Telegram From the Embassy in the United Kingdom to the Department of State,
only to articulate equal sovereignty but also to practice it, especially to counter
the racist assumptions underpinning Western policy. In a new world that
respected freedom and independence, what would equal sovereignty look
like? What would be the material practices of sovereignty in a new era in
which “the tide of history had changed its course”?50
From the start of the crisis, Nasser emphasized compliance with inter-
national law by reference to the materiality of transiting cargo through the
canal. What better demonstration of Egypt’s protection of the canal than
through the continued traffic, at rates comparable to the same months in
1955? In July and August he emphasized that nationalization had had no
impact on freedom of navigation, as borne out by the figures for shipping that
the Egypt Information Department later published in a pamphlet on the Suez
Canal.51 The efficient operation of the canal was of even more importance in
mid-September during Operation Pile Up. There was such an imminent
threat placed on Egypt if the transit of shipping failed that Nasser awarded
Orders of Merit to every pilot who had engaged in the successful operation.52
As Egypt met this huge test, it seemed that any justification for military action
had withered and died.
In addition, the test placed on operating the canal enabled Egypt to write its
own letter to the President of the Security Council decrying the threats Britain
and France made in their earlier letter to the President,53 and announcing that
Egypt had received numerous positive responses to its own calling of an
international conference on the Suez Canal. This announcement further
demonstrated Egypt’s genuine attempt at conciliation.54 It is arguable that
the strategy of conducting a counter-conference finds direct inspiration from
September 9, 1956 (Department of State, Central Files, 974.7301/9–1156) (forwarded to Dulles

on September 11).
50
Quote taken from the “Address Delivered by Mr. Anwar el Sadat at the First Afro-Asian
People’s Solidarity Conference, December 26, 1957,” The First Afro-Asian People’s Solidarity
Conference, 26 December 1957 to January 1, 1958, 2nd edition (Cairo: The Permanent
Secretariat of the Organization for Afro-Asian People’s Solidarity, 1958), pp. 7–12, available at
www.fordham.edu/Halsall/mod/1957sadat-afroasian1.asp. In the speech, reference was made to
the “liberation” of Port Said, which was a reference to the guerrilla campaign waged by
Egyptian civilians faced with the Anglo-French invasion of the previous year.
51
TNA FO 953/1692, “The Suez Canal: Facts and Documents,” Comparative Statement of Ships
Transiting Through the Suez Canal, p. 23.
52
Kyle, Suez, p. 250.
53
UN Doc S/3645. Letters of September 12, 1956, from representatives of France and the United
Kingdom. The letter purported to indicate to the Council that Egypt would threaten
international peace and security if it were not to cooperate with the Users’ Association. The
letter was seen as a clear pretext to war and was followed up with another, on September 23.
54
UN Doc SC S/3650. Letter of September 17, 1956, from representative of Egypt.
Bandung. It also found material support from Bandung: numerous partici-

pants from Bandung visited Egypt during the Crisis to engage in small-scale
diplomacy, most notably India’s Foreign Minister, Krishna Menon; and acted
as Egypt’s representatives during the Conferences in London.
Egypt repeated that there could now be no justification for the British and
French threats because the canal had operated smoothly for more than sixty
days despite the obstacles placed before it. These countries instead sought to
take virtual possession of the canal and destroy Egypt’s independence. Egypt
further formalized its denouncement of Operation Pile Up and the efforts at
sabotaging the canal’s operation with another letter to the President of the
Security Council on September 24. It requested an urgent meeting to consider
the actions taken by Britain and France, as they constituted a danger to
international peace and security and were serious violations of the UN
Charter.55
The Security Council held a series of meetings on the “Suez Question”
in early October at which Egypt was invited to take “a place at the
Security Council table.”56 In his speech on October 8 Fawzi began by
emphasizing the “question” was a simple one, a choice faced by Egypt
between “domination and freedom.”57 He stated that those who had expressed
approval at the nationalization represented no less than two-thirds of the
world’s population. The “entente” between the United Kingdom and France
was a tactic
to see to it, of course, that the now slipping hegemony of the nineteenth
century, when time was slumbering and the sky was dark, should be retrieved;
to see to it that the Suez Canal should be finally amputated and severed from
Egypt.58
55
UN Doc S/3656. Letter of September 24, 1956, from representative of Egypt in response to the
Anglo-French letter of September 23.
56
The Security Council met to discuss the Suez Question at its 735th meeting (October 5, 1956);
736th and 737th meetings (October 8, 1956); 738th and 739th meetings (October 9 1956); 740th
Meeting (October 11, 1956); 741st meeting (October 12, 1956); and 742nd and 743rd meetings
(October 13, 1956). The expression “at the Security Council table” is used at the start of each of
the verbatim records of the meetings to connote the dual role of participant (speaker and
interested party) and non-participant (non-voter). The 739th–741st meetings were held in
private and constituted negotiations between Fawzi, British Foreign Minister Selwyn Lloyd,
and French Foreign Minister and President of the Council Christian Pineau, with Dag
Hammarskjold acting as moderator.
57
UN Doc S/PV.736, October 8, 1956 para 3, p. 1. Fawzi quotes his speech extensively in his
account of the Security Council meetings. See Fawzi (1987), pp. 64-5.
58
UN Doc S/PV.736, October 8, 1956 para. 13, pp. 2–3.
He made plain the distinction to be drawn between the British and French
attempts at recapturing the methods of the nineteenth century and Egypt’s
genuine desire to engage in dialogue. Egypt had never refused negotiation (as
suggested in the September 23 letter by Britain and France) but had refused
“dictation.”59 He argued that Egypt had been facing not “a conference but a
trial”; they had not been “invited to a meeting, but assigned to a court.”60
As the Security Council meetings progressed, the debate appeared to center
on the legal status of the Canal and who had the power to author that status:
Britain, France, and the United States asserted it was an “international
waterway” whereas Egypt, Yugoslavia, and the Soviet Union acknowledged
its international importance but emphasized the need for Egyptian cooper-
ation as an equal, sovereign actor. For instance, the Yugoslav Representative
Vladimir Popović quoted President Tito’s August 12 response to the First
London Conference that “no international conference may discuss Egypt’s
right to nationalize the Suez Company . . . An international conference can
only discuss conditions of the application of the principle of the freedom of
navigation, with participation of Egypt on an equal footing and without
imposing decisions upon Egypt.” Popović said that “the crux of the Suez
problem, as it now presents itself, is to bring Egypt’s sovereign rights with
regard to the Suez Canal into harmony with the legitimate interests of
the world community in navigation through what is undoubtedly – and
increasingly – a waterway of exceptional international importance.”61
This debate crystallized around the third of Six Principles that were
included in the final Resolution put to the Security Council at the 743rd
meeting on October 13, that “[t]he operation of the Canal should be insulated
from the politics of any country.”62 Fawzi argued that the “Western concept of
59 60
Ibid. para. 47. Ibid. para. 50.
61
UN Doc S/PV.738 paras. 8 and 12, p. 3. The Yugoslav delegate went on to reference the wider
issue of world affairs having to “adjust” to “a rapidly evolving international framework . . .
especially the interests of newly independent states” (para. 12).
62
The Six Principles were unanimously adopted by Security Council vote at the 743rd meeting
as UN SC Resolution 188 (October 13, 1956) (UN Doc S/2675); however, the vote itself was not
straightforward. The British and French draft Resolution had two parts, the first detailing the
Six Principles agreed as the basis for continued (private) negotiations following the private talks
between October 9 and 11, and the second essentially repurposing the 18 Power proposal from
the First London Conference calling for, among others things, a Suez Canal Users’
Association. The first part was approved by unanimous vote. The second part was defeated by
the exercise of the veto by the Soviet Union, to which Yugoslavia also added its opposing vote.
It should be noted that Yugoslavia had proposed an alternative draft resolution that included
the Six Principles and the stipulation that negotiations continue under the auspices of the
Secretary General (UN Doc S/3672 October 13, 1956). Following the vote adopting the
amended Resolution 188, Dulles said that it was clearly “understood that the Security Council
insulating the Canal from politics” in fact “would throw the Canal violently
into the fray of the politics, not only of one nation but of a great number of
nations.”63 Here, as with Nasser’s statements, international legality was posited
contra “internationalization,” with such “collective colonialism” representing
a dark reversion to the past of unequal violence and disorder.
While Egypt accepted the Six Principles and Resolution 188 as a basis for
continuing negotiations, it was not prepared to agree to the extraordinary
British insistence that more concrete proposals be agreed on before talks could
be resumed.64 Despite Anglo-French hostility, Egypt continued to expect, as
did Hammarskjöld, that meetings scheduled for the end of October in Geneva
could result in a workable agreement. In the meantime, Egypt maintained its
adherence to the 1888 Convention’s neutralization of the canal and the
guarantee of free navigation. Britain and France appeared increasingly isol-
ated not only in terms of legal rhetoric but also in the manifestation of legal
compliance: the continued smooth operation of the canal and Egypt’s will-
ingness, and indeed insistence, to negotiate on equal and cooperative terms.
Hammarskjöld discussed with Fawzi what “organized cooperation” might
look like, emphasizing that joint meetings and representation of users would
not go beyond the first three principles contained in the Resolution, relating
to Egypt’s sovereign authority over the canal.65 At the end of October it looked
like a negotiated settlement on a newly redefined basis of international cooper-
ation was forthcoming, one that adhered to the UN Charter principles but,
importantly, asserted the centrality of the Bandung principles on equality,
dignity, and freedom from colonialism, collective or otherwise, past or present.
Collusion and invasion forced that settlement to the background while the
UN became the stage for another set of struggles over what reclaimed sover-
eignty would mean in a world of newly independent states.66
remain[ed] seized of th[e] matter and that the Secretary General may continue to encourage
interchanges.” The Yugoslavian delegate therefore did not press for a vote on their draft. See
UN Doc S/PV.743 October 13, 1956.
63
Fawzi (1987), p. 71.
64
Ibid., p. 73. Fawzi recounts how he resented the suggestion by Pineau and Lloyd that a
“questionnaire” to explain the rejection of the 18 Powers proposal. He recalled that it was an
insult.
65
UN Doc S/3728, Yearbook of United Nations, Exchange of correspondence dated November
3, 1956, between Secretary-General Dag Hammarskjöld and the Foreign Minister of Egypt
Mahmoud Fawzi.
66
These events are, perhaps, more familiar to the student and scholar of international law: the
Uniting for Peace resolution, the First Emergency Session of the General Assembly and the
United Nations Emergency Force (UNEF). The story of those spectacular struggles is one for
another day though readers may pause to consider the oft-forgotten point that it was the
On April 24, 1957, unspectacularly, Egypt publicized a Declaration agree-

ing to settle disputes as to the canal’s operation through the International
Court of Justice, and accepting the binding force of the 1888 Convention, but
it did not accept that this required international control or even oversight.67
The United States requested the Suez question to remain on the UN Security
Council’s agenda following this Declaration because it was not prepared to
accept its juridical status, even though Egypt made plain that the Declaration
“constitute[d] an international instrument.” The United States therefore con-
tinued to resist the sovereign rights of Egypt to bind itself in international law
as an equal legal author. Yet that protest eventually petered out as Egypt
continued to operate the canal without incident and settled a claim for
compensation with the company through World Bank mediation during
1957 and 1958.
conclusion
For Nasser, the Bandung Conference provided the first opportunity to engage
on the international plane as an equal actor in a forum that rejected the
politico-legal structuring of colonial and imperial power. During the Suez
Crisis, Nasser deployed the Bandung Conference as a rhetorical and material
resource to counter what he categorized as “collective colonialism” – in
essence, “new manifestations of colonialism” – and to articulate a distinct
vision of world order and the role of international law in that ordering. If we
consider that much of the operation of the international is through an
imagining of an international plane on which actors engage in politics and
law, then Bandung was vital to Nasser’s imagination of that plane as populated
by like-minded anti-imperialists. In this alternative world, newly independent
states faced similar challenges and held a range of concerns that coalesced
around principles of the respect for equal sovereignty, the rejection of coloni-
alism and reclamation of international legal authorship and authority. The
power of participating at Bandung – both in mind and in actualized perform-
ance – facilitated Nasser addressing the international from Cairo and Alexan-
dria as an equal player facing an unequal task of asserting sovereignty,
particularly territorial integrity, in the face of historic domination and contem-
porary threats to survival.
Yugoslavian representative in the Security Council, Jože Brilej, who proposed the Uniting for
Peace procedure, which paved the way for the emergency meetings of the General Assembly.
67
265 UNTS 299 (No. 3821).
Participation at Bandung also appeared to cement Nasser’s conceptualiza-

tion of Egypt’s place in the world. In 1955, immediately after the Conference,
he wrote that Egypt could not “look stupidly at a map of the world not
realising our place therein and the role determining to us by that place.”
Egypt was part of three circles: an Arab circle, an African circle, and a Muslim
circle.68 Here were the first articulations of Egypt’s positive neutrality, and this
positioning certainly could be traced back to participation at Bandung.
Indeed, upon Nasser’s rejection of the Menzies Mission report on September
9, 1956, the Americans caricatured him as a “hypnotic prisoner” to the rhetoric
of neutralism, deriding it as “evangelical neutralism, particularly that brand
found among certain members of the Bandung bloc.”69
Nasser also performed the rhetoric of Bandung through deliberate repeti-
tion of the principles articulated in the Final Communiqué. The whole
strategy of terming the effort at internationalization and management of the
canal as “collective colonialism” can be seen as an attempt to undermine great
power reactions to nationalization as manifestations of an outdated, illegal
practice in the decolonization era. Further, by holding up the UN Charter as
a document being subjected to undue pressure, manipulation, and dismissal
by the British and French, Nasser aligned himself as a champion of inter-
national legality in distinction to these colonial powers. In terms of practice,
Nasser materially demonstrated – through the efficient, unimpeded operation
of the canal until the Anglo-French invasion – the concrete reality of equal
sovereignty and compliance with international obligations. And during UN
negotiations Egypt could rely on Bandung participants and emerging non-
aligned cooperation, following Brioni, to articulate a joint imagining of a
decolonized world in which small states rewrote international legal obligations
and commitments.
In these various forms, therefore, Bandung surfaced as a significant politico-
legal resource for Nasser throughout the Suez Crisis.70 The aims and object-
ives of nationalist policy were articulated and practiced in terms of inter-
national law, using this law specifically to reject the contradictions inherent
in great power reaction to nationalization. The deployment of the spirit of
Bandung resurfaced again in 1957, when Cairo hosted the First Afro-Asian
68
Gamal Abdel Nasser, The Philosophy of the Revolution (Cairo: Dar al-Maaref, 1955) p. 54.
69
FRUS, Document 195, Draft Telegram, September 9, 1956 op cit.
70
This chapter has not considered the domestic effect of his deployment of Bandung, but it
should be noted that from the domestic perspective, he used his experience at Bandung and his
consequent emergence as an Arab leader to cast himself as an anticolonial hero, here to save
Egypt from foreign domination. This was powerful rhetoric for domestic consumption that
neatly papered over his authoritarian policies and stifling of dissent.
People’s Solidarity Conference. In his opening address on December 26, 1957,

Anwar Sadat71 pointed out that Egypt had demonstrated to the world what true
independence according to the principles of Bandung could look like. He
quoted Nasser, who had spoken at an anniversary event of the Suez War in
Port Said: “We turn to the whole world demanding the corroboration of the
fundamental principles of justice, which is the right of self-determination.”72
Nasser and, most notably, Foreign Minister Fawzi authored an other
international law capable of restraining collective colonialism and guarantee-
ing sovereign independence. They did so with a conscious attention to the
multiple audiences to their performance of sovereignty, the code word for
effecting the physical nationalization of the Company a prime example of the
knowing surveillance of Egyptian governance. Bandung played a critical role
in this tangible, legal reclamation of international personality, not only as a
direct reference – in particular using the language of the Final Communi-
qué – but also in the imagining of an altered international plane of authoring
legal actors.73
Egypt and the decolonizing world, at Bandung, Brioni, London, New York,
or Cairo, rejected explicit and implied classification as an object of knowledge
and instead reclaimed status as a knowing subject of international law.
Whether in public articulation (the performance of speeches, press state-
ments, or interviews in precise places), in written text (as legal decree,
pamphlet production or communiqué), or private, screened-off negotiations,
71
Then Minister of State.
72
“Address Delivered by Mr. Anwar at the First Afro-Asian People’s Solidarity Conference,
December 26, 1957.”
73
Lest this alternative remembering of history of the Suez Crisis appear somehow nostalgic for a
kind of Nasserist nationalism-through-internationalism, Nasser’s claim to international
authority had a disciplining force upon domestic politics too. He was able to draw upon his
newly embarked upon international experiences – as global representative of independent
Egypt – to shore up his hold on national power. He co-opted anti-imperialist rhetoric to his
own brand of Arab nationalism, and in that same move silenced alternative critiques and voices
within Egypt and the decolonizing world. Most obviously the nationalization of the Suez
Canal Company had long been a demand publicized and called for by the Society of the
Muslim Brothers. Documenting the internal organization of calls for nationalizing the
Company, see Brynjar Lia, The Society of the Muslim Brothers in Egypt: The Rise of an Islamic
Mass Movement, 1928–1942 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1998). The Company’s
activities had also long been the object of numerous, ongoing labour disputes among Canal
workers. See Joel Beinin and Zachary Lockman, Workers on the Nile: Nationalism,
Communism, Islam, and the Egyptian Working Class, 1882–1954 (Cairo: American University
in Cairo Press, 1998). On the effect of the Suez Crisis and the turn to foreign policy from
1955 in cementing Nasser’s hold over nationalist opposition actors, see R. Meijer, The Quest for
Modernity: Secular Liberal and Left-Wing Political Thought in Egypt, 1945–1958 (London:
Routledge, 2002).
Nasser and his officials were at once speaking to great power and simultan-
eously speaking to an alternative world, calling that world into being and
placing it, equally, on the imagined international plane. While historians
argue about the legacy or otherwise of Bandung, about the genealogy of
nonalignment, or about the leadership of the project of “positive neutrality,”
it is clear that Bandung was used by its participants – in this chapter, by
Nasser – to articulate and practice an altered international plane that rejected
new manifestations of colonialism and used international law as the tool with
which to reject great power interference. The project of nationalization,
articulated as a project of independence and sovereign equality, could be
one that harnessed and applied the language of Bandung for all Bandung
participants, not simply for Egypt in its confrontation with collective
colonialism.
35
Palestine at Bandung
The Longwinded Start of a Reimagined International Law
nahed samour
introduction
Is the Bandung Conference to be remembered as the first time the rights of
Palestinians were acknowledged at an international level?1 Or did Bandung,
and thereby the Asian-African community, fail the Palestinians in their quest
for self-determination? Palestine proved to be a discomforting issue faced by
the Bandung plenary. All ills that were opposed and all principles that were
affirmed in the Final Communiqué spoke to the Palestinian context – but
Palestine was not easily accommodated in the conference. One of Bandung’s
objectives was “to consider problems of special interest to Asian and African
peoples, for example problems affecting national sovereignty, racialism and
colonialism in all its manifestations.”2 The conference declared its “support of
the cause of freedom and independence for all such peoples,” or “peoples
[subjected] to alien subjugation, domination and exploitation.”3 Were the
Palestinian people considered as subjected to colonialism, racialism, and
imperialism at Bandung? Were Palestinians identified as beneficiaries of the
stated aims of self-determination, freedom, and independence?
I shall argue that as a conference, Bandung entailed too many tensions and
contradictions, leaving it almost inconsequential. The later emerging spirit of
Bandung starting in the 1960s outshined the Final Communiqué of the
conference. That spirit was materialized by a confident Palestinian leadership
emerging in the 1964 Palestine Liberation Organization and by a radicaliza-
tion of the Third World movement formed by dramatic struggles such as in
1
Hashim Behbahani, China’s Foreign Policy in the Arab World, 1955–1975: Three Case Studies
(London: Kegan Paul International, 1981), p. 31.
2
3
Final Communiqué, D.1.b.
595
596 Nahed Samour
Algeria, Vietnam, and Palestine. The change was initiated not on the level of
international law and diplomacy but through armed struggle.
This contribution shows that Palestine at Bandung was central and mar-
ginal at the same time. It was central in the discussions, yet marginal in the
wording of the Final Communiqué. A friendly reading sees in the Final
Communiqué recognition of Palestinian rights “on however a limited scale
at his early stage.”4 The Libyan newspaper Al-Jihad in a comment on April 23,
1955, went much further and celebrated Bandung as a distinct milestone for
the Palestinian cause, and as an Eastern landmark: “From now on we shall not
ask for the implementation of the United Nations resolution on Palestine but
shall demand the execution of the Bandung resolution.. . . We shall turn
eastward with our hearts and hopes.”5
When the Bandung Conference took place in 1955, delegates found them-
selves in a substantially predefined state of the law: They could not shape
international law ex novo, but they were confronted with an international legal
order that was established before their voices were heard. As newly independ-
ent states they (at first) largely embraced the existing post–Second World War
legal framework in form and substance, putting their hopes in the promises of
national equality. The Palestine Question highlights the predicament of how
Bandung was defined, and limited, by a state-centric perspective which
excluded Palestinians (who were not invited) and adopted a universalist legal
rhetoric as a solution, with the United Nations as key reference. This was
problematic as the “universal” in United Nations law emerged from European
legal and political genealogies that had not benefited Asian-African concerns in
general, and Palestine in particular, but rather disregarded Palestinian rights.
Only decades later did Bandung countries revisit some of the international
legal terms to serve peoples suffering from foreign domination. A re-imagined
post-Bandungian spirit relativized the state-centrism and universalist rhetoric
to be more in line with a renewed anticolonial legal conceptionalizing and
wording. Thus, the Bandung Spirit survived in different terms. In the years
that followed, while still holding on to the universalized legal rhetoric of the
United Nations (UN), Asian, African, and Latin American countries took
international law in three distinctly new directions in dealing with the Pales-
tine Question: (1) moving away from a state-centric nucleus of international
law and gradually recognizing national liberation movements, here the
4
Behbahani, China’s Foreign Policy p. 31.
5
Cited in Yufeng Mao, “When Zhou Enlai Met Gamal Abdel Nasser: Sino-Egyptian Relations
and the Bandung Conference,” in Bandung 1955, Little Histories (eds. Antonia Finnane and
Derek McDougall) (Caulfield: Monash University Press, 2010), p. 103.
Palestine at Bandung 597
Palestinian Liberation Organization, as nonstate members of international

organizations; (2) shifting the treatment of the question of Palestine from
humanitarian relief for refugees to legal solutions for citizens; (3) treating
colonialism and apartheid as legal crimes, rather than political contingencies,
and therefore requesting settler colonialism and apartheid, as affecting Pales-
tinians, to be judged by an international tribunal – echoed today in discussions
regarding the Statute of the International Criminal Court.6 With a focus on
Palestine after Bandung, this chapter looks at law’s ambivalence in a larger
decolonization process.
The following part of this chapter addresses questions of how conference
settings lay the groundwork for understanding law as process (like conference
precedents, invitees, and agenda setting). Next, the chapter discusses confer-
ence text production, namely the Bandung Final Communiqué and its
universalist, ambivalent clause on Palestine. It highlights some of the delegate
speeches and heated discussions before the Final Communiqué was passed
and contrasts them with the Final Communiqué. The chapter pays particular
attention to the Syrian delegation’s speech on Palestine and so China’s
position, which was possibly the closest non-Muslim, non-Arab, pro-
Palestinian position at Bandung. The final part turns to the post-conference
spirit and legacy, and it looks at how Palestine served as a template for
reformulating legal demands while continuously engaging with established
international law.
who came to talk about palestine (and who did not)

The European history of international law is a history of conferences (or
congresses) as important venues for international lawmaking today. At the
conferences of Westphalia, Utrecht, Vienna, Berlin, and Paris, the Great
Powers convened to construct a European architecture of unity (or ius
6
The ICC Statute criminalizes the transfer of settlers into an occupied territory as war crimes
under art. 8 (2) (b) (vii), and apartheid is criminalized in art. 7 (1) (j). See also the detailed
discussions in Tilley, Virginia (ed.), Occupation, Colonialism, Apartheid? A Re-Assessment of
Israel’s Practices in the Occupied Palestinian Territories Under International Law, Human
Sciences Research Council, Cape Town, 2009; “Separate and Unequal, Israel’s
Discriminatory Treatment of Palestinians in the Occupied Palestinian Territories, Human
Rights Watch Report, December 2010. John Dugard and John Reynolds “Apartheid,
International Law, and the Occupied Palestinian Territory,” (2013) 24 European Journal of
International Law 3, p. 867. UN (ESCWA) Report, “Israeli Practices towards the Palestinian
People and the Question of Apartheid”, 2017. For critical perspective on Palestine and the ICC
see John Reynolds and Sujith Xavier “The Dark Corners of the World. TWAIL and
International Criminal Justice”, (2016) 14 Journal of International Criminal Justice 4, pp. 1–25.
598 Nahed Samour
publicum europeaum), aiming for a European peace. Jurists and diplomats at

these conferences elaborated criteria and principles, largely ex novo, and
applied them to legalize any territorial changes that had taken place.7 The
free sovereigns convened to make law for themselves. Questions of (dis)respect
for sovereignty and territorial integrity were central at these conferences. As
international conferences were considered a meeting place of the so-called
civilized states,8 this also explains why those at the receiving end of inter-
national law were not invited. Excluded from the Congress of Vienna and
marginalized at the Paris Peace Conference,9 the newly independent coun-
tries performed their own international conference at Bandung after their first
decade of independence. As “contacts among Asian and African countries
were interrupted during the past centuries,” it was the expressed aim to “renew
their old cultural contacts and develop new ones in the context of the modern
world.”10 The Bandung Conference thus emerged from looking back at a past
under foreign domination as well as projecting a joint future to achieve
meaningful sovereign equality in the international community.
Bandung expressed the Asian-African attendees’ discontent with the inter-
national (Western) community: The conference was born in response to the
slow pace of decolonization and the failure of the United Nations to admit
new members since the 1950s.11 Only as late as 1960 did the UN General
Assembly turn decisively toward self-determination. It admitted seventeen
former colonies as new states and, later that year, adopted the Declaration
on the Granting of Independence to Colonial Countries and Peoples,
Ga Res. 1514 (XV) which drew on the Bandung Final Communiqué.12
Palestine was a theme even before the conference started. Palestine repre-
sented who not to invite. Palestine was discussed without any official Palestin-
ian representatives present. Reportedly, the Mufti of Jerusalem (renamed
7
Carl Schmitt, Der Nomos der Erde in Völkerrecht des Jus Publicum Europeaum (Berlin:
Duncker & Humblot, (1997), pp. 156–158. With respect to the European conferences and the
Ottoman Empire, see Eliana Augusti, “The Ottoman Empire at the Congress of Paris: between
New Declensions and Old Prejudices,” in Yearbook of Young Legal History, Vol. 3 (eds. Laura
Beck Varela, Pablo Gutiérrez Vega, Alberto Spinosa) (Martin Meidenbauer, München, 2009),
pp. 503–517.
8
See Johann Kaspar Bluntschli, Das moderne Völkerrecht der civilisierten Staten als Rechtsbuch
dargestellt (Nördlingen: Beck, 1878), p. 4.
9
See Augusti, “The Ottoman Empire,” pp. 503–517. 10
Final Communiqué, B.1, p. 4.
11
Final Communiqué, F.1. See also Shira Robinson, Citizen strangers: Palestinians and the birth
of Israel’s liberal settler state, (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 2013), p. 157.
12
For a detailed discussion of the Colonial Independence Declaration, see James Summers,
Peoples and International Law, 2nd rev. ed. (Leiden: The Eric Castrén Institute Monographs
on International Law and Human Rights, 2014), p. 203.
Grand Mufti of Palestine by the British Mandate Power), Mufti Hajj Amin al-
Husayni, who had acquired a role of Palestinian leadership in the fight against
British and Zionist domination, attended the conference as observer.13 How-
ever, the frustration of the absence of an official Palestinian delegation was
later captured in the “statement of the Syrian delegation on the Palestine
question”:
Palestine does not figure in this Conference. This alone speaks to itself. It
stands in testimony of the denial of the Arabs of Palestine of their rights of
self-determination14 . . . Palestine was promised in the First World War the
enjoyment of full independence, just at the Arab States now represented in
this Conference. Were it not for the Zionist aggressive movement, Palestine
would have been legitimately seated amongst us in this Conference.15
Instead, Palestine was represented by the nation-states present, especially

Egypt and Syria. Significantly, deputy head of the Syrian delegation Ahmed
Shukairy was himself a Palestinian jurist, and joined the Syrian delegation to
advocate for Palestine.16 Later, in 1964, he served as the first head of the
Palestinian Liberation Organization. Shukairy’s concerted efforts were central
in having Palestine discussed at Bandung. For Egypt, Palestine was also
considered central.17 Egyptian President Nasser showed his support for Pales-
tine by including in his delegation to Bandung Abd Al-Khalik Hassuna, the
first Secretary General of the Arab League (established in 1945), who was vocal
in coordinating Arab support for Palestine.18 In fact, the Arab League had
encouraged relations of Arab states with Asian-African states with the goal of
advocating for the Palestinian cause internationally.19
13
Naila Al-Qalqili, “The Palestinian Identity and Recognition by the International Community,”
Arab Information Center, May 24, 2010, available at www.arabsino.com/articles/10-05-24/2483
.htm.
14
Delegation of Syria to the Asian-African Conference [1955], Statement of the Syrian Delegation
on the Palestine Question, p. 2 (document on file with author).
15
Statement of the Syrian Delegation, p. 1. Of the twenty-nine participating states, nine were
Arab states: Egypt, Iraq, Jordan, Lebanon, Libya, Saudi-Arabia, Sudan, Syria, and Yemen. Five
states with Muslim majority population present were Afghanistan, Indonesia, Iran, Pakistan,
and Turkey. The Arab and Islamic bloc thus comprised almost half of the participating states,
fourteen of twenty-nine.
16 17
Behbahani, China’s Foreign Policy. Id. at 21.
18
Mohamed Hasanayn Heikal, Cutting the Lion’s Tail: Suez through Egyptian Eyes (London:
André Deutsch Limited, 1986), p. 25; Mao, “When Zhou Enlai Met Gamal Abdel Nasser,”
p. 102; Michael Doran, Pan-Arabism before Nasser: Egyptian Power Politics and the Palestine
Question (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), pp. 104, 113.
19
Muhammad Khalil (ed.), The Arab States and the Arab League, Vol. 2. (Beirut: Khayats, 1962),
pp. 150–151; Behbahani, China’s Foreign Policy, p. 360 n. 3.
600 Nahed Samour
Was Palestine not officially represented because Bandung took a state-

centric position? Conference predecessors to Bandung were nonstate in
nature as the participating peoples came from nations that were not yet
independent: The League against Imperialism, against Colonial Oppression
and for National Independence was held in Brussels in 1927,20 and from
Palestine came Jamal al-Husayni of the Arab National Congress of Palestine
and Moshe Erem of Poale Zion (Marxist-Zionist Workers’ Union).21 The
Brussels League of Imperialism was followed by the First International Asian
Relations Conference in New Delhi in 1947, where a larger list of invitees
than at Bandung was present, including nonstate representatives, such as a
delegation of Palestinians as well as Jewish Zionists from Palestine and from
the Arab League.22 Seven years after the nakba (Arabic for catastrophe, the
1948 Palestinian expulsion), organized leadership was indeed a challenge after
the expulsions and deportations of the former political elites. What leadership
was there to be invited?23 In fact, the Palestinian Liberation Organization was
to be established only as late as 1964. In 1955, Palestine as such had no proper
diplomatic representation but was subsumed under Arabic states. It did not
have one presumed precondition for statehood, which was diplomatic repre-
sentation. Bandung issued invitations to countries not yet entirely independ-
ent and whose territorial boundaries were not yet established, such as Gold
Coast (now Ghana) and Cyprus. In the Palestinian case, struggle for self-
determination and statehood started with a struggle to reorganize ones leader-
ship after destructive defeat that left people scattered over many countries. Albeit
the All-Palestine Government (1948–1959) was possibly one such attempt of
diplomatic representation.24 When therefore the Arab League organized Pales-
tinian representation on behalf of them, Bandung did not stand out but
20
On the Brussels gathering, see Vijad Prashad, The Darker Nations, A People’s History of the
Third World (New York: The New Press, 2007), pp. 16–30, 22; Manifest des Brüsseler
Kongresses gegen den Imperialismus, 1 927, no. 10, League against Imperialism Papers, IISG;
Roselan Abdulgani, The Bandung Connection: The Asia-Africa Conference in Bandung in 1955
(trans. Molly Bondan) (Singapore: Gunung Agung, 1981), pp. 9–16; Jamie Mackie, “The
Bandung Conference and Afro-Asian Solidarity: Indonesian Aspects” in Bandung 1955, Little
Histories (eds. Antonia Finnane and Derek McDougall) (Caulfield: Monash University Press,
2010), p. 10. Also mentioned as predecessor of Bandung is the 1926 International Democratic
Congress for Peace in Bierville, France, which was limited to delegates from South and East
Asia. Abdulgani, The Bandung Connection, pp. 9–16.
21
Prashad, The Darker Nations, p. 22.
22
Mao, “When Zhou Enlai Met Gamal Abdel Nasser,” p. 101.
23
If it is true that Mufti Hajj Amin al-Husayni attended unofficially, this might be a sign that he
was marginalized internally.
24
Avi Shlaim, “The rise and fall of the All-Palestine Government in Gaza,” (1990) 20 Journal of
Palestine Studies 1 pp. 37–53.
followed the track of its time.25 Bandung, did not stand out but followed the
track of its time: To exist and to be represented where two different concepts.
With the State of Israel, the case was different. In 1955 Israel was already a
United Nations member and Israel’s diplomats had tried hard to secure an
invitation to a conference they feared would seek common cause with the
Arab world in supporting Palestinian self-determination.26 However, Asian-
African participant states viewed Israel as a foreign implant to the Middle East
and “seedbed of imperialism”27 and did not invite Israel. Settler colonial states
like Australia and New Zealand were considered for participation, but ultim-
ately were also not invited.28 Two months before Bandung, China signed a
trade protocol with Israel, but had not recognized Israel.29 India and Burma
(now Myanmar), in particular, pressed for an invitation to Israel.30 Burma was
the only conference state that had established diplomatic relations with Israel
in 195331, arguing it was “a fellow socialist.” India had recognized Israel in
1950 but refused to exchange ambassadors.32 Pakistan and Egypt opposed an
invitation to Israel, arguing that if Israel would be invited, Arab states would
boycott the conference.33 Nasser had already objected to Israeli disregard of
UN resolutions and had reportedly helped convince the conference sponsor-
ing Colombo Group (Burma, Ceylon, India, Indonesia, and Pakistan) that
Israel should not be invited.34 In the end, the Colombo Five needed Arab
support in opposing American and British intervention in Korea and Taiwan,
respectively, and for this and other reasons, Israel was not invited.35
Palestine was discussed as a central topic, especially by Egypt, India, and
China.36 But it was Palestine, not the Palestinians, that was of concern at
25
Khalil, Arab States, p. 151.
26
Arnold Rivkin, “Israel and the Afro-Asian World” (1959) 37 Foreign Affairs 3, p. 492; Robinson,
Citizen Strangers, p. 157.
27
Robinson, Citizen Strangers, p. 157.
28
Kweku Ampiah, The Political and Moral Imperatives of the Bandung Conference of 1955: The
Reactions of the US, UK, and Japan (Kent: Global Oriental, 2007), pp. 31–35.
29
Behbahani, China’s Foreign Policy, pp. 28, 31.
30
Kahin, The Asian-African Conference, p. 3.
31
Behbahani, China’s Foreign Policy, p. 28, 31.
32
Rivkin, “Israel and the Afro-Asian World,” p. 492.
33
34
Heikal, Cutting the Lion’s Tail, p. 81. Heikal was a close advisor to Nasser and was with him at
Bandung.
35
Ampiah, The Political and Moral Imperatives, p. 31; Abdulgani, The Bandung Connection,
pp. 27–31.
36
On Palestine as key question in establishing relations between Egypt and China, and how their
rapprochement brought about larger Arab-Chinese cooperations. Behbahani, China’s Foreign
Policy, pp. 4, 20, 31.
602 Nahed Samour
Bandung. It was true at Bandung what remained true for many international
law conferences to come: Even when Palestine was discussed in the post–
Second World War deliberations that sealed their fate as a people, Palestinians
were excluded and effectively ignored, even when later occasionally nomin-
ally represented. They were spoken for, if at all, by the Arab states (with their
own considerations), all of which were weak and most of which – had only just
won a fragile independence – like the Bandung participant countries
Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, Libya, Sudan, and Egypt.37
Post-Bandung conferences of the Third World that aimed at overcoming
colonialism in all its forms, broke with this state-centrism and invited
and increasingly recognized nonstate actors as legal subjects, including
Palestinians and their national liberation movement. In 1961, invitations to
the world’s first non-alignment conference in Belgrade were then again
extended to nineteen liberation movements.38 It would yet take until the
NAM conference in Colombo, Sri Lanka in 1978 that the PLO would
attend as a full member.39 Thus, neither pre- nor post-Bandung anticolonial
conferences stuck to the exclusive state-centrism and the rights and duties
of independent sovereigns only, and officially welcomed Palestinian delega-
tions, who had also earned their right to be represented by a confident
leadership stepping outside the shadow of other states.
final communiqué: palestine entrapped in universal

legal language
Nineteenth-century Swiss legal scholar Johann C. Bluntschli considered inter-
national conferences as meeting places of the “civilized” states.40 Bandung
delegates frequently employed concepts of “civilization” as well as “universal-
ism,” yet in opposition to the equation of civilization with the European
37
Khalidi, The Iron Cage, The Story of the Palestinian Struggle for Statehood (Oxford: Oneworld,
2006), p. 125.
38
Invitations were arranged largely by Nasser and Tito. To qualify as non-aligned, one of the
criteria was that a country should consistently have supported movements for national
independence. G.H. Jansen, Afro-Asia and Non-Alignment (London: Faber and Faber, 1966),
p. 285; Robert Vitalis, “The Midnight Ride of Kwame Nkrumah and Other Fables of Bandung
(Ban-doong)” (2013) 4 Humanity: An International Journal of Human Rights,
Humanitarianism, and Development 2, p. 277, n. 84.
39
Shukry, Muhammad Aziz, “Mawqif harakat ῾adm al-inhiyāz min al-qaddīya al-filistinīya”[The
Position of the Non-Alignment Movement_ _
on the Palestine Question],_ _in Sayigh, Anis (chief
ed.), Al-Mawsū῾a al-Filistiniyyah [The Palestinian Encyclopedia], pp. 87–95, Vol. VI, 1990)
Encyclopædia Palæstina, second section: special studies, 6 Vols.; Vol. VI, published by
Encyclopædia Paælstina Corporation, Damascus/Beirut, Milano/Stampa, Italy, p. 93.
40
Bluntschli, Das moderne Völkerrecht, p. 4.
Enlightenment, to condemn imperialism and underline their fundamental

equality with the West.41 They invoked civilizational discourse as a discourse
of solidarity. The Final Communiqué declared that shared ancient heritage was
the basis of Asian-African solidarity, as “Asia and Africa have been the cradle of
great religions and civilizations which have enriched others’ cultures and
civilization.”42 By referring in its Final Communiqué to the UN Charter and
the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and by endorsing the concepts of
sovereignty and territorial integrity, Bandung largely opted for a UN parlance.
The universalist language used by representatives in the Bandung Final Com-
muniqué is strikingly different from the decolonial knowledge production of its
time. Intellectuals such as Franz Fanon and Aimé Cesare refused to adopt the
concepts of their colonizers or revealed the violence inherent in them. In fact,
these principles for “the promotion of world peace and co-operation” suggesting
sovereignty and equality sat uncomfortably with the realities or legacies of
colonialism, racialism, and imperialism. This discomfort can be seen by con-
trasting the Final Communiqué with the discussions leading up to it.
The resolution on Palestine was not entailed in “C. Human Rights and
Self-Determination” or in section “D. Problems of dependent peoples,” which
raised the cases of northern and southern Africa. Instead, the resolution on
Palestine appeared in a section entitled “E. Other Problems,” along with
disputes over Yemen and West Irian (also known as Papua or Western New
Guinea43). The wording of the resolution on Palestine says in full:
E. Other Problems. 1. In view of the existing tension in the Middle East
caused by the situation in Palestine and of the danger of that tension to world
peace, the Asian-African Conference declared its support for the rights of the
Arab people of Palestine and called for the implementation of the United
41
Formal colonial rule was of a very immediate experience to the Arab participants to the
Bandung Conference in 1955. While Palestinians were far away from their self-
determination, British troops remained in Egypt, Iraq, and Jordan until the 1950s, and
French troops were in Syria and Lebanon until 1946. The other two, Saudi Arabia and
Yemen, were still struggling to organize as post–Second World War states. Libya and
Sudan, also Bandung participant countries, were fully subject to indirect colonial rule.
Other parts of the Arab world, like Morocco, Algeria, and Tunisia, were addressed in
Bandung as subjects to French colonialism, which was explicitly condemned. Arab
countries such as South Yemen, Oman, and the further four countries of the Gulf were still
fully subject to direct British colonial rule. Khalidi, The Iron Cage, p. 10.
42
On the rhetoric of civilization as an anti-colonial instrument in the Final Communiqué, see
Kyle Haddad-Fonda, The Anti-Imperialist Tradition and the Development of Sino-Arab
Relations, 1955–1958, senior thesis, Departments of History and Near Eastern Languages and
Civilizations, Harvard (2009), pp. 18–28.
43
There was a dispute between Indonesia and the Netherlands over West Irian. See Mackie,
“The Bandung Conference and Afro-Asian Solidarity,” p. 17.
604 Nahed Samour
Nations resolutions on Palestine and of the peaceful settlement of the

Palestine question.
Bandung supported the rights of the Arab people of Palestine. However, there
is no mention of the words self-determination, human rights, colonialism, or
racialism that are used elsewhere in the Communiqué.44 These exclusions
make the resolution on Palestine remarkable for three reasons. First, the Final
Communiqué prominently affirmed “the rights of peoples and nations to self-
determination” as unifying the interests of the participating countries. It
explicitly referenced cases such as Tunisia, Algeria, and Morocco under
condemned French colonial rule. The Communiqué denounced racial seg-
regation and discrimination in “large regions of Africa,” particularly South
Africa. Second, in the discussions leading to the Communiqué Palestine was
clearly linked to all these concepts (see below), so its omission is even more
noteworthy. The delegates of Pakistan, Iraq, Egypt, Lebanon, Iran, Turkey,
and Jordan, and perhaps most vehemently Syria as well as China made efforts
to tie Palestine to joint Asian-African experiences of foreign domination and
political aims of self-determination. Third, the Communiqué saw the imple-
mentation of UN resolutions and negotiations as key in solving the question of
Palestine. While no mention of particular UN resolutions were made, two
topics were essential in UN resolutions until 1955: One, authorizing the
partition of Palestine45 against the wishes of the indigenous community, the
Palestinians. Two, administrating the plight of Palestinian refugees as humani-
tarian concern46, rather than addressing the legal context of their forced
expulsion to make space for Europeans seizing land. Bandung therefore
calling for UN resolutions as solution is troublesome from an anticolonial
perspective. Given the poor nature of the Bandung Palestinian resolution,
how do we evaluate Bandung’s legacy for Palestine?
The conference discussions regarding Palestine started with a debate with
whether to add Palestine to the agenda in the first place.47 Syria, followed by
44
See also Robinson, Citizen Strangers, p. 158.
45
United Nations General Assembly Resolution 181, 29 November, 29, 1947,
46
United Nations General Assembly Resolution 302 (IV) 8 December 1949,
establishing UNRWA. Having said this, UN GA Resolution 193 states in article 11 “that the
refugees wishing to return to their homes and live at peace with their neighbors should be
permitted to do so at the earliest practicable date, and that compensation should be paid for the
property of those choosing not to return and for loss of or damage to property which, under
principles of international law or in equity, should be made good by the Governments or
authorities responsible.”
47
Behind the scenes, Israeli diplomats together with Burmese and other delegates worked to
prevent the subject of Palestine from being raised. For more on Israeli-Burmese relations in
China promptly made it obvious that Bandung would be considered a failure

if Palestine was not discussed.48 Egypt’s Nasser introduced the Palestine issue
and made references to the continuance of colonialism in North Africa and
racial discrimination in South Africa – issues also taken up by other Arab
delegations.49 The document titled “Speech of the Delegation of Syria to the
Asian-African Conference [1955], Statement of the Syrian Delegation on the
Palestine Question”50 is central in capturing the Palestinian question through
self-declared concepts of self-determination, human rights, colonialism, and
imperialism.
Syria begins with the British Mandate period as a “history of series of
injustices” that was key in denying self-determination to Palestinians:
The mandate, essentially intended to pave the way for the independence of
the people, has left the inhabitants of Palestine deprived from their rights of
self-determination, with an alien community of several nationalities and
allegiances. The mandate, once described as a sacred trust of civilization,
has become in Palestine a disgraceful blemish in the record civilization. All
mandated territories in the Arab world have attained their full sovereignty and
independence. Iraq, Lebanon, and Syria now virtually represented in this
Conference had been placed under the mandate system after the First World
War. But Palestine similarly administered under the mandate has met a
different fate. . . . It stands in testimony of the denial of the Arabs of Palestine
of their rights of self-determination.51
While the British mandate over Palestine was terminated in 1947, a different
form of subjugation and domination then started. Syria made grave charges of
colonization:
For the first time in history, a campaign of colonization has been waged
under the guise of immigration [to Palestine] with such a tremendous speed
and high rate.”52 . . . Literally, this is an establishment of a State on the
the 1950, see Rivkin, “Israel and the Afro-Asian World,” p. 492; Robinson, Citizen Strangers,
p. 157.
48
It was this speech by the Syrian delegation, headed by Khaled Azm and deputy Ahmad
Shukairy, that successfully convinced Zhou Enlai to prominently put Palestine on the agenda.
China’s decision was consistent with its stated goal at Bandung, namely to make friends by
supporting national independence movements. Mao, “When Zhou Enlai Met Gamal Abdel
Nasser,” pp. 101–102.
49
50
On file with author. Thanks to Shira Robinson, Georgetown University, and Robert Burke for
providing access to a copy of the document.
51 52
Statement of the Syrian Delegation, p. 2 (emphasis added). Ibid. (emphasis added).
606 Nahed Samour
remains of a whole nation.53 . . . For Israel could only be established at the

remains of the people of the land.”54
Syria invoked the concept of settler colonialism: Settler colonialism is prem-

ised on the replacement of the indigenous population by a new one, or at least
the subordination of the former by the latter.55 Given that no indigenous
majority would have voluntarily ceded its country to a settler minority, settler
colonial projects by definition are to be executed by force. Or, in other words,
“settler colonialism destroys to replace.”56 Thus Zionist settler colonialism’s
systematic uprooting of the Palestinian people from their homeland was
judged as very serious threat to Palestinian survival as a nation. In this view,
Palestinians were part of the colonial world and their quest for self-
determination deserved full support.57 In 1960, Israel rejected the accusation
of colonialism in the UN, and instead portrayed itself as formerly subjected to
colonialism:
[W]e repudiate as morally unworthy and historically stupid the attempt to
equate Zionism with colonialism. Zionism is one of the nobles, the most
moving, the most constructive national movements in human history. . . . It
was here [in Palestine, 4000 years ago] that our people enjoyed national
53 54
Id. p. 4. Id. p. 3.
55
Although settler colonialism is an old phenomenon, it has recently grown into a theorized and
autonomous field of scholarly research. Today, the emerging framework of historical work on
Palestine and Israel is that of settler colonialism. See the introduction of the first issue of Settler
Colonial Studies, 2011, a journal dedicated to studying the past and present of the
phenomenon. With reference to Palestine, see Jabary Salamanca, Qato, Rabie, and S. Samour,
“Past Is Present: Settler Colonialism in Palestine” (2012) Settler Colonial Studies 2, at 1–9;
Patrick Wolfe, “Settler Colonialism and the Elimination of the Native” (2006) 8 Journal of
Genocide Research 4, pp. 387–409; Khalidi, The Iron Cage, p. 40.
56
Wolfe, “Settler Colonialism,” p. 388.
57
United Nations bodies have nevertheless not considered Palestine colonial at any time. See
Summers, Peoples and International Law, p. 540. Palestinians fell on the wrong side of
decolonization. First, their dispossession in 1948 took place before popular international
opinion had shifted in earnest toward support for the self-determination of colonized peoples
(the UN did not issue sanctions against South Africa until 1962). By the time that shift took
place in the mid-1960s, their dispersal in multiple countries had disqualified them from
eligibility for national self-government according to the UN’s 1960 definition of colonialism,
which focused on overseas, racial majorities inside delimited territory. Robinson, Citizen
Strangers, p. 198. On the “salt water” and “blue water” thesis of decolonization, see Patrick
Wolfe, “Corpus Nullius: The Exception of Indians and Other Aliens in US Constitutional
Discourse” (2007) 10 Postcolonial Studies 2, at 131 (see UN decision to exclude landlocked
indigenous minorities); James S. Anaya, Indigenous Peoples in International Law (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2000), p. 76; Patrick Thornberry, “Self-Determination, Minorities,
Human Rights: A Review of International Instruments” (1989) 38 International and
Comparative Law Quarterly 4, at pp. 868–873; Robinson, Citizen Strangers, p. 194.
independence, which they lost and regained and lost again, in the perpetual
struggle against the great colonial empires of that time.58
Syria reached out to Asian and African countries to explain and to tie the
Palestinian cause to their own experiences. The Syrians stated that “for this
problem, in essence is one of imperialism, to which Asian and African
countries have been subjugated.”59 Similarly, China saw Israel as a base for
“Western Imperialism,” and the Chinese press shortly later clarified that it was
the close link between the State of Israel and “Western Imperialism” that was
one of the main obstacles to peaceful coexistence.60
The Syrian delegation expressly distinguished between Judaism (one of the
monotheistic religions) and Zionism (a political nationalist ideology) and
stated that it was neither “anti-Jewish nor anti-semitic,” and that the Jews in
the Arab world have had a record of respected and equal members of society
and politics unequalled in any other part of the world. Its problem lay with
Zionism, which it described as “imperialism of a unique and single
character.”61
Eventually, the very discussion of human rights, coupled with Palestin-
ian refugees, brought tensions with India to the forefront. Bandung
speeches and resolutions made explicit references to human rights.62
Indeed, “self-determination,” the Final Communiqué later asserted, was
“a prerequisite of the full enjoyment of all fundamental human rights.”
The Communiqué charged that “the subjection of peoples to alien subju-
gation, domination, and exploitation . . . constitute[d] a denial of funda-
mental human rights.”
China first led the discussion of Palestine into the direction of human
rights, together with the rights of Palestinian refugees. China played a
58
Israel rejecting charges that Zionism creates colonialism as part of the discussion of the GA
Colonial Independence Declaration, 15 GAOR (1960), Plenary Meetings, 946th mtg.
(A/PV.946) paras 3, 7.
59
Statement of the Syrian Delegation, p. 1 (emphasis added).
60
Behbahani, China’s Foreign Policy, pp. 20, 29.
61
“This explains our reactions to Israel . . . I should like, however, to dispel a gross
misunderstanding. We are not anti-Jewish, neither are we anti-semitic. Before the advent of
Zionism, the Jews lived in our countries without any shred of discrimination or persecution.
We can boast of our record in tolerance. The Jews have lived prosperously in our lands. They
were eligible to any office or any walk of life.” Statement of the Syrian Delegation, pp. 5–6.
62
For a discussion of the human rights discourse in the 1950ies from a Third World perspective
and its strong connection to decolonization at Bandung, see Roland Burke, Decolonization
and the Evolution of International Human Rights (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania
Press, 2010), pp. 146–148. Haddad-Fonda, The Anti-Imperialist Tradition, p. 32.
608 Nahed Samour
significant role at Bandung generally,63 and became a main supporter of

Palestine at Bandung.64 The delegates representing Pakistan, Iraq, Lebanon,
Iran, Turkey, and Jordan, as well as China, stressed the human rights of the
Palestinian people, condemned Israel, and called for the repatriation of
Palestinian refugees.65 On April 22, the delegation of Afghanistan proposed
a resolution calling on the countries of Asia and Africa “to take appropriate
steps for the implementation of human rights” of the Palestinians.66 The
Syrian delegation first took the position that “it is too modest to describe the
Palestine question as a matter of human rights, but it is the very existence of
a nation that is at stake.”67 Syria then went a step further by declaring the
right of repatriation of Palestinian refugees to be “an inherent right”68 and
accused Israel of violating the United Nations Charter.69 China’s Zhou
Enlai also argued for going beyond supporting the Palestine resolution
and suggested a stronger wording of the issue. When Afghanistan intro-
duced a proposal that the conference pass a resolution supporting all UN
resolutions involving Palestine, Zhou Enlai suggested that the conference
should not only support Arab demands “for the recognition of the rights of
Arab refugees” but also “for territorial revisions.”70 China’s “strong effort” as
the only non-Arab, non-Muslim state to support Palestine was remarkable71
and was explicitly thanked by the Syrians.72
63
Behbahani, China’s Foreign Policy, p. 20.
64
See also Kahin, The Asian-African Conference, p. 16. China’s reward for its pro-Palestine
position was recognition from Arab states, Behbahani, China’s Foreign Policy, pp. 4, 20, 31. On
Chinese-Palestinian relationships following Bandung, see Muhammad Turki Al-Sudairi,
“Among Old Friends: A History of Palestinian Community in China,” March 27, 2015,
available www.mei.edu/content/map/among-old-friends-history-palestinian-community-china.
65
See “Speech by Premier Chou En-Lai at the Closing Session of the Asian-African
Conference,” in Kahin, The Asian-African Conference, p. 16.
66
Mao, “When Zhou Enlai Met Gamal Abdel Nasser,” p. 102.
67
Statement of the Syrian Delegation, p. 1.
68
In 1969, the General Assembly in its 24th session recognized for the first time that the “problem
of Palestine Arab refugees has arisen from the denial of their inalienable rights” (emphasis
added). GA resolution 2535 conveyed the centrality of Palestine to the tensions in the Middle
East. Non-aligned countries were central in bringing to the fore the rights of the Palestinian
people before the UN. See Committee on the Exercise of the Inalienable Rights of the
Palestinian People, The Question of Palestine (New York: United Nations, 1979), pp. 25–26.
69
Statement of the Syrian Delegation, p. 6.
70
NA: cable 1938, St. John 1960, 199, as cited by Mao, “When Zhou Enlai Met Gamal Abdel
Nasser,” p. 102. Kahin, The Asian-African Conference, p. 16. Also reported in New York Times,
April 21, 1955, as cited by Behbahani, China’s Foreign Policy, p. 22.
71
China’s direct support to Palestinian refugees took another five years to come about. New
China News Agency (NCNA), Oct. 15, 1960, as quoted by Behbahani, China’s Foreign Policy,
p. 25.
72
Behbahani, China’s Foreign Policy, p. 24; Kahin, The Asian-African Conference, p. 16.
The discussion on the refugees took a controversial turn when Nehru

argued that the conference should take no specific stance on the Arab-Israeli
conflict. India’s and Burma’s lack of support of the Palestinian cause shocked
several Arab and Muslim delegates.73 The Final Communiqué reflected a
compromise and supported only the “rights of the Arab people of Palestine,”
not specifically their “human rights.”74
Another compromise meant that the official Bandung position was that
peaceful negotiations were seen as the way forward, despite the fact that this
was not the official Arab position at the time. India explicitly criticized Syria’s
position against negotiating with Israel. Even the Chinese Premier, in explain-
ing China’s strong attitude regarding Palestine, stated that “there was a parallel
between the problems of Palestine and Formosa [Taiwan], neither could be
solved peacefully unless intervention by outside forces was excluded.”75 For
China, which on this issue aligned with India, negotiations were a key way to
solve the Palestine question. By the end of the conference, the Chinese
People’s Daily’s Observer noted:
For peace in the Middle East . . . it is necessary that consultations be held
among the countries concerned on the basis of United Nations principles
and the wishes of all countries in the Near East . . . it is necessary to avoid
military conflict. All those who are interested in peace in the Near East
believe that if efforts are made along these lines, the Palestinian question can
be peacefully settled.76
This statement is remarkable in that China, which at that time was rejected for
membership in the UN, nevertheless referred to the UN. Wanting to belong
and to be recognized as equal was key for the wording of Bandung’s Final
Communiqué and the section on the Palestine Question. The unqualified
respect for the UN Charter from all delegates – even those who were frustrated
with the reality of U.S. dominance in the UN – demonstrates how much these
Asian and African leaders desired complete inclusion in the international
community and how this limited certain anti-imperial possibilities.77
73
Behbahani, China’s Foreign Policy, p. 22; Kahin, The Asian-African Conference, p. 16.
74
Zhou Enlai commended the “Arab people of Palestine” on their “struggle” to win “human
rights” in his final speech in Bandung.
75
Kahin, The Asian-African Conference, p. 16; Mon’im Nasser-Eddine, Arab-Chinese Relations,
Beirut, n.d., p. 84.
76
New China News Agency (NCNA), April 25, 1955, as quoted by Behbahani, China’s Foreign
Policy, p. 23.
77
Haddad-Fonda, The Anti-Imperialist Tradition, p. 34.
610 Nahed Samour
The discussion on Palestine ended with the attendees’ agreement to call

only for the implementation of the relevant UN resolutions. Possibly, this
decision was meant to reconcile the countries present. Syria voiced discomfort
about the UN’s role on the Palestine question:
“The United Nations . . . succeeded in eliciting a resolution that partitioned
the Holy Land against the express wishes of the people concerned.”78
The General Assembly voted for the partition of Palestine into a Jewish and an
Arab state in Resolution 181, passed on November 29, 1947. The UN partition
plan was, however, colonial both in genealogy and content. In content, the
partition plan meant expulsion (officially called transfer) and dispossession.79
The plan also had a colonial genealogy: It developed from the 1937 British
plan to divide Palestine into a Jewish and Arab state, as put forward by a Royal
Commission, called the Peel Commission.
The Peel Commission’s plan was the first time that the principal notion of
the two-state solution was put forward internationally. The Zionists accepted it
in principle, but not the Palestinian Arabs, as the plan involved a so-called
transfer of Palestinians from their homes. Any partition plan would clearly
mean that Palestinians would become dispossessed and/or subjected to foreign
domination.80 In 1947, Great Britain, under American pressure, decided to
hand Palestine over to the UN. A special committee of the UN sent out to
study the problem, produced a partition plan on territorial terms more favor-
able to the Zionists than the 1937 plan. This was accepted by the General
Assembly on November 1947, with active support of the United States and
Russia, whose aim was for the British to withdraw from Palestine. Even before
the UN partition plan was decided on, Palestinians were not consulted or were
78
Statement of the Syrian Delegation, p. 3 (emphasis added).
79
Hannah Arendt objected to the UN partition plan and British and Zionist policies of division
between the peoples because it would bring about dispossession and expulsion of Palestinians
and the systematic violations of their rights, and the plan would turn Palestinians into refugees.
This overall process would subsequently set off a war that would threaten the very existence of
the Jewish community. See Arendt, “Zionism Reconsidered,” in The Jewish Writings (eds.
Jerome Kohn and Ron Feldman) (New York: Schocken Books, 2007), p. 343; Arendt, “To Save
the Jewish Homeland: There is Still Time,” in The Jew as a Pariah: Jewish Identity and Politics
of in the Modern Age (ed. Ron H. Feldman) (New York: Grove Press, 1978), pp. 178–179, first
published in Commentary, May 1948 (see www.commentarymagazine.com/article/to-save-the-
jewish-homeland-there-is-stil-time/). See also Amnon Raz-Krakotzkin, “Exile and
Binationalism: From Gershom Scholem and Hannah Arendt to Edward Said and Mahmoud
Darwish,” Carl Heinrich Becker Lecture of the Fritz Thyssen Foundation, 2011,
Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin, Berlin 2012.
80
On Palestine as the “colonized and the conquered territory” see also Hannah Arendt, The
Origins of Totalitarianism (San Diego: Harvest Books, 1973), p. 290.
effectively ignored by the various international powers.81 In response, Palestin-

ians and Arab members of the UN criticized and rejected the partition plan.82
The partition and the succeeding war justified these fears in that it resulted in
dispossession and subjection to foreign domination and subjugation: about
75 percent of Palestine was included in the frontiers of Israel, and almost two-
thirds of the Palestinian population lost their homes and became refugees.83
Both before and after the partition plan passed, there was concern within
the General Assembly about whether the partition plan was in accordance
with the UN Charter. The General Assembly almost requested an advisory
opinion from the International Court of Justice in 1947. Only by a majority of
one did a subcommittee of the General Assembly vote against submitting a
request for an Advisory Opinion to the International Court of Justice. The
question under consideration was as follows:
Whether the United Nations, or any of its Member States, is competent to
enforce or recommend the enforcement of any proposal concerning the
constitution and future government of Palestine, in particular, any plan of
partition which is contrary to the wishes, or adopted without the consent, of the
inhabitants of Palestine (emphasis added).84
Significantly, Bandung’s reference to UN resolutions to solve the problem

overlooked the fact that it was the UN partition plan that authorized the
81
The plan to partition Palestine met further faults and objections based on legal, moral and
political grounds, as voiced during the 1930s and 1940s. See Victor Kattan, “Palestine and
International Law: An Historical Overview,” in The Palestine Question in International Law
(ed. Victor Kattan) (London: BIICL, 2008), pp. xxxiii–xxxix; Khalidi, The Iron Cage, p. 125.
82
Hannah Arendt, later showed how the forced implementation of the UN partition plan lead to
expulsion as a result of the UN partition plan and not because of its rejection by the
Palestinians. She also highlighted how the partition plan was also the partition of the
Palestinian people, as half of which were supposed to remain as citizens of the Jewish state,
according to the UN partition resolution. See Hunaida Ghanim, “The Urgency of a New
Beginning in Palestine: An Imagined Scenario by Mahmoud Darwish and Hannah Arendt”
(2011) 38 College Literature 1, at 75–94; Raz-Krakotzkin, “Exile and Binationalism,” p. 115.
83
Hourani, The History of the Arab Peoples, p. 360.
84
UN GAOR Ad. Hoc Com. on the Palestinian Question, Annex 25, p. 300–301, UN Doc. A/
AC.14/3z and Add. 1 (1947); Elaraby, Nabil “Some Legal Implications of the 1947 Partition Plan
and the 1949 Armistice Agreements” (1968) 33 Legal and Contemporary Problems 1, at 101;
Michael G. Kearney, “Why Statehood Now: A Reflection on the ICC’s Impact on Palestine’s
Engagement with International Law” in Chantal Meloni and Gianni Tognoni, Is there a Court
for Gaza? A Test Bench for International Justice (Springer: TMC Asser Press, 2012), p. 391
Neither the UN Security Council nor the Mandatory Power endorsed the partition plan when
they could have done so after it was passed by the General Assembly. Kattan, “Palestine and
International Law,” p. xxxv, with further references.
612 Nahed Samour
situation of subjugation and foreign domination for Palestinians.85 The prob-

lem is extended when we consider that Bandung did not link Palestine to
colonialism and the quest for self-determination. What had happened for
Bandung to finalize a resolution on Palestine in this way?
The resolution was formulated,86 or at least endorsed,87 by Nasser.88 There-
fore, it was considered an indirect statement of Egyptian government policy:
Egypt called for Israel to relinquish its territorial conquests beyond the 1947 border
(i.e., return to the UN partition plan boundaries) and agree to the repatriation of
Palestinian refugees.89 In return, Egypt would recognize Israel based on the UN
resolution, and adhere to the principle of peaceful resolution to the conflict.90
Israel received the Palestine resolution as a negation of “the rights of the Jewish
people.”91 Israeli reactions to the Bandung resolution were defiant: Israel was
unwilling to consider either cession of territory or repatriation of the refugees.92
85
Nevertheless, it is important to note that the Syrian delegation’s demands that would have
served Palestinian interests were explicitly made within the framework of the UN Charter and
the Universal Declaration of Human Rights:
1. That the Arabs of Palestine as any other people, are entitled to the full exercise of their right
of self-determ[ination] in their homeland. 2. That the repatriation of the refuge homes is an
inherent right which they are entitled to exercise freely and without any impediment. 3.
That the Arab refugees are entitled to the full enjoyment of their properties, their rents and
revenues. 4. That the Arab refugees upon repatriation, as well as the Arabs now living under
Jewish authorities are entitled to the full enjoyments of all the rights set out in the Universal
Declaration of Human Rights, in letter and spirit. 5. That the denial of the rights of the
refugees to repatriation and to their properties is a flagrant violation of human rights and the
principles enshrined in the Charter of the United Nations.
Statement of the Syrian Delegation on the Palestine Question, pp. 5–6.
86
Joel Beilin, Was the Red Flag Flying There?: Marxist Politics and the Arab-Israeli Conflict in
Egypt and Israel, 1948–1965 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), p. 153.
87
Robinson, Citizen Strangers, p. 158.
88
Nasser was under pressure to participate in Western sponsored talks on an Arab-Israeli
settlement, as part of the covert Anglo-American ‘Plan Alpha’ for which the USA was offering
assistance in return, see Reem Abou-El-Fadl, “Neutralism Made Positive: Egyptian
Anticolonialism on the Road to Bandung” (2014) 42 British Journal of Middle Eastern Studies 2,
pp. 219–240. Nasser wanted the resolution to remain oblique for domestic reasons, Beilin, Was
the Red Flag Flying There? pp. 153–154.
89
Beilin, Was the Red Flag Flying There?, p. 153. Beilin speaks of all refugees, p. 154; Robinson of
a substantial number, Robinson, Citizen Strangers, p. 158.
90
Beilin, Was the Red Flag Flying There?, p. 153. Beilin considers the Bandung resolution as
consistent with the declared policy of the Egyptian government. Id. at 154. Interestingly, it was
Nasser who proposed a position on French North Africa with clear reference to colonialism,
which was accepted with little debate into the Communiqué, Kahin, The Asian-African
Conference, p. 17. Mao, “When Zhou Enlai Met Gamal Abdel Nasser,” p. 102.
91
Robinson, Citizen Strangers, pp. 157–158.
92
One week after the Bandung conference, Israeli Permier Sharett questioned whether Israel
should make any changes for peace. Newsweek, May 30, 1955, as cited by Beilin, Was the Red
Flag flying There? p. 154.
Beilin and Robinson consider the resolution important, as “it marked the first
time Israel had to reject publicly a peace offer from the most powerful leader in
the Arab world on terms previously endorsed by the international community and
the Yishuv [Jewish settlements prior to the founding of Israel] itself.”93
Was the reiteration of the language to “implement United Nations reso-
lutions” necessary to be recognized as “civilized states,” as deserving of their
new independence, and deserving to be members of the United Nations? Were
Bandung states entrapped in the universalist legal language of UN resolutions
because they were effectively noncomplete sovereigns? As porte-parole of Arab
interests, Egypt’s situation in the 1950s was indeed vulnerable. It was still
threatened by British imperialism and still consolidating its revolution. Egypt
sought to strengthen its power against the United Kingdom in order to reclaim
the Suez Canal for Egypt. In fact, only one year after Bandung, the tripartite
British-French-Israeli aggression on Egypt was launched in October 1956, which
the West benignly refers to as the Suez crisis.94 Additionally, Israel worked behind
the scenes with Burmese and other delegates to prevent Palestine from being
inserted into a clause about imperialism or racial discrimination.95
after bandung
Bandung can be retold as a narrative of failing Palestine for missing to link the
Palestinian question with legal concepts such as self-determination, human
rights, and (settler) colonialism, racialism, and imperialism – all concepts
discussed at Bandung with reference to Palestine but not taken up by the
Final Communiqué. Nevertheless, Bandung can be celebrated as the first
attempt to bring Palestine to the attention of the Third World.96
Bandung’s achievement lies not in its manifestation as a historic conference
and a Final Communiqué, but as an anticolonial spirit that gradually benefited
the Palestinian Question at succeeding international conferences of the Third
World and the UN. In fact, after Bandung, some states (Arab and non-Arab)
increasingly started to further the Palestinian cause at all other subsequent
conferences of what would thereafter be called the Non-Aligned Movement
(NAM).97 While the actual link between Bandung and NAM is not entirely
93
Beilin, Was the Red Flag Flying There? p. 154; quoted also in Robinson, Citizen Strangers,
p. 158.
94
For a critique of orientalism in international law, see Jean Allain, “Orientalism and
International Law: The Middle East as Underclass of the International Legal Order” (2004) 17
Leiden Journal of International Law, at 391–404, reprinted in Kattan, “The Palestine Question
in International Law” at 8–9. See also Peevers, Chapter 34 in this volume.
95
Rivkin, “Israel and the Asian-African World”; Robinson, pp. 157–158.
96 97
Behbahani, China’s Foreign Policy, p. 23. Id. p. 23.
614 Nahed Samour
direct or clear,98 both have considered the UN system as the most appropriate for
dealing with all global issues but, significantly, did not stop there.99
Countries of the Global South managed to gradually reformulate their
demands regarding Palestine and thereby considerably directed the course
of international law. The crucial difference was that they did so on request of a
Palestinian political leadership that was grappling with its survival during the
Bandung period, but that has meanwhile matured into a national liberation
organization with the establishment of the Palestinian Liberation Organiza-
tion thriving on the radicalization of the Third World movement formed by
dramatic struggles such as those in Algeria, Vietnam, and Palestine.100
One the one hand, all NAM declarations on Palestine continued Ban-
dung’s position to hold on to UN resolutions on Palestine, endorsed a two-
state solution (based on the UN partition plan), and supported negotiations to
achieve a peaceful settlement.101 What was novel, however, was that over time
they fervently endorsed the right of self-determination of the Palestinian
people, insisting that all variants of definitions of self-determination apply to
the Palestinian example and that gradually the “Palestinian right has been
most closely associated with this phrase.”102 Donald Horowitz has even argued
that the expression is essentially a code for that particular population.103 This
endorsement is linked to NAM’s articulated support for national liberation
movements.104 In 1970, NAM representatives declared that “it was unaccept-
able that these meetings should deal with the problems of decolonisation,
apartheid and racial discrimination without the presence of the interested
parties most directly concerned.”105 These discussions were later to affect the
status of the PLO as subject of international law.106 NAM declarations also
demanded racial equality for Palestinians in their homeland, as Palestinians
98
Some see NAM as a rival to Bandung. Vitalis, “The Midnight Ride,” p. 301. See also Özsu,
Chapter 17 and Oklopcic, Chapter 16 in this volume.
99
A.W. Singham and Shirley Hune, “The Non-Aligned Movement and the Internationalization
of the Palestine Question,” The United Nations Seminar on the Question of Palestine. No. 1–2
(New York: United Nations, 1980).
100
Chamberlin, Paul, The Global Offensive: The United States, the Palestine Liberation
Organization, and the Making of the Post-Cold War Order, Oxford University Press, 2012.
101
Shukry, “Mawqif harakat ῾adm al-inhiyāz min al-qaddīya al-filistinīya,” pp. 87–95.
102 _
In contrast to Security _
Council resolutions _ _ no reference to Palestinian self-
that make
determination. Summers, Peoples and International Law, p. 541 (specifically on self-
determination and Palestine, pp. 539–550; here at p. 539).
103
David L. Horowitz, “Self-Determination: Politics, Philosophy, and Law,” in National Self-
Determination and Secession (ed. M. Moore) (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), p. 201.
104
The Non-Aligned Movement supports the struggle of people to conduct wars of national
liberation that in turn could result in the establishment of independent states. Jansen, Afro-Asia
and Non-Alignment, p. 285.
105
Singham and Hune, “The Non-Alignment Movement,” p. 212. 106
Ibid.
were threatened to remain outside the body politics of their own country and
be excluded on religious and racial grounds from participating as equal
citizens.107 In doing so, the entire question of Palestine was shifted from a
humanitarian (refugee) problem to a legal (colonial) issue of (future) citizens,
leading to discussions of law108 in lieu of humanitarian relief.109 NAM also
considered the question of Palestine to be one of settler colonialism,110 and has
demanded an international war crimes tribunal to try Israel for crimes com-
mitted against the Palestinian people in territories occupied since 1948.111 At
the 1973 Algeria sixth summit of NAM countries, for the first time a detailed
resolution on Palestine explicitly linked the concepts of self-determination,
colonialism, and racial discrimination: “The struggle of the Palestinian people
to recover their usurped homelands is an integral part of the struggle of
all peoples for self-determination and against colonialism and racial
discrimination.”112
While acting within the framework of the UN, something new has
emerged. While it makes sense to focus on a single Bandungian “moment,”
this moment can be quite sobering. It was in the succeeding conferences that
the Asian, African, and Latin American countries normatively found some
emancipation by formulating law themselves. It is in the declarations of NAM
conferences that we can understand how the anticolonial tradition has made
efforts to serve Palestine.
107
Ibid. The majority of the Non-Aligned Countries have come to the conclusion that Zionism
must be equated with racism as an exclusionary doctrine that divides the peoples of the world
into arbitrary categories. See UN Resolution 3379 (revoked in 1991 in preparation to the Oslo
“Peace” Accords 1993).
108
On racial discrimination and segregation as practiced in Israel and the occupied territories
today, see UN Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination CERD/C/ISR/CO/
14–16, 11th session, March 2012.
109
On Palestine as discussed in the 1950s in UN Refugee institutions, see Peter Gatrell, Free
World?: The Campaign to Save the World’s Refugees, 1956–1963 (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2011), pp. 6366.
110
They identified settler colonialism as the main danger to rights and peace and called for it to be
“immediately stopped and reversed” (emphasis added). NAMXIII/Summit/Statement Palestine
25 February 2003 Statement of the XIII Non-Aligned Movement Summit re Palestine.
111
Seventh Summit: March 7–11, 1983, New Delhi, India, para. 89. In the 2003 statement, this
reads as follows: “They affirmed the importance of and called for the application of legal
remedies without impunity to war crimes committed in the Occupied Palestinian Territory,
including East Jerusalem. In this regard, they noted the role of the International Criminal Court”
(emphasis added). NAMXIII/Summit/Statement Palestine 25 February 2003 Statement of the
XIII Non-Aligned Movement Summit on Palestine, para.4.
112
See Algeria Sixth Summit of Non-Aligned Countries, 1973. Odette Jankowitsch and Karl. P.
Sauvant, The Third World Without Superpowers: The Collected Documents of the Non-Aligned
Countries, Vol. 1 (Dobbs Ferry: Oceana Publications, Inc., 1978), pp. 195–196. Similar wording
at Lusaka, fifth summit in 1970, but employing national liberation instead of self-determination.
36
“Must Have Been Love”

The Nonaligned Future of A Warm December
anthony paul farley*
I have forgotten—strange—but quite remember

The poinsettia’s red, blood-red, in warm December.1
– Claude McKay
introduction
The essay originates in a series of associations with A Warm December, a
1973 film about doomed romance starring Esther Anderson and Sidney
Poitier. The romance of A Warm December is situated within the Non-
Aligned Movement (NAM). A beautiful princess and a dashing physician fall
in love. The princess, an African diplomat, plays the USSR and the United
States against one another to create a third space in which her nation’s newly
won independence can develop. The physician, a widower, builds clinics to
bring medicine to the poor of the United States; he is in London to show his
daughter the world, and to race his motorbike. The princess and the physician
are destined to be lovers, but their beautiful dream is doomed before it begins.
Frantz Fanon made the tragic observation that capital will locate itself in
liberated colonies only on unacceptable or impossible terms. He also noted
that, far from serving as guardians of the new nation, the native bourgeoisie
were lovelessly ready at the first postcolonial trauma to destroy the entire
emancipation project. And this is exactly what the local elites did: They
destroyed their nations. As with DuBois’ Talented Tenth, the elite among
the oppressed who were to lead their nations out of bondage became a class for
themselves, and thus placed themselves in the profitable service of the foreign
*
Many thanks to Vasuki Nesiah, Luis Eslava, and Michael Fakhri for their comments on this
chapter.
1
Claude McKay, Flame-Heart, in Claude McKay, Selected Poems (Mineola, NY: Dover, 1999), p. 31.
616
“Must Have Been Love” 617
powers and principalities against which their comrades and fellow-citizens

had hoped the fight would continue.
Recall Amilcar Cabral’s final public speech delivered at Nkrumah’s funeral:
“Let no one tell us that Nkrumah died of a cancer to the throat or some other
disease. No, Nkrumah has been killed by the cancer of betrayal that we should
uproot.”
What is the cancer of betrayal? If the revolutionaries of African independ-
ence were guided by love, as Che said all true revolutionaries had to be, then
we can see in the light of their brilliant victories that their love was true. But
their love was also doomed from the start: capital will only locate itself in the
former colonies on terms that are unacceptable or impossible. The same is
true in A Warm December.
The film, anticipating the end, presents this love as doomed by a blood
problem; specifically, sickle cell anemia. The film’s tagline was: “His love.
Her December.” Perhaps Poitier, a man of the Caribbean and director of the
film, was thinking of Jamaican poet Claude McKay’s flowers of crimson: “I
have forgotten—strange—but quite remember / The poinsettia’s red, blood-
red, in warm December.”
Fanon’s analysis of the postcolonial situation in The Wretched of the Earth
is the truth of Poitier’s A Warm December, NAM, and Bandung. There once
was a time when the future of humanity seemed open. Bandung was the
center of that time. Colonialism was not yet over. Fanon’s analysis looked
forward. The hated foreign flags had been pulled down in nation after self-
emancipated nation; everyone was in love, and love was nonaligned and new.
Everyone has to be in love to make a future.
Bandung’s future was foreclosed at the start. A Warm December’s represen-
tation of foreclosure seems prophetic when we view the film now, although in
our heart of hearts, we knew it even then – but we did not want to know. We
preferred instead to try to square the circle by believing, in the forever-now of
foreclosure, that the bourgeois subject and the new subject of the non-aligned
future could be one and the same after colonialism. The cancer of betrayal
foreclosed that future. I have forgotten—strange—but quite remember / The
poinsettia’s red, blood-red, in warm December.
Another world was possible, not the impossibility of nonalignment. If, as
Cabral observed, we “firmly believe that the dead continue living by our
side,” then that other world may be waiting still. That is, after all, what we
believed at Bandung sixty years ago. That is what we believed in the warm
December of NAM. That is what we believed even as the cancer of betrayal
worked its foreclosure. Where have all the flowers gone? Where are the
crimson petals?
618 Anthony Paul Farley
We believed, with Cabral, “that the dead continue living by our side.” We
believed because we believe “love is strong as death.”2 We hoped because we
hope that love is stronger than death. We had faith because we have faith in
the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.3 We
understood because we understand that something about time and tense
had been broken. I have forgotten—strange—but quite remember / The poin-
settia’s red, blood-red, in warm December.
blood
But ends, of course, are also beginnings. And the new subject of the non-
aligned future had to imagine a life after capitalism. Capital begins in mass
death:
The discovery of gold and silver in America, the extirpation, enslavement and
entombment in mines of the indigenous population of that continent, the
beginnings of the conquest and plunder of India, and the conversion of
Africa into a preserve for the commercial hunting of black-skins, are all
things which characterize the dawn of the era of capitalist production. These
idyllic proceedings are the chief moments of primitive accumulation.4
Primitive accumulation, the mass death event at the zero hour of capitalism,
never stops. Indeed, capital is “blind to all dimensions of time” – hence, the
repetitions – “other than that of maximally exploitable surplus labor and the
corresponding labor-time.”5
Capitalism is a trinity. Its three faces are genocide (“the extirpation,
enslavement and entombment in mines of the indigenous population of
[America]”), colonialism (“the beginnings of the conquest and plunder of
India”), and slavery (“the conversion of Africa into a preserve for the
commercial hunting of black-skins”). Each face is an aspect of its origin:
death on an unthinkable scale. Capitalism is an endless return to the mass
death of its origin, but the origin is always kept out of the picture – unseen,
unthought, and unthinkable – like the navel of the dream. I have forgotten
—strange—but quite remember / The poinsettia’s red, blood-red, in warm
December.
2 3
Song of Solomon 8:6. Hebrews 11:1.
4
Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, Vol. I, trans. Ben Fowkes (New York:
Penguin Classics, 1992), p. 823.
5
Istvan Meszaros, The Challenge and Burden of Historical Time: Socialism in the Twenty-First
Century (New York: Monthly Review Press), p. 35.
cancer
Capitalism produces the war machines, along with the irrational divisions of
race and nation needed to spark those machines into action, as part of its
endless effort to accumulate ever-larger accumulations of capital. This project
requires endless new frontiers, even at the cost of creating them inside
previously settled territory; that is, even at the cost of becoming cancer.
Capitalism, already a cancer (as it is incapable of becoming a universal system
of reproduction), thus becomes a cancer of a cancer, a negation of a negation,
as it all falls down.
Rosa Luxemburg wrote:
In the form of government contracts for army supplies the scattered purchas-
ing power of the consumers is concentrated in large quantities and, free of
the vagaries and subjective fluctuations of personal consumption, it achieves
and almost automatic regularity and rhythmic growth. Capital itself ultim-
ately controls this automatic and rhythmic movement of militarist production
through the legislature and a press whose function is to mould so-called
“public opinion.”6
The ever-increasing competition of capitalism triggers its original method of

accumulation: militarism. Mass death is the swiftest route the system takes to
return to its origin. One may think of this return as a cancer of a cancer. As
competition inevitably increases,
Capital increasingly employs militarism for implementing a foreign and
colonial policy to get hold of the means of production and labor power of
non-capitalist countries and societies. The same militarism works in a like
manner in the capitalist countries to divert purchasing power away from the
non-capitalist strata.7
The ongoing war is outside and inside and always, at heart, colonial. Militar-
ism creates the non-capitalist territories to be conquered, internally and exter-
nally, and it does so until historical time brings it all to an end.
Germany made Europe a colony for only a small fraction of the 1,000 years
it promised. That short moment of capture, well recorded, has not been well
understood.8 Reparations for the Nazis’ practice of colonialism within Europe
6
Rosa Luxemburg, The Accumulation of Capital, trans. Agnes Schwarzschild (New York:
Routledge 2003), p. 446.
7
Id. at 446–447.
8
Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, trans. Constance Farrington (New York: Grove
Press, 1968), p. 102.
were made, debts were paid, the dead were mourned, and the deed was
marked as unforgivable. But it was not called colonialism. Real colonialism,
the colonial conquest of the Third World, is, it seems, forever; it is not for
repair, it is for repetition.
What is to be done? Europe and the New World owe the Third World
everything:
Colonialism and imperialism have not paid their score when they withdraw
their flags and their police from our territories. For centuries the capitalists
have behaved in the underdeveloped world like nothing more than war
criminals.9
Colonialism and imperialism cannot pay their score. The withdrawal of flags
and direct policing is not the end of the story. The sixty years since Bandung
have shown us at least that much. Fanon warned that historical time, the real
future of the world, would depend on the resolution of this question:
[What the Third World] expects from those who for centuries have kept it in
slavery is that they will help it to rehabilitate mankind, and make man
victorious everywhere, once and for all. But . . . we are not so naïve as to
think that this will come about with the cooperation and the good will of the
European governments.10
The people, the European proletariat, were called upon:

This huge task which consists of reintroducing mankind into the world, the
whole of mankind, will be carried out with the indispensable help of the
European peoples, who themselves must realize that in the past they have
often joined the ranks of our common masters where colonial questions were
concerned.11
The peoples’ war against colonialism had to continue on as a global class

struggle in order for humanity to have a future.
cure?
Most nations on Earth are members of NAM, a child of Bandung established
in 1961. As of this writing, NAM claims 120 Members,12 17 Observer
9 10 11
Id. at 101. Id. at 106. Ibid.
12
Afghanistan, Algeria, Angola, Antigua and Barbuda, Azerbaijan, Bahamas, Bahrain,
Bangladesh, Barbados, Belarus, Belize, Benin, Bhutan, Bolivia, Botswana, Brunei Darussalam,
Burkina Faso, Burundi, Cambodia, Cameroon, Cape Verde, Central African Republic, Chad,
Chile, Colombia, Comoros, Congo, Côte d’Ivoire, Cuba, Democratic People’s Republic of
States,13 and 10 Observer Organizations.14 NAM has sought to “create an

independent path in world politics that would not result in member States
becoming pawns in the struggles between the major powers.”15 But nonalign-
ment is not class struggle.
What was done was to be undone:
It is a fact that young nations do not attract much capital. There are many
reasons which explain and render legitimate this reserve on the part of the
monopolies . . . Private companies, when asked to invest in the independent
countries, lay down conditions which are shown in practice to be inaccep-
table or unrealizable.16
This is difficult. There are facts to be faced:

Let’s be frank: we do not believe that the colossal effort which the under-
developed peoples are called upon to make by their leaders will give the
desired results. If conditions of work are not modified, centuries will be
needed to humanize this world which has been forced down to animal level
by imperial powers.17
We were to take stock of ourselves for ourselves:

In reality the colonial system was concerned with certain forms of wealth
and certain resources only – precisely those which provisioned her own
industries. Up to the present no serious effort had been made to estimate
the riches of the soil or of mineral resources. Thus the young independent
Korea (DPRK), Democratic Republic of the Congo, Djibouti, Dominica, Dominican

Republic, Ecuador, Egypt, Equatorial Guinea, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Fiji, Gabon, Gambia,
Ghana, Grenada, Guatemala, Guinea, Guinea-Bissau, Guyana, Haiti, Honduras, India,
Indonesia, Iran, Iraq, Jamaica, Jordan, Kenya, Kuwait, Lao Peoples’ Democratic Republic,
Lebanon, Lesotho, Liberia, Libya, Madagascar, Malawi, Malaysia, Maldives, Mali, Mauritania,
Mauritius, Mongolia, Morocco, Mozambique, Myanmar, Namibia, Nepal, Nicaragua, Niger,
Nigeria, Oman, Pakistan, Palestine, Panama, Papua New Guinea, Peru, Philippines, Qatar,
Rwanda, Saint Kitts and Nevis, Saint Lucia, Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, São Tomé and
Príncipe, Saudi Arabia, Senegal, Seychelles, Sierra Leone, Singapore, Somalia, South Africa,
Sri Lanka, Sudan, Suriname, Swaziland, Syrian Arab Republic, Tanzania, Thailand, Timor-
Leste, Togo, Trinidad and Tobago, Tunisia, Turkmenistan, Uganda, United Arab Emirates,
Uzbekistan, Vanuatu, Venezuela, Vietnam, Yemen, Zambia, and Zimbabwe.
13
Argentina, Armenia, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Brazil, China, Costa Rica, Croatia, El Salvador,
Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Mexico, Montenegro, Paraguay, Serbia, Tajikistan, Ukraine,
Uruguay.
14
African Union, Afro-Asian People’s Solidarity Organization, Common-Wealth Secretariat,
Hostosian National Independence Movement, Kanak Socialist National Liberation Front,
League of Arab States, Organization of Islamic Cooperation, South Center, United Nations,
Secretariat of the Commonwealth Nations, World Peace Council.
15 16 17
See www.nam.gov. Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, p. 103. Id. at 100.
nation sees itself obliged to use the economic channel created by the
colonial regime.18
We were to make demands, not requests. Requests are instruments of persua-

sion and he whom one seeks to persuade one must first acknowledge as master
of the situation. Demands are different:
So when we hear the head of a European state declare with his hand on his
heart that he must come to the aid of the poor underdeveloped peoples, we
do not tremble with gratitude. Quite the contrary; we say to ourselves: “It’s
just reparation which will be paid to us.” Nor will we acquiesce in the help
for underdeveloped countries being a program of “sisters of charity.” This
help should be the ratification of a double realization: the realization by the
colonized peoples that it is their due, and the realization by the capitalist
powers that in fact they must pay.19
Global class struggle was Fanon’s answer to the question of the human future.
To secure a future for humanity, a global class struggle would have to carry on
even after the anticolonial struggle had uprooted the foreign flags.
observation
James Baldwin, clarifying his position as a member of the Russell/Sartre War
Crimes Tribunal, made a clear-sighted observation:
When the black populations of the world have a future, so will the Western
nations have a future – and not till then. But the terrible probability is that the
Western populations, struggling to hold on to what they have stolen from
their captives, and unable to look into their mirror, will precipitate a chaos
throughout the world which, if it does not bring life on this planet to an end,
will bring about a racial war such as the world has never seen, and for which
generations yet unborn will curse our names forever.20
Colonial wars do not end. They cannot end. Colonialism is not itself only;
colonialism is a trinity. Primitive accumulation has three faces: genocide,
colonialism, and slavery. As Rosa Luxemburg explained,
Thus capitalist accumulation as a whole, as an actual historical process, has
two different aspects. One concerns the commodity market and the place
where surplus value is produced . . . Regarded in this light, accumulation is a
18 19
Ibid. Id. at 102–103.
20
James Baldwin, “The International War Crimes Tribunal”, in Baldwin, The Cross of
Redemption: Uncollected Writings (New York: Vintage International, 2010), pp. 248–249.
purely economic process, with its most important phase a transaction

between the capitalist and the wage worker . . . Here, in form at any rate,
peace, property and equality prevail, and the keen dialectics of scientific
analysis were required to show how the right of ownership changes in the
course of accumulation into appropriation of other people’s property, how
commodity exchange turns into exploitation and equality becomes class
rule.21
That is one aspect of the accumulation of capital. The other concerns the
petals of blood:
The other aspect of the accumulation of capital concerns the relations
between capitalism and the non-capitalist modes of production which start
making their appearance on the international stage. Its predominant methods
are colonial policy, an international loan system – a policy of spheres of
interest – and war.22
Capitalism is an endless wheel of becoming; it revisits the original accumula-

tion by repeating it cycle after cycle after cycle – as if the capital going around
the earth was without origin, without bloodshed, and without history – by
creating new external and internal frontiers, through militarism and war.
etiology
Classes can join the class struggle only where they exist. European and New
World workers, salaried and waged, were and remain a labor aristocracy. They
produced less value than their labors allowed them to appropriate, and thus
they became, and thus they have remained, objective allies of imperialism.
Imperialism delivers this supplement to its New World and European workers,
in order to enlist them, objectively, into its service. These workers of the center
are not in objective solidarity with the workers of the world, only with the
workers of Europe and the New World. This helps the colonial powers
convert New World and European workers into flowers of crimson for its wars
of accumulation.
The system “pays” workers in the system’s centers far more than those on
the periphery. A portion of the surplus value extracted from the workers of the
periphery is transferred to the workers of the center to buy their objective
loyalty. Humanity’s future, depending as it does on global class struggle, seems
foreclosed by this cancer of betrayal. It seems, looking back, to have been so at
the very beginning. “I have forgotten—strange—but quite remember / The
21 22
Luxemburg, The Accumulation of Capital, p. 432. Ibid.
poinsettia’s red, blood-red, in warm December.” Was the anticolonial struggle

our warm December?
Colonialism is a trinity. Rising up against one of its manifestations will not
eradicate the others. As long as any one of the three exists, so will the other
two. Our warm December never ends. December repeats, and there is a
rhythm to the repetitions.23
The system is global. It has to be everywhere or the source of surplus value,
the exploited workers, would reject its bad deal by leaving. The frontiers are
false. The frontiers are open spaces and seemingly not integrated into the
system. But they are open spaces within one organic system. They are inside
and therefore part of the system, the world system, and vital as blood, circulat-
ing with a rhythm:
The bourgeoisie, by the rapid improvement of all instruments of production,
by the immensely facilitated means of communication, draws all, even the
barbarian nations into civilization. The cheap prices of its commodities are
the heavy artillery with which it batter down all Chinese walls, with which it
forces the barbarians’ intensely obstinate hatred of foreigners to capitulate. It
compels all nations, on pain of extinction, to adopt the bourgeois mode of
production; it compels them to introduce what it calls civilization in their
midst, i.e., to become bourgeois themselves. In one word, it creates a world
after its own image.24
But even as the system makes the frontiers over in its image – remember, the
remaking of the frontier is the lifeblood of the system – it also destroys those
remade frontiers; indeed, that is how it makes new frontiers. This is why there
is always blood everywhere and that is why December repeats: “I have forgot-
ten—strange—but quite remember / The poinsettia’s red, blood-red, in warm
December.” Militarism is the system’s chief mode of reproduction.
23
Consider Nelson Mandela’s query:
[I]n our modern world we have to grapple with such conundrums as an excess of wealth
in one area of the world which contributes to the creation of poverty in another. The
question arises naturally as to whether wealth in one corner of the globe can be preserved
where deprivation thrives in another, as to whether the time has not come for us to take
such steps as would assure that the development agenda of the Non-Aligned Movement
informs the development agenda of the whole international community.
Address to the Inaugural Session of the XII Summit of the Non-Aligned Movement in Durban,
South Africa, September 2, 1998.
24
Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, “Manifesto of the Communist Party,” in Collected Works
(London: Lawrence & Wishart Ltd, 1976).
prayer
Malcolm X, in the last year of his life, in the first speech after the bombing of his
home, made the following observations of the anticolonial spirit of Bandung:
Along about 1955 they had the Bandung Conference in Indonesia. And at
that time the Africans, the Asians, the Arabs, all of the nonwhite people got
together and agreed to de-emphasize their differences and emphasize what
they had in common, and form a working unity. And it was the working
unity – the spirit of Bandung created a working unity that made it possible for
the Asians, who were oppressed, the Africans, who were oppressed, and the
others who were oppressed to work together toward gaining independence for
these other people. And it was the spirit of Bandung that brought into
existence this working unity that made it possible for nations that didn’t have
a chance to become independent to come into their independence. And
most of this began along in 1959.
After 1959 the spirit of African nationalism was fanned to a high flame, and
we began to witness the complete collapse of colonialism. France began to
get out of French West Africa; Belgium began to make moves to get out of
the Congo; Britain began to make moves to get out of Kenya, Tanganyika,
Uganda, Nigeria, and some of those other places. And although it looked like
they were getting out, they pulled a trick that was colossal.25
Defeated, it seemed, on field after field of battle, colonialism withdrew, only

to advance with a kind of magic. The New World was colonialism’s colossal
trick. Like Fanon, Malcolm X recognized that the fight was not over when the
foreign flags were pulled down:
They were trapped on the African continent, they couldn’t stay there; they
were looked upon as colonial, imperialist. So they had to pass the ball to
someone whose image was different, and they passed the ball to Uncle Sam.26
For Malcolm X, the ball was passed from Europe to the New World, from the
European powers to the United States. The United States had the ability, in
Malcolm X’s view, to present itself with a false face because it did not appear to
possess an imperialist history. But the capitalist center includes the United
States, and internal as well as external frontiers. The United States had long
experience, with colonialism, as Malcolm X, looking at the internal frontiers,
warned:
25
Malcolm X, “Educate our people in the science of politics (February 14, 1965),” in February
1965: The Final Speeches (New York: Pathfinder Press, 1992), pp. 107–108.
26
Ibid.
[A]t that time, the Africans couldn’t see that though the United States hadn’t
colonized the African continent, he had colonized twenty-two million Blacks
here on this continent. Because we are just as thoroughly colonized as
anybody else.27
There is one system. There is no way to play one side against the other, one set
of great powers against another set of great powers. There is no way to be
nonaligned within a unitary system. The state capitalism of the People’s
Republic of China and the former USSR were both part of one system.
transcendence
There is no European proletariat, no American proletariat. The workers of the
global centers have been bought. The workers of the center get more than
they produce. If one compares them to the workers of the periphery, then one
sees fifty-fold increases in wages for the same hours and intensities. Work on
the periphery is paid less, fifty-fold less by some measures, than work in the
center. The strange fifty-fold multiplication of worker compensation in
Europe and the New World comes from the workers of the periphery. The
boost of the wages and salaries of the workers of the center is the result of the
transfer of the super-exploitative surplus extracted from the workers of the
periphery to the labor aristocracies of Europe and the New World.
Malcolm X saw potential in consanguinity. The colonized of the world
system’s internal frontiers were “just as thoroughly colonized” as the colonized
of the system’s external frontiers. The people of the frontiers, internal and
external to the centers, are all in the same objective situation. Organization of
anticolonial struggle could, theoretically, be aligned on all frontiers. In fact,
that alignment was already happening by Bandung:
[T]he power structure is international, and as such, its own domestic base is
in London, in Paris, in Washington, D.C., and so forth. And the outside or
external phase of the revolution, which is manifest in the attitude and action
of the Africans today is troublesome enough. The revolution on the outside
of the house, or the outside of the structure is troublesome enough. But now
the powers that be are beginning to see that this struggle on the outside by the
Black man is affecting, infecting the Black man who is on the inside of that
structure . . .
The newly-awakened people all over the world pose a problem for what’s
known as Western interests, which is imperialism, colonialism, racism, and
27
Ibid.
all these other negative-isms or vulturistic isms. Just as external forces pose a
grave threat, they can now see that the internal forces pose an even greater
threat . . .
Just by advocating a coalition of Africans, Afro-Americans, Arabs, and
Asians who live within the structure . . .
So when you count the number of dark-skinned people in the Western
Hemisphere you can see there are probably over 100 million . . .. And this
100 million on the inside of the power structure today is what is causing a
great deal of concern for the power structure itself.28
The colonized of the center, excluded from the labor aristocracy, were the
cure for the cancer of betrayal. They were not aligned with the system. They
could, aligned with each other and situated in the centers, in the internal
frontiers of the centers, change the entire system.
requiem
They were, unfortunately, led astray. The Talented Tenth were, in the context
of the United States, the native bourgeoisie in the newly emergent nations of
the periphery. If there was hope, it was with the masses. That is where
Malcolm X saw it. But the masses of the internal and external frontiers were
betrayed by their elites. The Talented Tenth, like the European workers, were
a labor aristocracy. The colonial bourgeoisie, like the European and the New
World workers, were a labor aristocracy.
A Warm December shows the nonalignment of the nonaligned world
through the story of doomed postcolonial romance. The handsome physician,
an African-American widower, is in London with his young daughter. He
plans to participate in a motorbike race, but the beautiful African princess-
diplomat enlists his aid in helping her conceal herself from a man who is
following her. The physician is intrigued by her mysterious comings and
goings, and by the diversity of the characters with whom she meets. They fall
in love, but she is dying. Better a warm December, a love that will be lost – not
to a change of heart but to a disease of the blood – than nothing, they agree.
The physician has already lost love at death’s door; he is a widower, this is
not his first December. The physician’s young daughter also loves the dying
beauty and wants her to become the mother that she will yet again lose; this is
not her first December. The beating heart of the potential wife and mother
will not go on past December, but the rhythm will live on in the family when
they mourn and remember, as they did the first time. They are set, all three
28
Ibid.
together, to turn love into a family in the United States, where he works to
bring mobile medical centers to the poor of its many interior frontiers
(ghettos).
But the almost-family’s warm December does not transpire. Foreclosure
rules the world. The princess chooses the future of her nation over her own
final chance at happiness. Her nation needs her, her happiness, her final
heartbeats, her warm December. Love may be strong as death, but duty is
stronger than love. As in Casablanca, “the problems of our three little
people don’t amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world.” Love of country
means everything. Love of country, we learn in A Warm December, is
expressed as nonalignment. The princess-diplomat works to keep the great
powers from capturing her nation’s future. Each great power, worried about
the others, plays the role of suitor to the newly emerging nation. As a great
beauty and as a great diplomat, it falls to her to do the work of keeping them
at bay until development and true independence arrive. This is the spirit of
nonalignment.
Poitier’s A Warm December extracts nonalignment’s constitutive contradic-
tion from geopolitics and places it within a doomed romance. This displace-
ment hides the foreclosure of postcolonial hope. Foreclosure, in A Warm
December, has to do only with the problems of “three little people,” not “this
crazy world.” Indeed, the lovers of A Warm December sacrifice their love in
order to pursue the nonaligned future dreamed of in Bandung.
NAM, like the lovers in Poitier’s film, began in romantic tragedy. There is
only one system. There is no way to trade one side against the other. Sides can
be played against each other only where they exist. There are no sides in a
unitary, global system. There is no way to be nonaligned within a unitary
system. There are no great powers. There is capital, appearing before us as
genocide, colonialism, and slavery.
There is no European proletariat. There is no New World proletariat. The
workers of the global system’s center have been purchased by the system. The
system purchased the workers of the center with surplus value extracted from
the workers of the periphery. This purchase of one group of workers with the
surplus value extracted from another group of workers broke the objective
solidarity between the workers of the periphery and the workers of the center.
The system requires an outside:
If capitalization of surplus value is the real motive force and aim of produc-
tion, it must yet proceed within the limits given by the renewal of
constant and variable capital (and also of the consumed part of the surplus
value). Further, with the international development of capitalism the
capitalisation of surplus value becomes ever more urgent and precarious,
and the substratum of constant and variable capital becomes an ever-growing

mass – both absolutely and in relation to the surplus value. Hence the
contradictory phenomena that the old capitalist countries provide ever larger
markets for, and become increasingly dependent upon, one another, yet on
the other hand compete ever more ruthlessly for trade relations with non-
capitalist countries. The conditions for the capitalisation of surplus value
clash increasingly with the conditions for the renewal of the aggregate
capital – a conflict which, incidentally, is merely a counterpart of the
contradictions implied in the law of a declining profit rate.29
The struggle for the frontiers necessary to the capitalization of surplus begins
as diplomacy but is carried out as primitive accumulation.
conclusion
Militarism and war resolve the crisis of circulation. The system appears to
possess an outside. Appearances are deceiving; furthermore, the system
deceives itself. It creates its own frontiers inside and outside of the centers.
Militarism and war create these strange internal and external frontiers.
The violence of the system is constitutive and rhythmic. The system,
already a cancer, is blind to this cancer of circulation: I have forgotten—
strange—but quite remember / The poinsettia’s red, blood-red, in warm Decem-
ber. The blood-red petals bloom every December, and unless it is December,
December is coming.
The once-and-future world is all around us, smashed into bright little bits
every cycle. Just as in the original accumulation (genocide, colonialism,
slavery), it remains, albeit in fragments, as long as anything human remains.
It is a smile not intended for gain, it is solidarity for its own sake, it is the dream
of one big union, it is the general strike to come, it is every single little thing –
or constellation of shining things – that keeps us human, it is the commons of
reason, the fact of language, and the kingdom of ends. It is not hollow; it is full
of stars. The content of the once and future world is shaped by choices, group
and collective, made as we face what we face with the loves that we choose
and the loves that have chosen us.
What is blackness but proximity to death, the death the princess-diplomat
dies, like the death the physician’s wife has already died, the death that is in
the blood, the death that is always everywhere a negated reproduction, a
reproduction of death, a tale of Bandung retold?
29
Luxemburg, The Accumulation of Capital, p. 446.
There is another way to remember Bandung. Capitalism is a global system.

There is no outside. War, a constitutive part of the system and its original
cancer of circulation, creates the strange frontiers. Capitalism has conquered
and reconquered every space on the globe. The conquest of labor power is the
conquest of time, but not historical time. Historical time runs out. The
capitalist occupation of space-time is not the totality it may seem.
The people of the frontiers, internal and external, have an objective unity.
The spirit of Bandung may help them find their alignment. Their constella-
tion is to be found with each other – not with their capitalists, not with their
nations, not with their Talented Tenth, not with their native bourgeoisie. This
communion of people with empty hands is the future; their singular heartbeat
is the cure.
37
The Bandung Declaration in the

Twenty-First Century
Are We There Yet?
arif havas oegroseno
introduction
When Asian-African leaders gathered at Bandung sixty years ago, their
main discussion issues were socioeconomic development, decolonization,
and the Third World’s role in the global Cold War political atmosphere.
Perceived threats were the politics of colonization from Western Europe,
the politics of co-optation and containment from the East and West, and
the politics of proxy wars – in other words, traditional threats coming from
another state.
This fear of foreign state intervention is evident in the preamble of the Ten
Bandung Principles, known as Dasasila Bandung:
Free from mistrust and fear, and with confidence and goodwill towards each
other, nations should practise tolerance and live together in peace with one
another as good neighbours and develop friendly co-operation on the basis of
the following principles . . .
Further manifestation of this fear emerges within the Dasasila Principles,

which contain five mentions of “nations” in five Principles, three mentions
of “country/ies” in three Principles, and also the mention of “big powers,” as
well as the principles of “respect for sovereignty, territorial integrity, free from
external intervention or interference or aggression, and right to self-defense.”
These polite, ambiguous, and diplomatic labels all speak to the fear of external
states. The establishment of the Non-Aligned Movement in 1961 – driven by
Nehru of India, U Nu of Burma, Sukarno of Indonesia, Nasser of Egypt,
Nkrumah of Ghana, and Tito of Yugoslavia – also demonstrated a fear of
encroachment of influence by the warring global powers of the Eastern and
Western Blocs. The chosen diplomatic wording was, “a middle course for
[the] Developing World.”
631
632 Arif Havas Oegroseno
Within the economic realm, in the 1950s when they discussed their ways
and means to advance economic development, the combined GDP of Asia
and Africa was in the lowest part of the global rank. The combined GDP of
Indonesia, China, and India were less than US$1 billion, whereas the Dutch
GDP was around US$6 billion. The combined GDP of Asian countries in
1952 was around 15 percent of the global GDP, and the combined GDP of
Africa was around 10 percent.
Colonial attitudes were transformed in many ways and forms, such as provid-
ing scholarship only to students from former colonies. Another example is one-
sided, bilateral investment treaties, whereby protection of foreign investment
was seen as protecting Western foreign investment only in developing coun-
tries, and not vice versa. At the time, for example, it was inconceivable that
Asian people could own a European football club. International law and
politics very much revolved around the narrative of the poor, developing world’s
countries attempting to free themselves from political and economic colonial-
ism, whereby the Cold War defined global economic power, which was
primarily in the hands of European members of the Western and Eastern Blocs.
fast forward
The twenty-first century presents a totally different global strategic environ-
ment. The global threats are no longer fears of wars among nations. It is no
longer just nation-states that mount dramatic military attacks; individuals and
organizations have brought powerful countries to their knees. Indonesia, the
host of the Bandung Conference, has faced this threat since early 2000, with
the most dramatic attack being the Bali Bombing. Conventional warfare has
also been eclipsed by new modes of attack and counterattack, such as suicide
bombings. The Bali Bombing in Indonesia was an example of both the new
actors and the new forms of warfare.
Significantly, these threats have been faced not only by the founders of the
Asia-Africa Conference but also by the very entities that the Bandung Conference
considered to be threats – namely, the Western and Eastern Blocs of the Global
North. In this environment, the Dasasila Principles are at best inadequate, and at
worst irrelevant. Cross-border threats from trade, trafficking, and organized crime
raise challenges that exceed the scope of the Dasasila Principles.
immigration and anti-immigration

The same is true of twentieth-century approaches to international law and
international relations more generally. Even the old theory of balance of
The Bandung Declaration in the Twenty-First Century 633
power written by renowned scholars such as Hans Morgenthau offers few

resources when engaging with Osama bin Laden and ISIS. Extremist forces
such as Le Pen have become powerful in areas such as immigration, and
established laws and norm of immigration are unable to counter these forces.
Moreover, twentieth-century laws and norms have exacerbated problems in
areas such as the environment. The world has been unable to develop a
collective strategy in dealing with existential threats from carbon pollution
and global warming. Many island-state members of the Non-Aligned Move-
ment could disappear from the face of the earth in the not-too-distant future.
While the political and strategic environments have dramatically changed
sixty years after Bandung, the economic powers have also shifted. Maps of
colonial economic power no longer reflect the global distribution of wealth.
Today, economic power lies in Asia. Of the twenty largest economies in the
world, six are Asian countries, of which four are from East and Southeast Asia,
one is from South Asia, and one comes from the Middle East: China, India,
Indonesia, Japan, South Korea, and Saudi Arabia. According to the Inter-
national Monetary Fund, only seven Asian countries had per capita incomes
of less than $1,000 in 2010: Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Cambodia, Lao PDR,
Myanmar, Nepal, and Timor-Leste. The Asian Development Bank reported
in Asia 2050: Realizing the Asian Century that Asia’s share of global GDP (at
market exchange rates) could double from 27 percent in 2010 to 51 percent by
2050. African economies are also improving.
In contrast, Europe is in continuous decline because of demographic chal-
lenges, and it is now embroiled in endless financial crises embellished with
traditional security threats never imagined since 1945. The United States is also
in relative decline, while Russia has a GDP of US$2 trillion – less than the
combined GDP of ASEAN at US$2.3 trillion – and is really not a real global
player anymore other than occupying a permanent seat on the Security Council.
China has developed into a muscular economic, political, and military force.
Maps of military power have also changed radically. China has a vast submarine
fleet that includes nuclear-powered submarines, while Europe, the colonial
power that ruled the world for more than 250 years, has few submarines. The
founders of Bandung would not recognize the world in which we live today.
bandung’s relevance today

Regarding Bandung, we can pose certain fundamental questions today: Is the
Conference still relevant? Will nations, their peoples, and scholars simply
pretend that the Bandung Declaration of 1955 is still relevant? Will they dare
to say otherwise? Will they dare to suggest a revision?
634 Arif Havas Oegroseno
Sixty years later, fear of foreign state intervention and aggression is still valid.
The spirit of trust, promotion of mutual interests, and cooperation and respect
for justice and international law embedded in Bandung continues to be
relevant today, when we fear our own neighbors, especially those who possess
muscular economic, political, and military strength. International norms,
peaceful negotiations, and dispute settlements should be the weapons of
choice in conflict among states. Legal arguments in global tribunals ought
to be the chosen path in settling differences in many sensitive issues such as
sovereignty claims and maritime boundaries settlement. Indeed, in the twenty-
first century, the international community will never recognize acquisition of
territory not based on internationally and legally recognized means.
The role of international lawyers in Asia and Africa is crucial in instilling
the culture of respect of international law in the conduct of states in their
respective regions and beyond. Their role is not limited to making new global
norms, such as the success of aligning positions in the making of the United
Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea in 1982, but it is also within their
own countries and regions in the conduct of social and economic relations. It
would be highly disappointing to witness member states that declared the
Dasasila Principles disavowing such principles in their bilateral or regional
dealings. Invocation of the Dasasila Principles in many regional conflicts,
potential or real, is a must. This would serve as a reminder to keep the spirit of
trust of Asia-Africa Conference alive and well.
Sadly, for some major nontraditional threats such as terrorism, transnational
organized crimes, illegal fishing, and climate change, the Dasasila Principles
are either irrelevant or simply toothless. However, while the Dasasila
Principles are not equipped to deal with such threats, the spirit of cooperation,
collaboration, and solidarity among countries can be employed to fight these
challenges.
conclusion
Today, we strongly need creative methods of collaboration among conference
members on many urgent issues resulting from nontraditional security threats.
Doctrinal thinking and dogmatic approaches are not going to tame climatic
change or solve international public health issues, such as the recent Ebola
crisis. Such approaches will also prove ineffective in addressing the spread of
ISIS with better proposals of a different future. Anticolonialism cries have long
lost their echoes. Nations and scholars of the Dasasila Principles need to
recognize the new challenges of the twenty-first century and decide on the
right course of actions for them to be relevant in the world of today.
The Bandung Declaration in the Twenty-First Century 635
Commemoration of Bandung should not merely be an avenue to

reminisce, but also a time to reflect, to contemplate, and to plan on
survival in this brave new world. If not, the Dasasila Principles will face
a tragic end while their people engage in killing sprees in the name of
misplaced beliefs.
38
Virtue Pedagogy and International Law Teaching
hengameh saberi *
“You may know a truth, but if it’s at all complicated,

you have to be an artist not to utter it as a lie.”1
introduction
International law may not receive significant attention as a pedagogical
endeavor, but it can certainly depend on the exceptional gravity of that
attention.2 In a colorful recounting, international law teaching competes with
the worst aspects of sex and the weather in that many “think they are expert[s];
they complain about problems, but do nothing to improve the situation.”3
This is not exactly true, as what unites diagnostic accounts of international law
teaching is not shortage in reform proposals, but an enduring preoccupation
with international law’s institutional identity and peripheral academic visibil-
ity in legal education.
Corresponding to the resilience of this concern is a literature surviving
the seasonal winds of scholarship for decades.4 Across diverse academic
*
I am thankful to Lisa Kelly for perceptive feedback and to Phil Kariam for editorial
assistance.
1
Iris Murdoch, An Accidental Man (London: Chatto and Windus, 1971), p. 90.
2
The use of “international law” avoids the anachronism of “public international law” and leaves
room for the application of virtue theory to international legal pedagogy in general;
nonetheless, this topical discussion centers around “public international law” in response to the
attention it has received across generations of international law teachers.
3
John Gamble, “Teaching or Get off the Lectern: Impediments to International Law Teaching”
(2007) 13 ILSA Journal of International and Comparative Law 379.
4
For a list of sources with an emphasis on Australian and Canadian works, see Gerry Simpson,
“On the Magic Mountain: Teaching Public International Law” (1999) 10 European Journal of
International Law 70, n. 2.
636
Virtue Pedagogy and International Law Teaching 637
locales,5 historical phases,6 and thematic emphases,7 teachers of international

law have consistently called for new ways to present the field in an increasingly
integrated market of practice. While many older accounts betrayed anxiety
about international law’s peculiar identity,8 contemporary analyses struggle
with the evolution of international legal education in light of market
demands.
Aside from variation of emphasis, however, this expanding literature has
scarcely surpassed some of the older accounts in providing a meaningful
outlook on international law pedagogy. The contemporary reactions often
advance a largely self-fulfilling iteration of constant discontent with the field’s
rank and recognition in legal education. Yet it remains as true now as it was
three decades ago, as one such reflective account maintained, that there is no
state of emergency or grim exception disabling international law education
and that the institutional peculiarities instead ought to be taken as a force to
urge alternative thinking.9 An equally compelling observation warned against
theoretical incoherence and depoliticization of the subject matter as a result of
compromises that international law teachers often make in response to the
perceived pedagogical, jurisprudential, and functional inferiority of the field.10
These accounts are significant because their diagnoses and suggested remed-
ies reject the sui generis status of international law and instead call for
5
See, e.g., Ivan Shearer, “The Teaching of International Law in Australian Law Schools” (1983)
9 Adelaide Law Review 61; B.S. Chimni, “Teaching, Research and Promotion of International
Law in India: Past, Present and Future” (2001) 5 Singapore Journal of International and
Comparative Law 368; Hikmahanto Juwana, “Teaching International Law in Indonesia” (2001)
5 Singapore Journal of International and Comparative Law 412; Isaak Dore, “The International
Law Program at Saint Louis University” (1996) 46 Journal of Legal Education 336; Diane
Penneys Edelman, “It Began at Brooklyn: Expanding Boundaries for First-Year Law Students
by Internationalizing the Legal Writing Curriculum” (2002) 27 Brooklyn Journal of
6
See, e.g., Michael Reisman, “The Teaching of International Law in the Eighties” (1986) 20
International Lawyer 987.
7
See, e.g. John C. Knechtle, “Innovative Ways to Teach International Law” (2003) 97 American
Society of International Law Proceedings 217; Diane Otto, “Handmaidens, Hierarchies and
Crossing the Public – Private Divide in the Teaching of International Law” (2001) 1 Melbourne
Journal of International Law 35; John A. Barrett, “International Legal Education in the United
States: Being Educated for Domestic Practice While Living in a Global Society” (1997) 12
American University Journal of International Law and Policy 975.
8
See “Roundtable on the Teaching of International Law: Proceedings of the Eighty-Fifth
Annual Meeting of the American Society of International Law” (1991) 85 American Society of
International Law Procedures 102.
9
David Kennedy, “International Legal Education” (1985) 26 Harvard International Law Journal
361, at 384–385.
10
Gerry Simpson, “On the Magic Mountain.”
638 Hengameh Saberi
imaginative encounters with the possibilities that rules, doctrines, institutions

and context offer to international legal education. They do so precisely by
challenging the assumptions of a peculiar and particularly undervalued dis-
ciplinary identity that prompt such extraordinary preoccupations in the
first place.
As this chapter suggests, when reflecting on pedagogy in international law,
we might do well to shift our gaze from the subject matter to the agent. While an
agent-based approach to the teaching of international law is not closed to
existential considerations – the multiple personae of people with projects bear
evidence to that – my interest here is in a broader sense of agency than mere
identity. As a preliminary attempt to entertain the interrelated frameworks of
agency and virtue in international legal thinking, this chapter uses virtue
epistemology to identify a new approach to responsible and responsive peda-
gogy. For virtue epistemologists, beyond an exclusive moral sense, virtue refers
to human character traits, skills, and dispositions that normatively shape our
cognitive connection to the world.11 A virtue-based account of knowing prom-
ises an attractive normative framework to evaluate pedagogical choices.
To what extent and how do scholarly and pedagogical observational stand-
points justifiably delimit teachers’ discretion over the methodological and
substantive choices that they make? Do we have a more reliable tool than
the subjectivism of identity narratives to measure the success of our practice in
an “invisible college” of traveling minds that rise from the Global South and
teach in the North, and vice versa? How do we evaluate the pedagogical good
(and possible harms) in unavoidably popular methodological approaches and
styles such as interdisciplinarity and experientialism beyond their definite
marketability? Might we sacrifice some crucial faculties in our students if
we, for example, allow our scholarly passion to overrule the practical wisdom
of encouraging dissent? But isn’t dissent also subject to rules of epistemic
responsibility? What, if anything, does responsible pedagogy have to do with
coherence of our legal and political positions inside and outside of the
classroom in between different scholarly and advocacy roles? And what about
teaching from a critical standpoint as an overarching label?
These questions gain more urgency as the present volume reflects on the
legacy of a historical moment, reassessments and employment of which could
either sharpen or blunt international law’s critical edge. Neither this essay nor
virtue pedagogy has all the answers, but a virtue account offers new avenues
for a more reflective stance on international law as an intellectual medium
11
See, e.g., John Greco and John Turri (eds.), Virtue Epistemology: Contemporary Readings
(Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2012).
through which to relate to the world. First, it directs the focus away from
ontology to epistemology and thereby treats international legal studies as a
mature endeavor deserving of difficult questions about knowledge that other-
wise never see the light of day in a tediously exaggerated state of disciplinary
identity crisis. Second, it can afford an integrative approach to coherence in
knowledge and ethics – in knowing and doing, in scholarship and teaching,
and so forth – without the baggage of moralizing foundations. Third, precisely
because of that integrative capability, a virtue-based approach can account for
experience – individual and otherwise – as a determinative factor in both
pedagogical and scholarly choices without the danger of unrestrained subject-
ivity. Last, because it reconciles intellectual demands and dispositional traits,
it makes no claim to having a hegemonic pedagogical blueprint and instead
allows for responsible creativity.
virtue epistemology
Virtue theory,12 broadly speaking, centers on a number of important questions
that are rooted in the Aristotelian virtue ethics tradition – the significance of
agents as well as choice and action in moral theory, virtues, dispositions and
character, moral discernment or wisdom, the role of emotions in our moral life, a
deep concept of flourishing or happiness, and the fundamental questions of how
one should live one’s life and what sort of person to be.13 Virtue epistemology, in
part influenced by the revival of interest in virtue ethics, gives epistemic virtue
concepts a central role in addressing questions of epistemic justification.14
12
I have deliberately avoided “virtue theory” and used a more neutral phrase of “virtue account”
because the former is taken to refer to considerations of virtue in dominant deontological and
utilitarian moral traditions as well as to virtue ethics in particular. Having eclipsed in the
nineteenth century in favor of the two dominant moral traditions in Western philosophy, virtue
ethics was revived in the late 1950s by G.E.M. Anscombe in Modern Moral Philosophy (1958)
33(124) Philosophy 1. In turn, this led to development of various forms of virtue ethics inside and
outside deontological and utilitarian approaches. Martha Nussbaum provides a lucid account
of this complexity to reject a trichotomous taxonomy in which virtue ethics is regarded as a
third, distinctive category against Kantians and utilitarians. Martha Nussbaum, “Virtue Ethics,
A Misleading Category?” (1991) 3 Journal of Ethics 163. Even though the relation between
virtue epistemology and virtue ethics (and hence a clear account of the latter) is important, for
the purposes of this essay, I am not concerned with clear designations and use virtue theory or
account in a broad sense to refer to a focus on virtue as reflected in the accompanying text.
13
In Ancient Greek philosophy, these are excellence or virtue (arête), moral or practical wisdom
(phronesis), and happiness or flourishing (eudaimonia). For a helpful account, see Julia Annas,
Intelligent Virtue (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011).
14
For the first application of virtue epistemology, see Ernest Sosa, “The Raft and the Pyramid:
Coherence versus Foundations in the Theory of Knowledge” (1980) 5 Midwest Studies in
Philosophy 3.
640 Hengameh Saberi
In defining the place of epistemology, philosophers are cognizant of its

historical relationship to skepticism, the philosophical threat of which, in
principle, warranted theorizing about knowledge.15 But, for modern epistemol-
ogy, there are additional problem areas that call for epistemological inquiry as a
distinctive enterprise. One of those concerns is the question of the value of
knowledge – that is, whether we should set knowledge as a goal, or the only goal,
of inquiry, answer the question of “knowledge for what?” and know when and
how we are justified to say “we know.” Those who believe knowledge requires
justification mostly adopt either a foundationalist or a coherentist approach to the
structure of justification.16 Virtue epistemology, in contrast, shifts the focus from
justification of beliefs to that of the intellectual character of the agent “so that
knowers, or would-be knowers, come to bear as much of the onus of credibility as
‘the known’ has standardly borne.”17 The normative property of an act of cogni-
tion is measured against the cognitive character of the agent, and those cognitive
characters are epistemic or intellectual virtues and vices.
A second and related tenet of virtue epistemology is that epistemology is in
essence a normative discipline.18 For some epistemologists, that simply means
the basic epistemic concepts of knowledge, justification, and virtue can be
defined adequately only in normative vocabulary,19 while for others it implies
an educational or practical mission for epistemology to nurture our intellec-
tual well-being by, among others, helping us recognize modes of “epistemic
injustice”20 or furnishing us with forms of intellectual virtue to inspire intel-
lectual flourishing or cultural reformation.21
15
See generally Alfred Jules Ayer, The Problem of Knowledge (London: Macmillan, 1956).
16
The problem of justification is as follows: every belief C must be inferentially justified by a
belief E, which in turn needs to be justified by another belief F, which needs to be justified by
yet another belief G, ad infinitum. Foundationalism would have the regress end with some
empirically basic or noninferentially justified beliefs in no need of further justification. The
coherentist, on the other hand, considers justification to be inferential in a circular or weblike,
rather than linear, manner. See, e.g., Michael Williams, Problems of Knowledge: A Critical
Introduction to Epistemology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), pp. 81–90 and 117–123.
17
Lorraine Code, Epistemic Responsibility (Hanover, NH: Brown University Press, 1987),
pp. 8–9.
18
This is in opposition to Willard Van Orman Quine’s suggestion that the questions of
justification and what to believe should give place to cognitive psychology. Van Orman Quine,
“Epistemology Naturalized” in Ontological Relativity and Other Essays (New York: Columbia
19
See, e.g., Linda Zagzebski, On Epistemology (Belmont, CA: Wadsworth Cengage Learning,
2009).
20
Miranda Fricker, Epistemic Injustice: Power and the Ethics of Knowing (Oxford and New York:
21
Robert C. Roberts and W. Jay Wood, Intellectual Virtues: An Essay in Regulative Epistemology
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2007).
What exactly constitutes intellectual virtues turns on whether they are

regarded by epistemologists merely as a critical means conducive to intellec-
tual flourishing or as both a critical means to intellectual well-being and partly
constitutive of that. Cognitive faculties such as memory, perception, and
introspection, for example, as reliable and stable means of getting to the truth,
define intellectual virtues for epistemologists who are concerned with a virtue-
based analysis of knowledge. But for those who are concerned with cognition’s
ethical implications and epistemic responsibility, refined intellectual charac-
ter traits such as open-mindedness, fair-mindedness, tenacity, thoroughness,
and conscientiousness, rather than cognitive faculties, make up intellectual
virtues.22
However, this neither is nor ought to be a sharp taxonomy. A complete
epistemology plausibly requires both faculty and character-trait virtues.
Although both are indispensable, it is nonetheless epistemologists’ attention
to intellectual character traits that suggests some exciting and non-traditional
epistemic possibilities.
One such attempt broadens the scope of epistemology by urging a focus on
personal and social aspects of cognitive life and by considering epistemic
responsibility as chief among intellectual virtues.23 Under another account,
the chief intellectual virtue is epistemic conscientiousness, a desire to reach
truth and avoid error.24 Additional intellectual virtues such as impartiality,
intellectual sobriety, and courage are required to regulate a desire for truth
because that desire is not a virtue on its face and could be compatible with
vices of fanaticism and dogmatism.25 Concerned with the social aspects of
knowledge, a third account points to virtue epistemology’s disregard of a
distinction, long made in virtue ethics, between self-regarding and other
regarding virtues. Perceptual acuity and intellectual courage promote agents’
own intellectual flourishing, while their honesty and integrity promote others’
intellectual flourishing by enabling the former to clearly communicate their
reasons or demonstrate creativity to discover knowledge new to a
community.26
Along the lines of social and historical concerns, some have argued for a
genetic or social approach to epistemology, which instead of focusing on
knowledge at a particular point in time, considers the cognitive life of the
22
These two views are known as virtue reliabilism and virtue responsibilism respectively.
23
Lorraine Code, Epistemic Responsibility, p. 44.
24
James Monmarquet, Epistemic Virtue and Doxastic Responsibility (Lanham, MD: Rowman &
Littlefield Publishers, 1993), p. 21.
25
Id. at 23. 26
Jason Kawall, “Other-Regarding Epistemic Virtues” (2002) 15 Ratio 257, at 260.
642 Hengameh Saberi
mind developed in a social context. Here, virtues help shed light on the
cognitive life of the mind and its socialization while playing a central role in
defining cognitive ideals in context.27 A thorough grasp of the development of
cognitive ideals requires attention to concepts such as “social patterns of
mimicry and imitation” and “the importance of training and practice in
learning how to search for the truth.”28 It also accounts “for the superiority
from an epistemological point of view of certain communities and the bodies
of knowledge they generate,” and hence for considering why physics and
scientific educational material, for example, are more respectable than
astrology.29
Finally, a Neo-Aristotelian account of virtue epistemology holds an integra-
tive view of moral and epistemic virtues and argues that just as in Aristotelian
moral virtues where both “motivational” and “reliable success” components
are present, intellectual virtues also motivationally and reliably define justifi-
cation. An individual exhibiting intellectual courage, for example, is motiv-
ated to persevere in her ideas out of a desire for truth and is reliably successful
at doing so.30 Just as in moral virtues, intellectual virtues may conflict –
intellectual courage and humility, or generosity and autonomy may pull in
different directions. In such cases, the agent relies on Aristotelian phronesis or
the virtue of practical wisdom to balance the conflicting demands of a given
situation and respond appropriately.31
The foregoing sketch, while not a critical assessment, suffices to demon-
strate the significance of a normative approach to epistemology. The addition
of intellectual character traits to cognitive faculties further moves our grasp of
the world from mere perception and knowledge to understanding, wisdom,
and intellectual flourishing. Virtue epistemologists interested in the social and
ethical aspects of knowledge endeavor to outline the ways that virtues ought
to guide our cognitive connection to the world,32 and the ways virtues and
vices can promote or hinder intellectual flourishing.33 Notably, the virtue of
epistemic justice requires “reflexive critical openness” to the voices of the less
powerful and marginalized – those often dismissed because of cognitive and
27
Jonathon Kvanvig, The Intellectual Virtues and the Life of the Mind (Savage, MD: Rowman &
Littlefield Publishers, 1992).
28 29
Id. at 172. Id. at 176.
30
For the most developed account, see Linda Zagzebski, Virtues of the Mind: An Inquiry into the
Nature of Virtue and the Ethical Foundations of Knowledge (New York: Cambridge University
Press, 1996).
31 32
Roberts and Wood, Intellectual Virtues, p. 311. Id. at 165, 206, 219, 250, 261, 293, and 311.
33
See Heather Battaly, “Epistemic Self-Indulgence” (2010) 41 Metaphilosophy 214.
social prejudice34 — and urges further reflection on questions of power and

credibility on a level of social and political inquiry.
But how can responsibilism in virtue epistemology guide responsible and
reflexive pedagogy?
virtue pedagogy and pedagogical persona

Teaching can be understood in three distinct but interrelated senses: as a
practice, a role, or an activity.35 It seems to me that institutional and individual
practices and roles adopted in order to realize the ends of teaching, normative
as they might be, follow from an understanding of teaching as an activity. The
notion of “pedagogical persona” refers to the overall character agents adopted
while conducting the activity of teaching rather than to various roles or
practices they may follow to achieve defined ends through that persona. This
is partly inspired by what Herman Paul calls “scholarly persona,”36 an ideal-
typical model that allows for consideration of a constellation of features with
which an activity is pursued rather than a single-focused embodiment of one
episodic instance of scholarly engagement. Paul introduces “scholarly perso-
nae as models of scholarly selfhood, or as models of abilities, attitudes, and
dispositions that are considered to be crucial for the pursuit of scholarly
study.”37 For Paul, skills are the technical proficiency or mastery required to
accomplish the tasks of a particular practice,38 but virtues are something more:
“they are oriented toward goods that their practitioners recognize as consti-
tutive of the practices (for example, moral inquiry, scholarly research, political
deliberation) in which they find themselves engaged.”39
As Paul admits, this conception of virtue has a constructivist element
beyond its Aristotelian roots, which regard goods that define virtue as given
and not subject to the individual’s discretion. Under Paul’s model, virtues are
not frozen in time, but are necessary to pursue the goods regarded as consti-
tutive of a particular activity by its practitioners in a particular time.40 In
agreement with Paul, here I have little interest in a “moral”41 or “personal
34
Miranda Fricker, “Epistemic Injustice and a Role for Virtue in the Politics of Knowing” (2003)
34 Metaphilosophy 154.
35
David Carr, Making Sense of Education (New York: Routledge, 2003), p. 19.
36
Herman Paul, “What Is a Scholarly Persona? Ten Theses on Virtues, Skills and Desires” (2014)
53 History and Theory 348.
37 38 39 40
Id. at 353. Id. at 358. Id. at 359. Ibid.
41
See Linda Zagzebski, Virtues of the Mind, p. 108. I do not necessarily reject that a virtuous
person is more likely to be a moral person than a nonvirtuous person, but as stated before, here
I need not take any position on the relationship between virtue epistemology and virtue ethics.
644 Hengameh Saberi
worth”42 conception of virtue. But I part ways with Paul’s constructivist

understanding of virtue which gives persona a temporal or contextual charac-
ter. I take persona instead to stand for the kind of selfhood that agents, based
on their understanding of the activity in question, define for themselves.
Virtues are human qualities that normatively direct, rather than descriptively
explain, the agents’ choice of persona and the particular ways they act within
that persona to achieve the desired ends with reliable success.
More specifically, I use pedagogical personae to point to the kind of selves
that agents, based on their understanding of the art or science of teaching as
an activity, adopt and exhibit while they perform and engage in multiple roles
and practices to achieve the ends of education. Epistemic virtues seem to be
the best candidates to guide agents in their choice of the persona and resulting
roles and practices. Such roles and practices may range from course designing,
classroom teaching, research and independent study supervision, evaluation,
and any other ordinary teaching activity. Pedagogy, taken broadly, implies an
understanding of what is appropriate and what is inappropriate knowledge (in
a broad sense of those qualifiers) to impart through education and includes an
“animating ethos” in a pedagogue.43
The application of virtue theory to pedagogy, particularly when promoted
through advocacy for noncognitive means (such as identity narrative) to
cultivate wisdom and understanding beyond the mere transfer of knowledge,44
has raised skepticism about the capacity of noncognitive tools to avoid false-
hood and deception and mistaking the particular for the universal.45 In
response to that challenge, an advocate of virtue pedagogy argues that “there
are forms of understanding that transcend the conceptual” and uses virtues
such as “pedagogical tact,” “personal presence,” “discipline,” and “patience”
to respond to both “conceptual and cognitive” and “evocative and noncogni-
tive” dimensions in human science inquiry.46 But this is hardly responsive, as
“understanding” in human science inquiry need not be entirely noncognitive.
Aside from that, the virtues invoked are also too general and too blunt to
42
Jason Baehr, The Inquiring Mind: On Intellectual Virtues and Virtue Epistemology, cited in
Herman Paul, “What Is a Scholarly Persona?” at 359.
43
Max van Manen, “Pedagogy, Virtue, and Narrative Identity in Teaching” (1994) 24 Curriculum
Inquiry 135, at 139.
44
For a prime example, see ibid.
45
Gary D. Fenstermacher, “On the Virtues of van Manen’s Argument: A Response to ‘Pedagogy,
Virtue, and Narrative Identity in Teaching’” (1994) 24 Curriculum Inquiry 215.
46
Max van Manen, “The Pain of Science: Rejoining Fenstermacher’s Response” (1994) 24
Curriculum Inquiry 221, at 226–227.
contribute much by way of effective and sharp checks and balances against the
folly of pure subjectivism.
Here is precisely where virtue epistemology, as compared to other forms of
virtue theory, remains unparalleled for the value of its emphasis on
demanding norms of cognitive justification in line with desired normative
social or ethical implications. As alluded to earlier, the difference between
virtue epistemologists focusing on reliable cognitive faculties and the respon-
sibilists is one of emphasis rather than a choice between cognitive and
noncognitive features. Cognitive- and character-related intellectual virtues
together accommodate historical and social situatedness of knowledge without
sacrificing measures of reliability. Qualities such as open-mindedness, integ-
rity, conscientiousness, tenacity, and thoroughness may seem too abstract and
global to direct pedagogical agents in a meaningful way to pursue their activity
that is both reliable and context-sensitive. But the virtue of practical wisdom
enables the agent to interpret the demands of intellectual character traits on
the inquiry and balance between such demands when conflicts arise.
Once agents define their pedagogical persona according to their understand-
ing of the activity – what teaching is all about and what goods it pursues toward
the ultimate end of intellectual well-being – virtues as normative qualities act
both as a critical means to and partly constitutive of intellectual well-being to
guide various roles and practices embedded in the activity. Global as epistemic
virtues might be, their interpretation and application in context as normative
guides under the light of practical wisdom is the agent’s responsibility. There is no
reason to exempt intellectual character virtues from critical reflection. But the
broad agency of the individual in interpretation and balancing of the normative
demands of these virtues will leave ample room for context-sensitivity.
Different skills and abilities distinguish teachers in what kind of technical
tasks they can tackle, but different intellectual dispositions and attitudes
distinguish between more or less normatively justified pedagogical choices.
The implications of virtues for international law teaching are no less salient
than an agent-based approach to pedagogy deserves. To make sense of the
normative relevance and significance of virtues for international law teaching,
let us consider a few examples of pedagogical problem areas that manifest the
operation of virtue theory for the inquiring agent. The coverage is admittedly
eclectic and the exercise intended to draw attention to the resulting inquiry
and questions to be asked under a virtue account rather than to provide a
blueprint. Befitting the normative approach it advocates, in a way it speaks of
the author’s dispositions and attitudes, and so with luck, the invoked virtues
ought to point to the right questions as they also guard against intellectual self-
indulgence.
646 Hengameh Saberi
virtue pedagogy and international law teaching

Contra international law teaching, international legal scholarship has invited
some serious reflections on the role of scholars as agents in their connection to
the world through scholarly intervention. Normative views of the responsi-
bilities of international legal scholars posit a collective as a community.
Whether this collective is an epistemic community built on common forms
of access to and production of knowledge, an interpretive community reflect-
ing commonly shared forms of construing legal texts, or simply a professional
community, divergence of ideas about the justificatory goals of its scholarly
production is sharp enough to extend along different theories about law.
On one extreme of some illustrative recent accounts, a detached scholarly
position must contain “second-order legal scholarship” to the analysis of the
origin and doctrinal structure of norms, their influence on perceptions and
preferences, and their interaction with one another – a tempered exercise of
the far more extreme Kelsenian reflexive distance position.47 Reconciling
positivism and politics, critical positivism takes rules seriously as it urges full
sensitivity to the socioeconomic and ideological context of their creation.48
Inspired by virtue ethics, a creative reading of Martti Koskenniemi’s culture of
formalism understands it to be recognition of the demands of individual
ethical responsibility on, among others, international law scholars.49 Another
stance – perhaps at the other extreme and closely related to virtue ethics –
understands professional (and individual) sensibilities as “disciplinary habits of
thought, assumptions, and dispositions” that invite international law scholars
to a more reflective consideration of their individual and collective ethical
responsibilities.50 This last account adds another crucial element to sensibility
for effective agency, namely a proper cognitive infrastructure to organize
responsible engagement with the world.51
47
Jochen von Bernstorff, “International Legal Scholarship as a Cooling Medium in International
Law and Politics” (2014) 25 European Journal of International Law 977, at 990. For a simpler
account wary of accountability of scholars to the “scientific community,” “the truth,” and “the
public,” see Anne Peters, “Realizing Utopia as a Scholarly Endeavour” (2013) 24 European
Journal of International Law 533, at 540.
48
Antonio Cassese (ed.), Realizing Utopia: the Future of International Law (Oxford: Oxford
University Press: 2012), p. xvii.
49
Jan Klabbers, “Towards a Culture of Formalism? Martti Koskenniemi and the Virtues” (2013)
27 Temple International and Comparative Law Journal 417, at 420–421.
50
Andrew Lang and Susan Marks, “People with Projects: Writing the Lives of International
Lawyers” (2013) 27 Temple International and Comparative Law Journal 437, at 449.
51
Id. at 452.
To fill the lacuna of an agent-based approach to international law teaching,

epistemic virtues help guide this recognition – sensibility – in a responsible
manner. If epistemic virtues are the best normative candidates to guide agents in
their choice of pedagogical persona and resulting roles and practices, it is
because they include habits, dispositions, skills, and attitudes under both cogni-
tive faculties and intellectual character traits. Virtue pedagogy takes account of
dispositions, attitudes, and habits in the pedagogical agent, as it also demands a
cognitive infrastructure that is epistemically both reliable and responsible.
Take, for example, critical approaches to (international) law teaching.
Decades on, the critique against reproduction of hierarchy through legal educa-
tion52 and the later call for politicization of the classroom53 still undeniably
reverberate through understandings of critical pedagogy in (international) legal
studies. At their core, such efforts cut through various forms of contingency of
knowledge while their emancipatory ideals aspire to expose the role of hegem-
ony and power in its formation. The idea of a uniform definition and method-
ology for critical pedagogy would be reductive.54 Grounded in the critiques of
the Frankfurt School and especially Herbert Marcuse against the role of schools
in solidifying authority and undermining the necessary social consciousness for
social change,55 various concerns have preoccupied critical pedagogy theories in
the past few decades. These aspirations unite in urging anti-oppressive praxis56
centering on race, gender, nationality, ethnicity, and sexuality. In their post-
modern incarnation, they go so far as to advocate a global decolonizing role for
education by, for example, reviving indigenous knowledge.57
Critical legal pedagogy shares some similar ideals. At times, explicitly
relying on a Gramscian antihegemonic framework, it envisions decolonizing
the self and society through “identity politics as anti-subordination praxis.”58
Critical international law pedagogy has also fed on strands of identity politics,
52
Duncan Kennedy, “Legal Education and the Reproduction of Hierarchy” (1982) 32 Journal of
Legal Education 591.
53
Duncan Kennedy, “Politicizing the Classroom” (1994) 4 Southern California Review of Law
and Women’s Studies 81.
54
For a qualitative study of different understandings of the concept among self-identified
pedagogues, see Mary Breuing, “Problematizing Critical Pedagogy” (2011) 3 International
Journal of Critical Pedagogy 2.
55
See, e.g., Michael Apple, Education and Power (Boston: Routledge & Kegan Paul: 1982).
56
Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed (London: Sheed and Ward, 1972) is often regarded as
the first theoretical articulation of critical pedagogy.
57
See Sandy Grande, Red Pedagogy: Native American Social and Political Thought (Lanham,
MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2004).
58
See, e.g., Francisco Valdes, “Outsider Jurisprudence, Critical Pedagogy and Social Justice
Activism: Marking the Stirrings of Critical Legal Education” (2003) 10 Asian American Law
Journal 65.
648 Hengameh Saberi
with Third World Approaches to International Law (TWAIL) perhaps having

inspired the most inclusive manifestation of critical ideals of education in
international law.59 TWAIL’s theoretical commitment to emancipation,
equality, positional parity, agency for change, empowerment, antisubordina-
tion, historicity, contextualism, antidualism, inclusion, and expansion of the
political informs a pedagogical approach that contains, but goes well beyond,
mere identity politics.60 The subversive nature of such reorientation aims to
do more than merely challenge banking models of education, in which the
teacher deposits information into passive deposit boxes as students, and which
are the main target of critical pedagogy theories.61 It is not content, then, with
a reproduction of a hierarchical relationship where the pedagogue only
transfers TWAIL teachings as a transaction. Instead, it places the pedagogue
in a nonhierarchical, dialogical relationship with the student to explore
together alternative theoretical sources for knowledge through the context of
often-ignored sites and voices for emancipatory praxes.
If this summary is accurate, all the axes of critical international law peda-
gogy, understood as such, would normatively benefit from an agent-based
approach governed by epistemic virtues.
To start with the nonhierarchical and dialogical nature of the pedagogue-
pupil relationship, it ought to be asked what exactly symmetry – invoked to
question traditional sources of authority – means in this context.62 If symmetry
refers to the space given to the pupil to reason and analyze the material
independently, that in and of itself may not carry much distinctive analytical
weight as a characteristic of this relationship to argue for it in a theory of
education.63 But if symmetry refers to epistemic or pedagogical parity between
the pedagogue and pupil, then it is dubious how that could ensure the
59
Mohsen al-Attar and Vernon Tava, “TWAIL Pedagogy: Legal Education for Emancipation”
(2009) 15 Palestine Journal of International Law 7.
60
For one attempt at detailing an actual experience with designing a course on this basis, see
ibid.
61
Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, p. 53. For a superb example of dissent against the
banking model in international law teaching, see Diane Otto, “Handmaidens, Hierarchies and
Crossing the Public.”
62
I borrow Martha Nussbaum’s reference to “pedagogical symmetry” to refer to the rejection of a
hierarchical relationship without engaging with her particular elaboration on the subject. See
Nussbaum, The Therapy of Desire (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009), p. 340.
63
For an essentially similar, but more complex, critique of Nussbaum’s articulation of
pedagogical symmetry, see David Moltow, “Pedagogical Symmetry and the Cultivation of
Humanity: Nussbaum, Seneca and Symmetry in the Teacher-Pupil Relationship” (2014) 13
Arts and Humanities in Higher Education 115, at 117.
realization of telos of critical teaching – training with appropriate cognitive

tools for effective agency for change and emancipation.
The fact that dialogical exploration of sources of domination, old and new,
guards against a robotic reproduction of the teacher’s preoccupations gives it
legitimacy. But the pedagogue, by virtue of practice, is more likely to have
cultivated intellectual character traits such as open-mindedness and generosity
and be able to exercise appropriate cognitive tools to interpret, identify, and
debunk traditional sources of knowledge that reinforce or neutralize various
ploys of domination. Destruction of the canon needs no less epistemic
responsibility than multiplication of new, more inclusive sources of know-
ledge. Positivism and formalism, For example, often the easiest targets of
critical international law pedagogy,64 are weighty adversaries worthy of neces-
sary cognitive and virtuous intellectual character traits well-developed in the
pedagogue to be imparted in the process of critical education.
The search for alternative theoretical sources of knowledge also needs
epistemic justification. Theoretical inclinations to a large extent reflect dis-
positions or temperaments. Empiricism or abstract thinking, social and ethical
implications attributed to different theoretical orientations, and distinctive
methodological demands associated with different theoretical perspectives
appeal to scholars partly based on diverging temperaments. Yet, although
sensibilities partly explain theoretical choices, they do not justify them. The-
ories need cognitive rather than metacognitive justification.
Teaching dissent from dominant theoretical approaches in favor of new
explanatory or normative theories requires, first and foremost, full engagement
with those approaches on their own terms. Whether through “narrowing of
the focus followed by a broadening of perspective”65 in which several theoret-
ical frameworks are brought to bear on a particular problem area, a phenom-
enological approach finds a case to be worth anatomizing “when it both
typifies and enacts fundamental legal controversies of the sort that go on in
a variety of distinct substantive settings,”66 or a purely abstract comparative
study of theoretical orientations toward the global legal order, critical peda-
gogy must teach how to push the object of critique to its limit, on its own
terms, to expose its ills. For example, rational choice approaches can hardly
withstand the philosophical scrutiny of “self” and “rationality” if the critical
pedagogue takes their claims seriously to develop a critique from within rather
64
See, e.g., Mohsen al-Attar and Vernon Tava, “TWAIL Pedagogy,” at 23.
65
Gerry Simpson, “On the Magic Mountain,” at 89.
66
Richard Falk, “New Approaches to the Study of International Law” (1967) American Journal of
International Law 477, at 495.
650 Hengameh Saberi
than without. Sociological claims of human rights norm internalization may

well fall short if assessed against valid empirical observations. Likewise, pro-
cedural accounts of legitimacy, assessed as such, might betray a tall order of
assumptions of substantive justice for a pluralistic global community. But that
will become obvious only if they are taken seriously on their actual claims
rather than treated lightly or dismissed offhand.67
In short, the association of theories with political or ethical orientations and
methodological choices must be proven through reflection rather than
assumed by consensus. Critical pedagogy’s legitimacy owes to how it takes
this as both a responsibility and an opportunity. Shortcut descriptors such as
antisubordination and universalism cannot do the filtering job alone. Theories
feeding critical international legal pedagogy are susceptible to unwarranted
universalism as well. Our understanding of social phenomena – revolutions,
urbanization, immigration, and social movements – might draw from grand
critical social and political theories of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries
in such a way as to lose touch with particularities of various locales to which
our limited cognitive tools may not afford access. Epistemic virtues urge the
critical pedagogue to take her dispositions seriously, treat them reflexively, and
acquire habits consistent with intellectual virtues of humility, courage, open-
mindedness and impartiality, autonomy, and conscientiousness in order to
teach how to responsibly question the canon and develop new theories against
subordination and colonization of the self and society.
Most notably, critical international law pedagogy’s reliance on alternative
sites and marginalized voices for more inclusive sources of knowledge and
emancipatory praxis responds to demands of epistemic justice. These narra-
tives are retrievable on the streets of the metropole as much as in “relatable
hinterlands.”68 Notwithstanding what forms suppression and convenient col-
lective amnesia have taken historically, these sites and voices have continued
to share a second-class fate and, with that, the welfare of millions.
Again, dispositions by and large determine which voices call out to us more
audibly and to what extent we take them to represent indefensible oppressive
practices. Yet we need reliable epistemic discriminating capacity to select and
treat such alternative narratives as media for new knowledge. Epistemic virtues
enable the agent to discriminate consciously and legitimately and guard
against both arbitrariness and subjectivism. A commitment to self-criticality
67
For a case of such hasty dismissal, see Mohsen al-Attar and Vernon Tava, “TWAIL Pedagogy,”
at 22.
68
The phrase is borrowed from Robbie Shilliam, “Colonial Architecture or Related Hinterlands?
Locke, Nandy, Fanon, and the Bandung Spirit” (2015) 22 Constellations.
in the pedagogue would ensure both intellectual reliability and responsibility

in the selection, presentation, and interpretation of narratives whose reach
goes beyond the idiosyncrasies of personal identity. Self-criticality, however, is
not noncognitive. Rather, it calls for both appropriate cognitive faculties to
reliably relate to the existing knowledge and intellectual character traits to
responsibly open the space for new sources.
By shifting the focus from the disciplinary or institutional identity of the
field to the agency of the pedagogue, virtue pedagogy poses demanding
epistemic requirements on teaching international law as a vocation that fosters
intellectual well-being both as an end in itself and as a means to more
democratic processes of constructing emancipatory knowledge. The era of
defined boundaries between critical and mainstream international law teach-
ing is now behind us. Critical orientations in international law – even the
factions specifically inspired by TWAIL – proceed with very different moral
and political priorities and, at times, converge around only a faith in emanci-
patory praxes. What is conveniently termed mainstream also carries various
interdisciplinary flags and acts on diverging interests. So the old framing does
not seem to be as analytically sharp as it may once have been, nor is it proving
strategically productive. Moreover, a broad scope of information vying for
students’ attention seems to well deflate critical pedagogy’s classic concerns
about banking models of education in a law school course on international
law. Rather than continuing to rely on classic dichotomies and longstanding
critiques of education as hierarchy, we ought to focus our individual
and collective efforts on fostering critical international law pedagogy as an
epistemically robust and responsible intellectual enterprise.
This is ever more urgent considering that a network of critical approaches is
increasingly in a dialogue and that mobility, digital and otherwise, is the new
career reality. How would we teach international law critically to a classroom
in a country whose plight has animated our critical theories but which has no
share of its own in critical scholarly literature? The majority of theoretical
sources guiding critical international law approaches still come in English.
We can overcome linguistic barriers more easily, but lexicon barriers require
patience and strong intellectual tools to navigate. What should we make, for
example, of the reception of critical work examining the adverse conse-
quences of feminist interventions in international human rights and humani-
tarian law’s treatment of women by a class of female lawyers whose lives were
for years limited to seclusion and professional retardation by an oppressive
regime that confined them to darkness? How to convince young, aspiring
lawyers about the costs associated with using the language of international
human rights in a context where defense of civil and political rights still
652 Hengameh Saberi
defines life and death? The question is not over strategies, as survival tactics have
often taught these students enough wickedly pragmatic wisdom to find their way
around. It is rather a question about the future of critical pedagogy not just in
what it teaches but also in what it learns. It is about urging agency in pedagogues
to acquire skills, habits, and dispositions to transcend homey personal identities,
if and when needed, and exercise self-criticality in an epistemically responsible
way. It is also about adopting sufficient artistic expression and practical wisdom,
from humanities or other cognitive fields, not to have to present the complicated
truth as a lie or as a subjective choice of a narrative.
conclusion: parting with bandung?

Historiography is unparalleled in the opportunities it has afforded critical
international law scholarship to establish itself as an exceptional source of
light on the past with critical consequences for understanding the present.
The collective effort of this volume is but one example. Yet the same concern
with history seems to have colonized critical international law pedagogy and,
to a great extent, inadvertently discouraged imaginative experimentations for
renewal in pedagogical alternatives.
Histories of international law ought to be explored in more multifaceted
ways, with a stronger commitment to unmasking and connecting the com-
plexities that a conscious or implicit state-centric worldview erroneously
confines to different realms of law.69 To be sure, transcending jurisdictional
boundaries is not merely to connect the neglected strands of the past (and
those to the present), but also to complicate international legal historiogra-
phy’s disciplinary self-understanding of its mission further. Writing history as
reflected in events, concepts, or the life of individual people70 has already
animated a critical market of narratives and counternarratives of international
law’s past that has moved beyond a jejune anxiety about historical research as
mere fact-finding expedition. Told in one voice and written from one angle,
the inspirational story of Bandung’s antisubordination, for example, might be
but a myth,71 whereas the change of method might uncover new factual
69
For such a recent call, see Martti Koskenniemi, “Expanding Histories of International Law”
(2016) 56 American Journal of Legal History.
70
Bardo Fassbender and Anne Peters, “Introduction: Towards a Global History of International
Law” in The Oxford Handbook of the History of International Law, Bardo Fassbender and Anne
Peters (eds.) (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), p. 11.
71
See, e.g., Robert Vitalis, “The Midnight Ride of Kwame Nkrumah and Other Fables of
Bandung” (2013) 4 Humanity 261.
cornerstones hard to dispute. The story of Bandung is retold in this volume

with such awareness and that, in and of itself, attests to the maturity of critical
attempts at international law historiography.
But here is the rub. This same disciplinary success has become a hegemony
of sorts in critical international law teaching. To belong to the critical club of
international law teachers, we invariably select, reproduce, and disseminate
the best of existing literature to diagnose the current ills with the wrongs of the
past in classrooms. Particularities of locales, institutional demands, linguistic
differences, temporal specificities, pedagogical expediency, and most other
practical considerations in favor of effective forms of sharing knowledge and
intellectual diversity and flourishing all lose color in the face of our homogen-
ous submission to the force of this hegemony. One would have to come along
for a ride in the wreckage of the past to learn how to possibly craft a different
international law for the future.
What if this club collectively questioned its own pedagogical hegemon?
Refocusing our gaze from the subject to the pedagogical agent might be just
one way toward such a reorientation. In some sense, we might then have to
part with the story of Bandung, just as we might have to experiment with
something other than 1648, 1871, 1907, 1945, and so forth. As long as the
pedagogical agent is expected to discriminate between experiences in an
epistemically responsible and reliable way, experimentation with various cog-
nitive and artistic forms of knowing does not need arbitrary constraints. Greek
mythology could compete with artificial intelligence in an international law
classroom as they shed light on the puzzle of power, subordination, and the
new forms of oppression and freedom with further, inevitable advancement of
technology. Historical narrative would then be only one guiding star on the
horizon rather than the determining force of both the journey and destination.
This is how pedagogical responsibility and expediency might best serve an
intellectually fulfilling medium in international law through which to con-
nect to the world.
Epilogue
The Legacy of Bandung
partha chatterjee
introduction
It has been alleged recently that just as the Treaty of Westphalia was
reinterpreted in the nineteenth century as the mythical source of a law of
nations based on state sovereignty, so is the Bandung Conference being
re-created now by a group of postcolonial scholars as the mythical founda-
tion of global anti-imperialist politics. Both sides of this analogy are vastly
overstated. While the nineteenth century was doubtless an important period,
when positive international law based on the formal acts of sovereign states
was compiled in standard and widely accessible scholarly volumes, scholars
had already noted the significance of Westphalia in the emergence of state
sovereignty. Emerich de Vattel’s work, composed in the middle of the
eighteenth century and enjoying general acceptance well into the nine-
teenth, explicitly formalized a set of practices that were acknowledged as
having been largely inaugurated at Westphalia.1 As for Bandung, its signifi-
cance lies in the explicit assertion that state sovereignty everywhere must be
legitimately based on the will of the people, and that the sovereignty of
every state must be recognized as formally equal. These goals were set
before the peoples of the world. They have not yet been achieved. Hence,
our invocation of Bandung today is not the regurgitation of a mythical story,
but the declaration of a contemporary set of demands of global politics. To
understand the point, we need to consider what the leaders at Bandung
were fighting against.
1
Emerich de Vattel, The Law of Nations or the Principles of Natural Law, trans. Charles G.
Fenwick (Washington, DC: Carnegie Institutions, 1916).
657
658 Partha Chatterjee
the law of nations in the east

The practices of modern empire in the nineteenth century emerged within
a new conceptual frame developed by Jeremy Bentham and the utilitarians
who proposed that governments everywhere, in every part of the world,
could be compared and ranked according to a common set of measures.2
Hence, certain universal norms could be fixed, against which each country
could be measured and its deviation from the norm identified. Suitable
policies could then be devised for bringing the governments of those
countries closer to the universally desirable norm. Empire thus came to
be thought of as a new educational project of normalization; that is,
disciplining. The techniques ranged between two types – a pedagogy of
violence and a pedagogy of culture. While culture increasingly became the
preferred method, including legal reform, reform of social and economic
institutions, and the spread of Western-style education, it was also asserted
that imperial force may have to be employed to ensure the proper condi-
tions for cultural pedagogy. The history of imperialism since the nineteenth
century is fundamentally characterized by debates over the degree,
sequence, combination, and points of application of the pedagogical tech-
niques of violence and culture.
The normative considerations involved questions of both morality and
law. Occupying a central place in these debates over imperial policy was
the concept of sovereignty. In each case where the issue came up of
whether or how much to intervene, the application of moral as well as
legal norms required a determination of the existence and quality of
sovereignty. The striking fact, even though largely unacknowledged until
quite recently, is that the evolving practices of imperial power in the
Americas, Asia, and Africa had a profound effect in shaping the so-called
law of nations and defining the place within it of the modern sovereign
nation-state.
In the debates that took place in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries
about the moral and legal propriety of the European conquest of the Americas
and those in the eighteenth century about the British territorial acquisitions in
India, there is a significant shift in the discursive conditions. The debates
between the scholastics and the humanists over the legitimacy of the early
conquests of America were framed within Roman law concepts such as
2
I have argued this point at greater length in my book, The Black Hole of Empire: History of a
Global Practice of Power (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2012), Ch. 6.
dominium and imperium.3 By the time of the acquisition of territory in India in

the eighteenth century, the dominant philosophical framework was that of
natural law: the legal arguments were now those of Grotius, while the moral-
political arguments tended to come largely out of Montesquieu.4 In the
nineteenth century, alongside the emergence of utilitarian reasoning in polit-
ical affairs, the legal domain was marked by the rise of positivism, of which
John Austin was the foremost proponent, his ideas becoming posthumously
influential in the latter half of the century.
The shift from natural law to legal positivism was marked by the devaluing
of universal natural law assumptions, which were taken to be principles of
morality rather than of law, and an emphasis on the empirical evidence of
legal acts executed by sovereign state authorities. In domestic society, only the
positive law made by a sovereign state could qualify as proper law. In the field
of international law, this definition raised a problem, voiced by Austin himself:
In the absence of a globally sovereign state, there could not be, properly
speaking, any international law. However, this fundamentalist objection was
circumvented by the argument that the body of extant international law
consisted of specific acts, such as treaties, conventions, and agreements, into
which sovereign states entered.
But who were these sovereign states whose legal transactions with other
sovereign states could produce a body of positive international law? The
argument was made that the mutual treaties and agreements between these
sovereign states were based on certain shared premises and had, over the years,
produced a set of mutually recognized and accepted principles of inter-
national transaction. In other words, what might be otherwise called custom-
ary had been actually incorporated into a body of positive international law
because, in fact, those sovereign states constituted an international society, or
perhaps a “family” of nations.
C. H. Alexandrowicz has argued that before the nineteenth century, legal
relations between European powers and states in India and Southeast Asia
existed “on a footing of equality.”5 The former acknowledged the sovereignty
of the latter and even adopted, or at least tried to fit into, the legal practices
that prevailed in interstate relations in the region. The Europeans were aware
3
Anthony Pagden, Lords of All the World: Ideologies of Empire in Spain, Britain and France,
c.1500–c.1800 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000); David Armitage, The Ideological
Origins of the British Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000).
4
Richard Tuck, The Rights of War and Peace: Political Thought and the International Order
from Grotius to Kant (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999).
5
Charles Henry Alexandrowicz, An Introduction to the History of the Law of Nations in the East
Indies (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1967).
that there were different classes of sovereigns in the East, ranging from
suzerains such as the Emperor of China or the Mughal Emperor, to minor
sovereigns who were otherwise vassals of a suzerain, to vassals on the border-
line of sovereignty and nonsovereign feudal status. Some of the treaties
between Europeans and Indian rulers were declared to be transactions
between sovereigns, even when they were only concluded between their local
representatives – such as the treaty of 1547 between the kings of Portugal and
Vijayanagara. Even when Indian rulers effectively surrendered territory to the
East India Company in the eighteenth century, as in Bengal or the Carnatic,
or in the Maratha territories, they did so as sovereign powers through treaties.
The situation changed drastically in the nineteenth century when, with the
adoption of legal positivism in place of natural law theories, the sovereign
status of Eastern rulers came to be doubted and the family of nations compris-
ing the proper subjects of international law was restricted only to the countries
of Europe and the new republics of the Americas. Paradoxically, as Alexan-
drowicz points out, the domain of the law of nations in the nineteenth
century “shrank to regional dimensions though it still carried the label of
universality.”6
While this argument might seem persuasive from a legal point of view, the
change in regimes makes more sense if placed within the changing political
context of relations between European powers and Eastern rulers in the
nineteenth century. The world in the nineteenth century as seen from Europe
was quite different from the way it looked in the eighteenth. The attraction of
Asian, and later African, territories as sources of raw material for European
industry, land for European commercial agriculture, and markets for Euro-
pean industrial manufactures had become overwhelming.
Added to this was the expansion through the nineteenth century of the
balance-of-power system of Europe to include within its scope the territories of
virtually the entire globe. The classical balance-of-power system had
developed a mechanism, through territorial transfers and shifting alliances,
to prevent the emergence of a single dominant power or coalition in Europe.
Thus, the relative strengths of the core players of the system – Austria, Britain,
France, Holland (replaced by Prussia after 1815), and Russia – were frequently
adjusted by territorial acquisitions at the expense of minor powers (the parti-
tions of Poland in the late eighteenth century being the most notorious
example) and, in the case of the maritime powers, by overseas territories. In
fact, overseas territories became the chief means for maintaining the
6
Id. at 2.
European balance in the nineteenth century, reaching egregious limits in the

partition of Africa at the Berlin Colonial Conference of 1884–1885.7 Further,
with the rising tide of democratic and nationalist movements in Central and
Eastern Europe, resonating with the threatening revolutionary rhetoric of the
natural rights of peoples and nations to self-government, the discursive shift in
the legal domain from natural law to positivism made good conservative sense.
This was the political background to the changing significance of the law of
nations in the nineteenth century. The European powers became the only
proper subjects of the purportedly universal law of nations because the entire
globe was now properly the object of European power.
The effect of this change on the Indian subcontinent becomes dramatically
clear from a chart prepared by Michael Fisher showing the annexation of
territory by the East India Company.8 Until 1799, the bulk of the territory
effectively held by the company, mostly in Bengal and the Carnatic, was not
quite annexed because de jure sovereignty still lay with various Indian rulers.
With Wellesley’s term as governor-general began a new aggressive policy, not
always endorsed by the British government or the company’s directors in
London, of annexing Indian territory. From 1799 to 1806, the company
annexed in Mysore, Awadh, and the Maratha country, some 135,000 square
miles of land – the size, Fisher points out, of reunited Germany today. Indeed,
during Wellesley’s period in office, the company annexed some 30,000 square
miles of territory every year.9 Annexations continued through the early nine-
teenth century. Lord Hastings, governor-general from 1813 to 1823, proclaimed
the legal doctrine of “paramountcy” by which the authority of the company
as the paramount power superseded that of all Indian rulers and bestowed on
it the right to annex their territories if, in its view, there were sufficient grounds
to do so.
From the 1830s, however, despite acknowledging the material benefits of
territorial expansion in the form of increased revenue and commerce, the
principal justification for annexation became the plea that the people living
under various Indian rulers needed to be protected from misgovernment. The
consideration that the people wanted and deserved better government, it
would be asserted, could trump all prior legal provisions of treaties and
override the objections of the rulers whose presumed rights of sovereignty
7
I have discussed the transformation of the classical balance of power system in Arms, Alliances
and Stability: The Development of the Structure of International Politics (Delhi: Macmillan;
New York: John Wiley, 1975).
8
Michael Fisher, ed., The Politics of British Annexation of India, 1757–1857 (Delhi: Oxford
University Press, 1993), p. xv.
9
Fisher, “Introduction,” id. at 18.
had been superseded by the paramount power assumed by the British. Two
influential bodies of opinion in Britain led this new campaign – radical
Benthamite reformers who demanded better government for the welfare of
the people, and Evangelicalists keen to extend their successful anti-slavery
movement to an effort to Christianize and civilize India.
Here, the history of European territorial acquisitions in Asia and, in the
nineteenth century, Africa posed conceptual problems for the law of nations.
Even though in the course of their imperial advance, European powers such
as Britain had entered into various treaties and agreements with Oriental rulers
and chieftains, were the latter really to be regarded as sovereign entities? To
admit this would be to acknowledge that the family of sovereign nations that
was the source of international law included such non-European members.
On the other hand, to deny them any sovereign authority would imply that the
treaties they had entered into with European powers had no legal standing.
The problem dogged imperial policy in India throughout the nineteenth
century.
The solution was devised, once again, by reference to the new comparative
scheme of normalization of governmental attributes. It allowed European
jurists to make a basic distinction between civilized and uncivilized nations.
By virtue of this distinction, the family of nations that constituted the proper
subject of international law could be restricted to only the civilized nations of
Europe and the white settler nations of the Americas. John Westlake defines
this “society of states” as the Europe that was born in classical Greece and
Rome, consolidated at Westphalia, and which now included European and
American states, plus “a few Christian nations such as the Hawaiian Islands,
Liberia and the Orange Free State.”10
As for the uncivilized peoples of the rest of the world, some had no state
formations or legal regimes at all, while others had rulers who were arbitrary
and whose laws were shaped by religions and cultures that did not value the
underlying principles that had produced the law of civilized nations. The
uncivilized nations could not be regarded as proper subjects of international
law. Westlake, writing at the end of the nineteenth century, was clear on this
point. Sovereignty was a purely European concept, and a native chief in Africa
could not be said to have transferred something of which he had no concept.
“International law has to treat natives as uncivilized. It regulates, for the
mutual benefit of the civilized states, the claims which they make to sover-
eignty over the region and leaves the treatment of the natives to the
10
John Westlake, Chapters on the Principles of International Law (Cambridge: Cambridge
conscience of the state to which sovereignty is awarded.”11 By the nineteenth

century, then, the proper subjects of international law had become restricted
to the “civilized nations”: it was for their mutual benefit that international law
was supposed to regulate the transactions between nations.
Did a discursive change from universalist natural law doctrines to legal
positivism bring about this change? Martti Koskenniemi, who does not give
much credence to the theory of change in legal regimes, argues that appeals to
universalist values did not disappear in the nineteenth century. Nor indeed
was the universalist humanism of the natural law doctrines of Grotius and
Vattel, “a secular variant of the Christian view of a single god,” an impediment
to excluding the non-European subject by emphasizing its radical difference
according to some purely European standard.12 Even when non-European
nations were regarded as capable of engaging in acts of sovereignty, the proper
subjects of the law of nations were always the European states. If there was a
change in the discursive practices of law, it took place entirely within a purely
European discourse.13
But the distinction between civilized and uncivilized nations still left
unanswered the question of whether the treaties entered into by the former
with the latter were legally valid. One response was to resort to the flexibility
afforded by the normalized scheme of comparison between nations and
suggest that there were different degrees of sovereignty among uncivilized
states. These degrees translated into different kinds of treaties between Euro-
pean and non-European states, ranging from trade agreements to cession of
territory. Each of these transactions implied a certain degree of capacity by the
uncivilized state to engage in international transactions. The acquisition of
territory by European powers could take place by cession of territory by treaty,
annexation, or conquest. There would also emerge in the nineteenth century
the concept of the protectorate by which a backward state would, through its
legal consent, be brought under the control of an imperial power without the
latter taking on the burden of administration. Imperial practices in Asia and,
later, Africa imparted the quality of variation and complexity to the positivist
concept of state sovereignty. This enabled, for example in 1856, the inclusion
of Ottoman Turkey in an international peace conference and, later in the
11
Id. at 143.
12
Martti Koskenniemi, The Gentle Civilizer of Nations: The Rise and Fall of International Law,
1870–1960 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), p. 131.
13
For an interesting discussion on the ambiguities of international law in the context of Imperial
China in the nineteenth century, see Lydia H. Liu, The Clash of Empires: The Invention of
China in Modern World Making (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004),
pp. 70–139.
century, the recognition of China, Japan, Persia, and Siam as occasional

members of the “family” of sovereign nations. These imperial practices also
brought out the conceptual obverse of the idea of sovereignty. It was necessary
for an entity – that is, an uncivilized nation – to first possess sovereignty
precisely in order to be able to give it up through a valid legal agreement
with a civilized European power. In the early twentieth century, Lassa
Oppenheim revealed some bewilderment when he observed: “[C]ession of
territory made to a member of the family of nations by a State as yet outside
that family is real cession and a concern of the Law of Nations, since such
State becomes through the treaty of cession in some respects a member of that
family.”14 Antony Anghie correctly concludes: “[T]he development of the idea
of sovereignty in relation to the non-European world occurs in terms of
dispossession, its ability to alienate its lands and rights.”15
These earlier treaties could not be discarded suddenly – not because of any
consideration for the sensibilities of Oriental or African rulers, but because of
the restraint of legal practice they placed on mutual relations between the
European powers. To allow the validity of these treaties to lapse would
introduce a dangerous instability into the relations and practices that had
been established among the various European powers themselves in Asia
and Africa. Anghie notes, “It was precisely the fear of disputes over title to
colonial territories among European powers that inspired the Conference of
Berlin in 1884–5. Consequently, the non-European world had to be located in
the positivist system, not merely for purposes of control and suppression, but to
prevent its ambiguous status from undermining European solidarity.”16 Not
surprisingly, this feature once more confirmed the virtually exclusive centrality
of the European powers to the “family of nations” that made international law
in the nineteenth century.
By the middle of the nineteenth century, the legal concept of the protect-
orate had emerged so that “one state could acquire complete control over
another . . . without necessarily assuming the burden of its administration . . . it
14
Lassa Oppenheim, International Law: A Treatise (London: Longmans, Green, 1912), p. 86. In
the eighth edition of the book, edited by Hersch Lauterpacht, the passage was changed to
“cession of territory made to an independent State by a State not yet recognised as such is . . . a
real cession and a concern of the Law of Nations, since such State becomes through the treaty
of cession in some respects a State enjoying a certain position in international law.” Clearly, in
the age of the United Nations, the idea of some states being excluded from “the family of
nations” was no longer legitimate. Oppenheim, International Law, ed. Lauterpacht (London:
Longman, Green, 1955), pp. 547–548.
15
Antony Anghie, Imperialism, Sovereignty, and the Making of International Law (Cambridge:
16
Id. at 71.
was this feature of the protectorate which favoured its extensive adoption by
European Powers in the spread of their dominion.”17 But although control of
internal affairs was left to the native ruler, a protecting power could take over
that function either because of a provision in the treaty or because the native
ruler was incapable of providing good government. The grounds for such
intervention were left vague and undefined, affording the paramount power a
considerable range of strategic flexibility in framing its policies toward the so-
called protected states. Even within the ostensibly positivist framework defined
by the concept of undivided sovereignty, the law of nations in the East had to
proceed by keeping sovereignty flexible and undefined, and thus subject to
policy rather than fixed legal principle.18
The history of European imperialism in Asia and Africa thus reveals a
general feature of the history of international law itself. In the latter half of
the twentieth century, the rivalry between the United States and the Soviet
Union led the superpowers to extend their control and dominance over every
part of the globe. The field of international law was taken over by policy in
place of law: The so-called diplomatic school that preferred flexible principles
and case-by-case negotiated settlements won over the legal school that
demanded firm principles of law and permanent international institutions of
adjudication. The superpowers began to use the language of law to justify
their political acts of foreign policy.19
The history of the law of nations in the Indian subcontinent in the
nineteenth century almost exactly prefigures the history of international law
in the second half of the twentieth. Until the eighteenth century, relations
between the European powers and Oriental states largely conformed to the
restraints imposed by the concept of sovereignty enshrined in Europe since
the Peace of Westphalia in 1648 and theorized in the eighteenth century by
Vattel. This was because the European presence in India was distinctly
inferior in terms of power compared to the Indian states, or because, as in
the eighteenth century, they dealt with the Indian states within a certain
balance-of-power framework. The law of nations, as developed in Europe,
was quite reasonably suited to such a framework. By the early nineteenth
century, the British became a hegemonic power in India. Other powers,
17
Mark F. Lindley, The Acquisition and Government of Backward Territory in International Law
(London: Longman, Green, 1926), p. 182.
18
Lauren Benton calls this “quasi-sovereignty” and recognizes it as a pervasive feature of colonial
empires. Benton, A Search for Sovereignty: Law and Geography in European Empires,
1400–1900 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), pp. 222–278.
19
Gentle Civilizer, pp. 413–509. A deeply committed universalist liberal jurist, Koskenniemi
argues that international law was dead by the 1960s.
whether European or Indian, were no longer serious competitors in the

region. There was no reason to abide by the constraints imposed by a law of
nations designed to maintain the balance of power. Law was mobilized to
further the policy objectives of the paramount power.
Our discussion of the legal and policy debates over British relations with the
Indian states in the nineteenth century, as well as a survey of the technical
instruments they produced for a dominant power to exercise control over
other putatively sovereign entities, allows us to offer a general definition of a
modern empire that covers most examples of imperial power in the world over
the past two centuries. The imperial prerogative lies in the claim to declare
the colonial exception. The effectiveness and legitimacy of this claim are open
to negotiation. In the nineteenth century, claims were negotiated, and some-
times challenged, principally in the so-called family of civilized nations,
mainly consisting of the major European powers. In a related sense, these
claims also had to be negotiated with domestic political formations in the
imperial countries. They were negotiated with the people of subordinated
states only in a peripheral and utterly subsidiary sense. The privilege of
declaring the colonial exception here applies to relations between a sovereign
power and other political entities whose sovereignty has to be recognized even
if only for them to surrender that sovereignty, whether wholly or partially.
A variety of techniques are developed, but all involve a determination that the
universal principles that apply to relations between sovereign states cannot
apply because the entity does not deserve the full status of, or has lost its
legitimacy as, a proper sovereign state. This is the definition of modern empire
that emerges from its history over the past 200 years.
Therefore, in the nineteenth century, “empire’s law” was made to replace
the law of nations in the Indian subcontinent and in other parts of the colonial
world. Carl Schmitt – who railed against the supersession after the Second
World War of the public international law of Europe by the claims of both the
United States and the Soviet Union to wage war on behalf of humanity –
would not have flinched if he heard this account, as he did not believe that the
Indian states were ever proper subjects of the law of nations. He would have
thought it legitimate and rational for the stability of the European states system
that Britain should bring under its domain the control of that part of the world.
However, the effective erasure in the nineteenth century, under British
imperial auspices, of the law of nations from the territorial space of the Indian
subcontinent was also an essential step for the imagining of undivided
national sovereignty in the twentieth. Indeed, the second half of the nine-
teenth century was when, as Manu Goswami has shown, the territory of
subcontinental India (including the princely states), now effectively
consolidated under British paramountcy, began to be geographically

imagined as a national space with a map, with borders, and with physical
and human resources that an Indian nation could claim for economic and
political assertion.20 When in 1947, Vallabhbhai Patel, the home minister of
newly independent India, proceeded to cajole and sometimes coerce the
hundreds of Indian princes (hitherto under the “protection” of the British)
to integrate their territories with those of the Indian state through treaties of
accession, his acts were in the formal sense no less imperialist.21 Invariably,
such is the tangled story of the sovereignty of most modern nations on earth.
the normalization of the nation-state

In the years following the First World War, the international order was
crucially restructured. A wide spectrum of opinion accepted the nation-state
as the universally normal and legitimate form of the modern state. This was
indicated by the espousal of the right of self-determination of nations by two
leaders holding entirely opposed ideological views on most things. Both
Woodrow Wilson and V. I. Lenin argued from their own political forums
that this right legitimately belonged to all peoples that had formed themselves
as nations. Recent historians have argued that “self-determination” became a
slogan in the early twentieth century to justify the creation of new nation-states
in Eastern Europe while providing a seemingly democratic ground for con-
tinued European domination over colonized people in Asia and Africa.22
Wilson was thinking of the nationalities that had been part of the Austrian
and Ottoman Empires, and believed that the so-called backward peoples of
Asian and African colonies still needed to go through a period of tutelage
under Western supervision. But he played a leading role in incorporating
these ideas into the structure of the League of Nations.
There are two dimensions along which the nation-state came to be normal-
ized in the era of the League. One was sovereignty. There was a general
presumption that the locus of sovereignty everywhere in the modern world
20
Manu Goswami, Producing India: From Colonial Economy to National Space (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 2004).
21
See V. P. Menon, The Story of the Integration of the Indian States (Calcutta: Orient Longmans,
1956).
22
Timothy Mitchell has shown how the idea of “self-determination” emerged, especially in the
writings of the liberal writer J. A. Hobson and the soldier-administrator Jan Smuts, as a
sophisticated justification for the continued rule by white settlers in South Africa. This idea was
generalized in the Mandates regime of the League of Nations. See Carbon Democracy:
Political Power in the Age of Oil (London: Verso, 2011), pp. 66–85.
was the nation-state. Among the members of the League were countries such
as Albania, Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, Hungary (all of which were until
recently parts of the Ottoman and Austrian empires), and Ireland (which
was a British colony until the Irish Free State was created in 1922). There
were League members such as Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and South
Africa, which were within the British dominions, and India, which was still a
British colony. Despite the fact that their sovereign status was ambiguous, they
qualified as members because they were seen to be actual or potential nation-
states.
Most interesting was the status of the so-called mandated territories: Arab
provinces of the Ottoman Empire and the former colonial possessions that
Germany surrendered. These territories were mandated to individual
member-states, under the supervision of a Permanent Mandates Commission,
in order to facilitate their transition to self-governing states. Article 22 of the
League Covenant noted that these territories were “inhabited by peoples not
yet able to stand by themselves under the strenuous conditions of the modern
world” and declared that “the tutelage of such peoples should be entrusted to
advanced nations who, by reason of their resources, their experience or their
geographical position, can best undertake this responsibility . . . as Mandator-
ies on behalf of the League.”23 It was the old liberal colonial project, now
brought under the management of an international organization and sub-
jected to a single juridical order that classified different types of mandates
according to degrees of social development.
Who had sovereignty over the mandated territories? The mandatory powers
were responsible only for administering the territories. Sovereignty was held in
abeyance until the people of the territory acquired the capability to govern
themselves. Until then, it remained latent in the potential nation-state.24 The
goal of independent national sovereignty was explicitly declared for the so-
called A Mandates – the British mandates of Palestine and Mesopotamia
(which became the independent Republic of Iraq in 1932) and the French
mandate of Syria (including Lebanon). Self-government was left ambiguous
for the B and C mandates, namely the former German colonies of Africa and
the Pacific, because the mandatory powers – Australia, New Zealand, and
South Africa (which wanted to annex those territories) – refused to accept
ultimate independence as the objective of their mandates. The League of
Nations’ recognition of national sovereignty as the goal of colonial trusteeship
was a major step in the global normalization of the nation-state. The
23
Covenant of the League of Nations, Article 22, paras 1–2.
24
See Imperialism, Sovereignty, and the Making of International Law, pp. 147–149.
mandatory powers were asked to do nothing less than create the conditions of
sovereignty that would turn the mandated territories into normal nation-states.
By grading the mandates into A, B, and C types according to the level of social
development, the League suggested, as Anghie has pointed out, “that sover-
eignty existed in something like a linear continuum, and that every society
could be placed at some point in the continuum, based on its approximation
to the ideal of the European nation-state . . . the Mandate System . . . acquired
the form of a fantastic universalizing apparatus that, when applied to any
mandated territory . . . would be directed to the same ideal of self-government
and, in some cases, transformed sufficiently to ensure the emergence of a
sovereign state.”25
The national form of the state was also normalized in the dimension of
governmental practices. Here the Permanent Mandates Commission tried to
initiate a major effort to devise, by using comparative empirical methods, a
general administrative science that could help in framing suitable governmen-
tal policies according to the level of social and economic development of a
people. The classification of mandates acknowledged the qualitative differ-
ence between the social formations of Lebanon, Mesopotamia, Palestine, and
Syria, governed for centuries within a sophisticated bureaucratic empire, and
the predominantly tribal African societies of Cameroon, Togoland, Ruanda-
Urundi, and Tanganyika and, even more so, the “primitive” societies of New
Guinea or Samoa. But by organizing the production of massive sets of
standardized information on the economic and social institutions of the
mandated populations, the League brought them within a single comprehen-
sive conceptual scheme in which they could all be described comparatively as
having different degrees of “state-ness.” Indeed, the production and classifica-
tion of information and the devising of manuals of administration for the
mandated territories suggests the image of a great Benthamite legislative
factory devising “the best possible laws” for the peoples of the world, according
to the particular abilities and needs of each but all tending toward the same
universally desirable norm.
The standardization of governmental procedures across the world was also
greatly accelerated in the League era by the new international organizations it
created, namely the International Labour Organization, the Health Organiza-
tion, and the Commission for Refugees. With varying degrees of effectiveness,
these bodies tried to establish governmental technologies of caring for the
basic needs of safety, health, and habitation of populations in all member
25
Id. at 148.
countries and making it the normal responsibility of modern states. In doing

so, it inaugurated a major process of international supervision of standard
governmental practices across the world – something that would become a
feature of biopolitical practices in the late twentieth century. In addition, by
creating the Permanent Court of International Justice, the League also intro-
duced the first institutional step in erecting a judicial framework for the legal
monitoring of the activities of sovereign nation-states.
Much has been said about the ineffectiveness, and indeed the failure, of
most of the League of Nations’ efforts. But it is important to grasp the
significance of the changes that the League brought about in the very struc-
ture of the international order. Until the First World War, the international
system effectively included the major powers of Europe and, by extension, the
European settler colonies of the Americas. Only those countries were
members of the so-called family of nations, both in diplomacy and inter-
national law. The League system changed this. Although the colonial posses-
sions of Belgium, Britain, France, Holland, and Portugal remained intact, the
space of the international order was significantly expanded to include the
nations formerly within the Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman Empires and
declared as potential nation-states those that were still colonies. Even more
significant was the technical apparatus that was created, through international
agencies, information systems, and administrative practices, for the normal-
ized regulation of all nation-states everywhere. As Susan Pedersen has shown
in her magisterial study of the Mandates system, many of the consequences of
these institutional innovations were not what their architects had intended, for
they were far more interested in the continuation of imperial control. But the
very internationalization of the imperial project undermined its legitimacy.26
Further, despite the shortcomings in realizing their goals, the normative
strength of the League’s technical practices is evidenced by the fact that under
the rubric of the United Nations, most were taken up after the Second World
War. This time, the formal end of colonial rule and the actual universalization
of the nation-state form were near at hand. The anti-imperial struggles had
scored major victories in many parts of the colonial world. A new world order
grounded on the universal principle of noninterference in national sover-
eignty was about to be founded.
The middle decades of the twentieth century saw scattered proposals aimed
at avoiding the logic of national self-determination and popular sovereignty.
These proposals came from unrepentant imperialists and anxious liberals
26
Susan Pedersen, The Guardians: The League of Nations and the Crisis of Empire (New York:
among the colonized people, all of whom were terrified by the prospect of
aggressive majorities riding roughshod over the privileges of the propertied
and the rights of minorities. Liberal politicians in West Africa, the Caribbean,
and India, for example, were keen to slow down the process of transfer of
power from the British and the French, provide constitutional safeguards for
property and minority rights, and delay the inauguration of universal suffrage.
Particularly interesting was the Aga Khan’s elaborate proposal at the end of the
First World War to create a South Asiatic Federation extending from Aden to
Mesopotamia, including the shores of the Persian Gulf to India, Burma, and
Ceylon (now Sri Lanka) all the way to the Malay peninsula.27 These fantastic
imaginings testify to the continued attraction of empire for privileged minorities
among the colonized. In West Africa, where nationalist mass mobilization was
weaker, the idea of some sort of continued partnership between the imperial
power and the colonized elite was sometimes prominent, even in the 1950s and
1960s. To think of these moves as potential alternative forms of the modern
state, as recent historians such as Frederick Cooper and Gary Wilder have
attempted to do, seems not only to deny the overwhelming structural logic of
the new global order as it was unfolding in the period, but also the most
powerful ideas of collective justice sweeping through the colonial world.28
the internationalism of the nonaligned

The years after the Second World War are well known for the emergence of
two rival international blocs led by two new superpowers. The Western bloc
was consolidated around the economic power of the United States over global
capitalism, a series of military alliances across the world, and the gradual
decolonization of the European empires. The Eastern bloc was dominated
by the Soviet Union and bolstered by the revolution in China and the
establishment of a communist regime in North Korea. Continuing the trad-
ition of communist internationalism, the Soviet Union offered military and
diplomatic support to the struggles of national liberation in Asia and Africa.
The Western alliance countered with its own support. But within this
polarized world, the Non-Aligned Movement created a new space of
internationalism.
27
Discussed in Faisal Devji, Muslim Zion: Pakistan as a Political Idea (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
28
Frederick Cooper, Citizenship between Empire and Nation: Remaking France and French
Africa, 1945–1960 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2014); Gary Wilder, Freedom Time:
Negritude, Decolonization and the Future of the World (Durham: Duke University Press, 2015).
The Bandung conference is usually seen as the point of entry. As newly

independent nations, the participants held national sovereignty to be of
supreme importance in ensuring their rights in the global community of
nations. Several countries had launched programs of independent economic
development. The conference also included delegates from countries such as
Pakistan, the Philippines, and Turkey, which had just concluded defense
pacts with the United States. Nevertheless, the conference affirmed the five
principles of promotion of world peace: mutual respect of all nations for
sovereignty and territorial integrity, nonaggression, noninterference in internal
affairs, equality and mutual benefit, and peaceful coexistence. Amplifying on
these principles, the conference affirmed the right of each nation to defend
itself individually or collectively, but warned that arrangements for collective
defense must not be used to serve the particular interests of the Great Powers.
On the political side, the main discussion at the conference was around the
subject of human rights. The discussions show how radically the context and
framework of debate on this subject have changed. In 1955, no one had any
doubt about the principal problem of human rights in the world: the con-
tinued existence of colonialism and racial discrimination. The principle of
self-determination of peoples and nations was the chief instrument by which
human rights were to be established. Affirming liberty and equality, the
postcolonial peoples demanded those principles be applied to the collective
right to autonomy of each nation founded on popular sovereignty. That was
the principle the United Nations had enshrined. The leaders assembled at
Bandung asserted that the UN charter and declarations had created “a
common standard of achievement for all peoples and nations.”29 Accordingly,
the conference supported the rights of the Arab people of Palestine. It called
for the end to racial segregation and discrimination in Africa. It supported the
rights of the peoples of Algeria, Morocco, and Tunisia to self-determination. It
called for Cambodia, Ceylon, Japan, Jordan, Laos, Libya, and Nepal to be
admitted to the UN, and for a united Vietnam. These sentiments were
invoked when the Non-Aligned Movement was formally launched in Bel-
grade in 1962.
The discourse on human rights has shifted completely, especially since the
1980s. Postcolonial regimes in Africa and Asia are now the principal targets of
accusations of human rights violations, and the accusers are governments
and organized opinion in the erstwhile imperial countries. Whereas at
Bandung the newly independent nations asserted the primacy of universal
29
Angadipuram Appadorai, The Bandung Conference (New Delhi: Indian Council of World
Affairs, 1955), p. 8.
principles of equality and national self-determination in a world dominated by

the cynical and strategic pursuit of power by the rival Cold War alliances, now
the universal claims of humanity are asserted by Western governments against
the privileges of national sovereignty claimed by allegedly oppressive rulers in
Asia and Africa.
On the economic side, Bandung stressed the principle of unfettered sover-
eign rights over the economic and intellectual resources of the formerly
colonized countries. Formal decolonization did not automatically guarantee
this right. As Sukarno said in his inaugural speech,
Colonialism has also its modern dress, in the form of economic control,
intellectual control, actual physical control by a small but alien community
within a nation. It is a skilful and determined enemy, and it appears in many
guises. It does not give up its loot easily. Wherever, whenever and however it
appears, colonialism is an evil thing, and one which must be eradicated from
the earth.30
The conference resolutions show that most countries in the region saw
themselves as exporters of primary commodities and importers of industrial
products. They were particularly keen to explore the possibilities of collective
action to stabilize the international prices of primary commodities. Many were
also attracted by the idea of state-led industrialization through planning and
regulatory regimes.
In this respect too, the world has changed radically since Bandung. The
countries of East and Southeast Asia as well as India have transformed their
economies into dynamic and diversified industrial powers, while much of
Africa remains poor and stagnant. No one today talks of an Afro-Asian
economic world.
conclusion
What then is the legacy of Bandung? The formal equality of sovereign nation-
states has been normatively established on a global scale and is embodied in
international organizations such as the General Assembly of the United
Nations. The old practices of imperial power, involving conquest and annex-
ation of colonial territories, are no longer legitimate. But the imperial privilege
to declare the colonial exception, at which Sukarno hinted at Bandung,
continues in many guises. Formal equality of status among nation-states
30
Africa-Asia Speaks from Bandung (Djakarta: Indonesian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, 1955),
p. 23.
merely establishes a norm on the basis of which real inequalities can be

measured as deviations, just as formal equality of citizenship does not abolish
but merely sets the standard for comparison of real inequalities. The colonial
exception is declared when the universal claims of equal sovereignty are
suspended in the case of a particular nation-state on grounds of misgovern-
ment, mistreatment of citizens because of cultural prejudices, or danger to
global security. These are exactly the same grounds on which the British in
India set aside legal obligations of existing treaties in the nineteenth century.
The imperial privilege still exists in a world without colonies.
The UN Security Council has five permanent members with veto power,
on the realist justification that no collective security measure would succeed
unless all the major powers were in agreement. This is perfectly in line with
many realist justifications in history of the imperial privilege that claims more
than what is entailed by the equal right of sovereignty. Again, a plethora of
exceptional practices surround the place of Israel as the most recent European
settler colony in Asia and the corresponding denial of the political rights of
sovereign nationhood promised to Palestinians by the League of Nations
mandate (every other mandated territory is now an independent nation-state
and UN member). To cite another example, everyone agrees that nuclear
proliferation is dangerous and should be stopped. Yet who decides that India
may be allowed to have nuclear weapons, and also Israel, and maybe even
Pakistan, but not North Korea or Iran? U.S. drones may be sent in to strike
terror targets in Pakistan or Yemen without the willing approval of those states,
but such action would be inconceivable if the terrorist targets were in Russia
or Spain. Public outrage over an oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico will induce the
United States to demand that BP pay billions of dollars to clean up the mess,
while it would use diplomatic pressure (with the covert connivance of those in
power in India) to ensure that Union Carbide pay no more than US$2,000 for
each of some 20,000 persons killed in Bhopal in 1984 in the worst industrial
disaster in history. Many countries have run up unsustainable public debts in
recent times, but why was Greece made the exemplary case in which, in
blatant violation of the sovereign will of the people of that country, its newly
elected government was forced to swallow a bailout package it did not want?
Those who claim to decide on the exception arrogate to themselves the
imperial prerogative.
The demands made at Bandung still remain the unfulfilled promises of a
global order founded on the freedom and equality of nations and peoples.
That is why the memory of 1955 still refuses to go away, even though the world
has changed so much over the past sixty years.
Index
AA Conference on Women, 18 Clinton on, 369–370

AA People’s Solidarity Conference, 18 as exploitative, 370
AA Students Conference, 18 under international law, 371–373
AAC. See Asian-African Conference public response to, 370
AALCO. See Asian-African Legal Consultive Washington Consensus as influence on,
Organization 369
AAPSO. See Afro-Asian Peoples’ Solidarity democracy in, 370
Organization economic development in
Abbas, Sirajuddin, 166–167 Chinese approach to, 373–375
Abboud, Farik, 360 infrastructure projects, 375
Abdulgani, Roeslan, 10–11, 173–174, 293–294, 359 models for, 374–375
Abi-Saab, Georges, xxix–xxx rights to, 378
Aboueldahab, Noha, 381–396 secrecy in, 375
Abraham, Itty, 542 European imperialism in, 665
Abu Zayd, Hikmat, 337–338 independence movements in, 170–172,
Acharya, Amitav, 394 363–365
ACP (African, Caribbean, and Pacific) land and property laws in, 367
countries, 510–511 market bias of, 378–379
Act of Chapultepec, 234 liberation movements in, 363–365
addressivity, 54, 60, 62, 64. See also chronotype NAM in, 372
concept peasant land in, 367
Adelson, Leslie, 153–154 property rights in, Chinese role in,
advanced capitalist nations, imperialism and, 376–379
37–38 state sovereignty in
aesthetics Chinese role in, 375–379
of Bandung Conference, 143–151 land recapture and, 377
as object, 144–147 property linked with, 376
as practice, 147–151 rights to, 378
as production, 147–151 African Union (AU), 136, 360–363
of thirdness, 151–154 liberation movements and, 363–365
of TWAIL, 154–156 Afro-Asian Conference, 414–415
thirdness and, 156–157 Afro-Asian Federation for Women, 12–13
Africa. See also ACP Countries Afro-Asian Journalists’ Association,
anticolonialism in, 71, 76–77 172–173
LAI and, 76–77 Afro-Asian Jurists’ Association, 172–173
Chinese presence in, 368–371 Afro-Asian movement, 110
675
676 Index
Afro-Asian Peoples’ Solidarity Organization AIIB. See Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank
(AAPSO), 12–13, 163, 165–173, 242, 244, Aizawa, Seishisai, 96, 99–100
304 on kokutai, 96–100
affiliate organizations to, 172–173 ground-rooted military in, 99
African independence movement and, religion and, 97–98
170–172 solemnization of rice economy in, 99
Algerian independence and, 168–169 state religion in, 98–99
anticolonialist activism by, 169–173 Ajami, Foaud, 112, 517, 526
founding of, 165–169 AL. See Awami League
in Indonesia, 169–173 Alexandrowicz, C. H., 659–660
Latin America and, 242 Algeria
Afro-Asian solidarity, 12, 148, 151, 161–176, 178, colonialism in, 603–604
215n1, 345, 394 independence movement in, 168–169, 296
Arab Spring and, 384–385, 394 NLF in, 166, 168
Bandung Conference and, 187–189, 356–357 Ali, Mohamed, 50, 56–57
changing attitudes toward, 173–175 All India Muslim League, 314
Indonesia and, role in, 174–175 Alliance for Progress, 503
Lee on, 175–176 American Popular Revolutionary Alliance
Malaysia and, role in, 174–175 (APRA), 233
NAM and, 173, 175–176 Americanist doctrine, 411
Nkrumah on, 174–175 Amin, Samir, 109–110, 255, 338–339
People’s Republic of China and, 192 Ampiah, Kweku, 388
setbacks for, 163–164 Amrith, Sunil, 90–92
Zhou Enlai and, 183–184 Anand, Ram Prakash, 88, 470–471
through economic development, 185 Anderson, Benedict, 162
through international trade, 185 Anderson, Esther, 616
Afro-Asian Writers’ Bureau, 172–173 Anderson, Perry, 254
Afro-Asian Writers’ Conference, 18 Anghie, Antony, 535–551
agency, as Bandung ethic, 520 Angola, liberation movements in, 363–364
agrarian crises anticolonialism, 69–74, 76–80, 93, 164,
anti-imperialism and, 44–45 169–173, 193, 205, 248, 327
“death of peasantry” as a result of, 43–44, AAPSO activism and, 169–173
47–48 in African nations, 71
under imperialism, 41–47 Bandung Conference and, 9–14, 20–21
international investment and, 41–42 in Brazil, 418–419
international property rights and, 41–42 in France
through land grabbing, in Third World PCF and, 70
countries, 44–47 Union Intercoloniale and, 70
by China, 45 in Germany, IAH and, 66–67, 72
consequences of, 45–46 in Great Britain, 72
by foreign investors, 45–46 in Indonesia, 75–76
in India, 46–47 International Comintern Congress and,
from indigenous peoples, 46–47 70–71
through international alliances, 45 during interwar years, 77–79
land reforms and, 42 in Ireland, 247–248
in India, 42 Korovin on, 207–208
in Latin America, 42–44 LAI and, 9, 35, 66, 74–77
LVC response to, 44 Comintern and, 75
non-party-led social movements and, 42 critics of, 74
Agreement Trade and Intercourse, 180 international organizations and, 74–77
Ahmed, Aziza, 450–464 NAACP and, 76
Index 677
Nehru and, 74–75 human rights abuses in, 391

Pashukanis on, 207–208 socioeconomic rights and, 391–392
seas and oceans and, 81–83, 93–94 workers’ movements in, 389–391
totalitarianism as result of, 77–79 TWAIL and, 383, 392–394
transnational history of, as global in Yemen, 388
phenomenon, 67–74 Árbenz Guzmán, Coronel Jacobo, 238–239
during interwar years, 69–74 Arendt, Hannah, 610–611
origins for, 69–74 Aristide, Jean Bertrand, 128
spaces in, 69–74 Aristotle, 117–118
Union Intercoloniale and, 70 Armas, Carlos Castillo, 505–506
after Second World War, 79 Arnaud, André-Jean, 263
after Versailles Peace Conference, 69–74 art development, in Third World, 153
anti-immigration, 632–633 ASEAN. See Association of the South-East
anti-imperialism Asian Nations
as Bandung ethic, 520 Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB), 38
contemporary assessments of, 39–41 Asian regionalism, 192–195. See also ACP
in Ireland, 247–248 countries
in Latin America, 232–233 ASEAN and, 193–194
League Against Imperialism and, 9 Asian Relations Organization, 12–13
methods of, 30–31 Asian-African Conference (AAC), 399
self-determination and, 340 Asian-African Legal Consultive Organization
Anti-Imperialist League of the Americas (AALCO), 12–13, 142
(LADLA), 233 Asianism, 192–195
anti-poverty strategies, 523–524 Chinese vision of, 195
antiracism, 17, 29 Association of the South-East Asian Nations
antiracist paternalism, 558–559 (ASEAN), 193–194, 549
Antrobus, Peggy, 456 AU. See African Union
Apartheid, in South Africa, 342 Australia, Bandung Conference and, reaction
Appadorai, Angadipuram, 306 to, 402–409
APRA. See American Popular Revolutionary acceptance of, 403–405
Alliance application of memory, 406–409
Arab League, 12–13 as negative memory, 402–403, 405–406
Arab Socialism, 344, 346 authoritarianism
Cold War compared to, 395 in Arab region, after Arab Spring, 395
Arab Spring political, in Central Asia, 216
Afro-Asian solidarity and, 384–385, 394 authority, international law challenged by,
in Egypt, 385–387 560–561
human rights abuses in, 386–387, 391 authorship, international law challenged by,
socioeconomic rights and, 391–392 560–561
U.S. military aid to, 385–386 Autobiography (Nehru), 564
workers’ movements during, 389–391 Awami League (AL), 329
historical legacy of, 381–382 Aydin, Cemil, 70
local resistance movements after, 383 Azm, Khaled, 605
to forms of domination, 383
socioeconomic roots of, 388–392 Babri Masjid mosque, 317
new regional political order as result of, 382, Baguio Conference, 12–13
384–387 Bahrain, U.S. military aid to, 385
postcolonial authoritarian rule after, 395 Bakhtin, Mikhail, 50
postcolonialism and, 384 on addressivity, 54, 60, 62
socioeconomic rights and, 391–392, 394–395 on bildungsroman novel, development of,
in Tunisia, 388–392 52–53
678 Index
Bakhtin, Mikhail (cont.) developmentalism and, 21–22

chronotype concept and, 50, 52 Egypt at, 338
for colonialism, 59 emotive language of, 130
for enchantment, 62–63 as event, 141–143
for imperialism, 56–57 First International Congress and, 66–67
for international law, 54–56 five principles of, 116
for modernity, 52–54 formulation of, 188
for nuclear war, 58–60 global independence movement and,
on polyphonic narratives, 54 164–165
Bakufu system. See Tokugawa Feudal System goals of, 421–422
Baldwin, Roger, 73–74 historical legacy of, 3–9, 25–26, 673–674
Ballard, Arthur, 78–79 through assessments, 49–50
Bandung Conference. See also ‘Spirit of memory compared to, 399–401
Bandung’ historiography of, 7–8
aesthetics of, 143–151 human rights discourse at, 338–343
as object, 144–147 immigration and, 632–633
as practice, 147–151 on imperialism, 47–48
as production, 147–151 inheritance of, 121–122
of thirdness, 151–154 international context for, 499
Afro-Asian solidarity and, 187–189, 356–357 in international law, 9–10, 14–22
agenda for, 372 as people’s history, 11
as anachronistic, 498 international response to, 560
anticolonialism and, 9–14, 20–21 Israel at, 601
anti-immigration and, 632–633 Japanese involvement in, 95–96
ASEAN and, 193–194 Makarios at, 250–253
Australia and, reaction to, 402–409 manufactured legacies of, 302–306
acceptance of, 403–405 Marxist-Leninist approach to, 229–230
application of memory, 406–409 memory of, 399–401
as negative memory, 402–403, 405–406 modernity at, 338–343
Brazil and, 412–413 NAM influenced by, 277, 465–466, 501
diplomats from, 419–423 Nasser and, 591–594
in popular press, 413–415 neocolonialist interventions after,
reactions to Conference, 413–428 127–128
universalistic sensibilities of, 423–428 neoliberal globalization and, 498–499
Cairo Declaration and, 169 NIEO legacy after, 304–306
as catastrophic event, 109–115 noninterference principles at, 541
narration of, 115–121, 125 nonintervention principles at, 541
as romantic narrative, 111–115 origins of, 535–537
as satire, 109–111 Palestine as topic at, 597–602
Central Asia influenced by, 227 paradox of, 312–313
collective security principle and, 501 People’s Republic of China and
commemoration of, 24–25 long-term legacy of, 189–192
conceit of, 128, 135–138 political goals for, 182–183
deceit in, 136 preparation for, 181–183
elements of, 136 sponsors for invitation to, 181
Dasasila Principles, 631–632 as performance, 10–11
deceit and, political legacy of, 128–132 as political reference point, 9–10
by Nkrumah, 134–135 power of, 9–14
by Sukarno, 132–134 purpose and function of, 4–9, 421–422
decolonization influenced by, 270 racism and, eradication of, 17
development state and, 547–548 relevance of, 633–634
Index 679
restoration of national sovereignty through, adoption of, 187

39–41 chronotype concept for, 50, 52
Soviet Union and, 209–213 for colonialism, 59
Chinese response to, 215 for enchantment, 62–63
from Soviet international law perspective, for imperialism, 56–57
197–199 for international law, 54–56
specters of, 121–122 for modernity, 52–54
statesmen at, 485–488 for nuclear war, 58–60
charisma of, 485 development of, 19–20
defined, 484 equality principle, 321
from Global North, 488 human rights and, 450–451
from Global South, 488 Palestine in, 602–613
Sukarno at, opening address of, 130 Third World development alternatives in,
Third World and, 467–469 470–472
identity through, 12–13 Bandung Spirit, 121–122
unity within, 50, 164–165 legacy of, 516
thirdness and, 151–156 NIEO and, 305–306
Treaty of Westphalia and, 16 nostalgia for, 432–433
Tricontinental Conference compared to, survival of, 596–597
245–246 Bangladesh
true heirs of, 122–125 independence movement in, 324, 332
questioning of, 123–125 Pakistan military intervention in, 324
twenty-first-century applications for, 632 Barbusse, Henri, 73–74
UNCTAD and, 490–492 Baxi, Upendra, 523–524, 563
vagueness of, 295–302 Bay of Pigs Invasion, 268
Versailles Peace Conference compared to, Beaulac, Willard S., 236
69–74, 80 Bedjaoui, Mohammed, 294, 470
West Irian dispute, 544–546 Bella, Ben, 164, 175
women’s rights and, 341–342 Ben Barka, El Mehdi, 164, 171–172, 242–243
Zhou Enlai and, 181–186, 298 Bengali Muslims, 325, 329
conciliatory approach to, 185–186, 192 Bentham, Jeremy, 658
opposition to collective security alliances, Berlin Conference, 439
301 Berlin Crisis, 296
Bandung ethic, 517–520 Bhaba, Homi K., 152–153
agency and, 520 Bharatiya Janata party (BJP), 317–318
anti-imperialism as, 520 Bhutto, Benazir, 457–458
colonialism and, 517–518 Bhutto, Sulfikar Ali, 329
continuities in, 520–526 Biafra, independence movement in, 332–333
discontinuities in, 526–530 BICS (Brazil, India, China, and South Africa)
global equality and, 520 countries, 37
Global South cooperation, 517–518, 522–523 on imperialism, 47–48
human rights practice and, 517–518, 520–526 Russia and, 37
anti-poverty goals of, 523–524 Bier, Laura, 344
ES rights as part of, 524 bilateralism, economic globalization and,
independence movements and, 520 511–513
neocolonialism and, 517–518, 524–526 bildungsroman novel, development of, 52–53
self-determination as, 517–518 bin Laden, Osama, 632–633
of solidarity, 519–520, 522–523 BJP. See Bharatiya Janata party
sovereignty as, 517–518 Bluntschli, Johann C., 602–603
Bandung Final Communiqué and Principles, Boehmer, Elleke, 564
18, 299–301 Bogor Conference, 12–13
680 Index
Bolshevik Revolution, 199–204 capitalism, 137, 619–620

Boltanski, Luc, 142–143 gangster, 340
Borges, Jorge Luis, 155 as metaphor for death, 618
Bouazizi, Mohammed, 388–389 Carvalho Veçoso, Fabia Fernandes, 411–428
Boumedienne, Houari, 175 Casarino, Cesare, 89–90
Brass, Paul, 46–47 Castro, Fidel, 232, 244–245, 471, 503
Brazil. See also BICS Countries; BRICS NAM and, 246
Countries; IBSA countries U.S. overthrow of, 506–507
at Afro-Asian Conference, 414–415 Castro, Santiago, 264
anticolonialism in, 418–419 catastrophe
Bandung Conference and, 412–413 Bandung Conference as, 109–115
diplomats from, 419–423 narration of, 115–121, 125
in popular press, 413–415 as romantic narrative, 111–115
reactions to, 413–428 as satire, 109–111
universalistic sensibilities of, 423–428 etymological roots of, 117–118
colonialism in, 416–418, 428 tragic conception of, 118
decolonization of, 417–418 transformational aspects of, 118, 120–121
democratic elections in, 415 CBDR principles. See common but
International Law Society in, 424 differentiated responsibilities
international universalism in, 426–428 principles
lusotropical foreign policy of, 416–420, 428 CDRN. See Comité de Défense de la Race Nègre
as Portuguese colony, 416–418 Center Against Imperialism, 78–79
TWAIL in, 412 Central Asia
UDN in, 415 Bandung Conference and, 227
Brazil and the Asian-African World (Menzes), colonialism in, 222
419–420 conceptual definition of, 219
Bretton Woods (BW) Agreements, 264 discrimination against, 225
Bretton Woods system, 482 division into geopolitical units, 218
BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China, and economic development in, 222–223
South Africa) countries, 37, 271, geographic boundaries of, 216–217
509–510 Islamic fundamentalism in, 216
economic and political power of, 496, oil resources in, 216
527–528 orientalization of, 227–228
Bridgeman, Reginald Francis Orlando, 77 political authoritarianism in, 216
Brilej, Jože, 590–591 political themes associated with, 216–219
Brockway, A. Fenner, 77–78 Russian arrival in, 217–218
Buarque de Holanda, Sérgio, 428 under Soviet rule, 216
Bunche, Ralph, 171 cynical deployment of, 226
Burke, Roland, 93, 384 narrative constructions of, 221–227
Burma, 4–5. See also Myanmar role in foreign policy, 219–221, 224–225
Bush, Laura, 461–462 Western interest in, 223–224
BW Agreements. See Bretton Woods Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), 233–234
Agreements Central Treaty Organization, 301
ceremony, 563–567
Cabral, Amilcar, 519, 531, 616–617 Césaire, Aimé, 8, 274
Café Filho, João, 415–416 Ceylon, 4–5. See also Sri Lanka
Cairo Conference, 456–457 Chacko, Shubha, 341, 451–452
Bandung Conference and, 501 Chakrabarty, Dipesh, 35, 68, 123
Cairo Declaration, 169 Charter of Economic Rights and Duties of
Calderon, Felipe, 267 States, 22, 255–256
Camus, Albert, 138 Chatterjee, Partha, 116–117, 342, 657–674
Index 681
Chattopadhyaya, Virendranath, 74 collective colonialism, 582–586

Chen Yi, 183 collective power, seas and oceans and, 93–94
Chiapello, Eve, 142–143 collective security principle, 501
Chimni, B. S., 35–48, 155 Colombia, in NAM, 246
China. See also BICS Countries; BRICS Colombo Conference, 12–13, 536. See also
Countries; People’s Republic of China Sri Lanka
in Africa, economic presence in, 368–371 Colombo Powers. See also Sri Lanka
Clinton on, 369–370 colonialism, 16–17, 21, 23, 29–30, 50–51, 56–57,
through economic development, 373–375 59, 69, 73, 78, 81–94, 114–115, 119,
as exploitative, 370 127, 133, 140–141, 161, 164, 166–167,
under international law, 371–373 182–184, 189, 193, 199–209, 213,
public response to, 370 229–231, 249–256, 268–270, 274–275,
Washington Consensus as influence on, 282, 300–304, 306, 355–366, 369–372,
369 377, 382, 400, 406, 414, 418–419,
armed conflicts and, 173 422–423, 426, 439, 453, 466, 485,
Asianism and, 195 498, 526–527, 531, 540–546, 551, 575,
Communist Party in, 271 582–586, 590–594, 605–606, 612, 615,
Great Leap Forward policy in, 271 615n110, 617–629, 673. See also
land grabbing by, in Third World countries, 45 anticolonialism
NAM and, 303 in Algeria, 603–604
nuclear weapons development program in, Bandung ethic and, 517–518
297 in Brazil, 416–418, 428
Palestine supported by, 607–610 broader conceptualization of, 363–365
Panchsheel Principles and, 538–539, 550 in Central Asia, 222
Sino-Yugoslav disagreements, 280 chronotype for, 59
socialist Bonapartism in, 280–281 collective, 582–586
Soviet appearance at Bandung Conference, communist, 541–542
215 definition of, 356–358
Choudhury, Cyra Akila, 287, 322–336 forms of, 358–359
chronotype concept, 50, 52 new, 358
for colonialism, 59 as global governance, 439
for enchantment, 62–63 in Indonesia, 83–86
for imperialism, 56–57 internal, 268–269
for international law, 54–56 Korovin on, 202–209
for modernity, 52–54 League of Nations mandate system and,
for nuclear war, 58–60 201
Chu Tze-Chi, 171–172 in Libya, 603
CIA. See Central Intelligence Agency manifestations of, 358–359
civil law, in Egypt, 349 in Morocco, 355–356, 603–604
civilized nations, uncivilized nations compared neocolonialism and, 361
to, 663–664 in Palestine, 603, 606
climate change, 476–477 Pashukanis on, 203–209
Clinton, Hilary, 369–370 by Portugal, 416–418
Cold War through protectorates, 664–665
Arab Spring compared to, 395 racial domination and, 360–361
economic development during, 466–467 racialism and, 57
international law during, 501–507 self-determination and, 362–363
Latin America during, U.S. involvement in, settler, 606, 615
233–235 Soviet Union and, 199–209
origins of, 554 in Third World, 355–356
Pakistan during, 326–327 in Tunisia, 603–604
682 Index
Comintern. See International Comintern Dabashi, Hamid, 384

Congress Darsono, Raden, 75–76
Comité de Défense de la Race Nègre Dārul Islām, 295–296
(CDRN), 71 Dasasila Principles, 631–632
common but differentiated responsibilities Datsu A-ron policy, 105
(CBDR) principles, 476–479 Dayal, Rajeshwar, 171
commons, seas and oceans as, 86–89 de Lesseps, Ferdinand, 577
communism ‘death of peasantry,’ 43–44, 47–48
International Comintern Congress and, deceit, during Bandung Conference, 128–132
70–71 of conceit, 136
neutralism and, 297 by Nkrumah, 134–135
regional anticommunist agenda, in Latin by Sukarno, 132–134
America, 235–242 Declaration on the Establishment of a New
Zhou Enlai on, 186 International Economic Order, 22
communist colonialism, 541–542 Declaration on the Granting of Independence
Communist Party, in China, 271 to Colonial Countries and Peoples,
Communist Party of Cuba (PCC), 243 340–341
Communist Party of Slovenia, 278 Declaration on the Promotion of World Peace
conceit, of Bandung Conference, 128, 135–138 and Cooperation, 187–189
deceit in, 136 Declaration on the Right to Development, 22
elements of, 136 decoloniality. See also anticolonialism
Conference of AA Journalists, 18 conceptual development of, 264
Congolese National Movement, 171–172 European response to, 262
Congress of Peoples Against Imperialism, 78–79 Marxist approach to, 263–275
Congresses for the Advancement of the in Third World, 262
Oppressed People, 465 decolonization, 4–7, 14, 20, 24, 40, 56–58,
Conrad, Joseph, 127–128, 138–139 67–69, 92–93, 119–121, 162–163, 166,
Constantinople Convention, 576, 578 169–170, 174, 184, 187, 196–214, 219,
constructivist approach, to humanization, 263–275, 305, 355–358, 361–365,
435 397–401, 406, 409, 417, 419, 424,
Cooper, Frederick, 671 432, 439, 480, 513, 539–540, 556,
Cordier, Andrew Wellington, 171 568, 574, 597–598, 671, 673. See also
Correas Vázquez, Oscar, 263–275 anticolonialism
Costa, Mariosa Dalla, 351 of Brazil, 417–418
Cotula, Lornzo, 45 developmentalism and, 439
Crane, Barbara, 454 international law and, 424–426
crossing narratives, 90–92 reclamation of world and, 556
Crossing the Bay of Bengal (Amrith), 90–92 UN role in, 361–362
Cuba Delhi Conference on Indonesia, 12–13
Bay of Pigs Invasion in, 268 delinking, of Western thought, 143
exclusion from OAS, 241–242 democracy
Havana Declaration and, 240 in Africa, 370
Tricontinental Conference and, 13, 242–245 guided democracy policy, 133, 137, 173–174
tricontinentalism in, 243–244 Democratic Republic of Vietnam, 164–165
Cuban Missile Crisis, 296 Democratization and Socialization of
Cuban Revolution, 239–240, 503 International Law: The Latin American
cultural cooperation, 487 and Afro-Asian Impacts (Valladão),
Cyprus 424–426
British colonial rule in, 250–254 Deressa, Yilma, 357
economic adjustment programs in, 258 Derrick, Jonathan, 70
in NAM, 256 Derrida, Jacques, 109, 119
Index 683
developing nations. See also economic FDI by, 492–493

development; globalization IFIs, 493
imperialism and, 37–38 ISDS provisions for, 492–493
development state, Bandung Conference and, World Bank reports on, 493–494
547–548 in India, 471
developmentalism, 21–22, 436–439 in Mexico, 273
circumstances and, distinctions between modernization theory for, 489–490
normal and exceptional, 441–442, under Nehru, 471
444–445 by Soviet Union, 198–199
decolonization and, 439 by technocrats, 488–492
governance practices and, 439–441 UNCTAD and, 490–492
through relief agencies, 443–444, 446–447 UNCTAD and, 490–492
structure of, 439–446 Zhou Enlai on, 185
development-security nexus, 446 Eden, Anthony, 302, 579
Dirar, Luwam, 355–366 educational cooperation, 487
direct racialism, 558–559 Efflatoun, Inji, 349–350
Discovery of India (Nehru), 563–567 Egypt. See also Suez Canal; Suez Crisis
discrimination, in Central Asia, 225 Arab Spring in, 385–387
Disraeli, Benjamin, 577 human rights abuses and, 386–387, 391
Documenta 11, 147–151 socioeconomic rights and, 391–392
Doha Development Round, 508–511 U.S. military aid to, 385–386
ACP countries, 510–511 workers’ movements during, 389–391
BRICS countries, 509–510 at Bandung Conference, 338
IBSA countries, 509–510 British occupation of, 577
Dominican Republic, in OAS, 239–240 civil law in, 349
Downer, Alexander, 403–405 collective colonialism in, 582–586
Draft World Population Plan of Action Free Officers Movement in, 577
(WPPA), 454–455 freezing of assets in, 584–585
Du Bois, W. E. B., 67–68, 73 human rights in, 343
dual nationality, 190 international law in, 576
Duffield, Mark, 446 NAM and, 303
Dulles, John Foster, 578–579 “Open-door Policy” in, 337–338
Dussel, Enrique, 264 right to day care in, 349
Dutch East India Company, 544–546 Shari’a law in, 349
cultural censorship under, 349
East Asian Summit (EAS), 403 as socialist cooperative society, 347
Eastphalian sovereignty, 548–549 sovereignty for, 580–586
economic and social (ES) rights, 524 state feminism in, 343–348
economic development. See also globalization through dual legal systems, 349
in Africa labor rights and, 348–353
Chinese approach to, 373–375 narrow interpretation of, 350
infrastructure projects, 375 through personal status legislation,
models for, 374–375 349–350
rights to, 378 scope of, 353–354
secrecy in, 375 Suez Crisis in, 574–575
Afro-Asian solidarity and, 185 women’s rights in, 343
in Bandung Final Communiqué, 470–472 in films, 345
in Central Asia, 222–223 labor rights, 348–353
Cold War context for, 466–467 legal modernization of, 343–348
elements of, 466–467 through propaganda campaign,
by financiers, 492–495 344–347
684 Index
Egypt. (cont.) Europe

suffrage rights, 346–347 decolonial response by, 262
in workplace, 350–353 NAM and, 256
Eiji, Wajima, 106 peripheralization of, 256
Einstein, Albert, 74 global, 259–262
elections, democratic. See also independence local, 259–262
movements self-colonization of, 256–259
in Brazil, 415 “Spirit of Bandung” in, 249–256
in Pakistan, 329–330 TTIP and, political response to, 261–262
Emergency Recovery Loans (ERLs), 445 European Central Bank, 257–258
Emerson, Rupert, 356–357 European Commission on Human Rights, 251,
empire, 3–6, 8, 36, 39, 69, 92, 116, 180, 189, 257–258
200–201, 250, 280, 283, 297, 314, 426, European International Law, 567–568
432, 468, 541, 555n17, 557–559, 607, European Public Law, 573
658, 666–671 Expulsion Edict of 1825, 97
enchantment, chronotype for, 62–63
An Encouragement of Learning (Fukuzawa), Fakhri, Michael, 3–32
104 family, as metaphor for nation, 565
environmental issues, 22, 25, 28, 64, 261, 368, Fanon, Frantz, 8–9, 37, 616–617
379, 465–480, 495 FAR. See Revolutionary Armed Forces
CBDR principles for, 476–479 Farley, Anthony Paul, 616–630
climate change, 476–477 Faundez, Julio, 498–514
in Global South, 474–475 Fawzi, Mahmoud, 586, 593
under IEL, 467–469, 477–478 FDI. See foreign direct investment
UNFCCC and, 476–477 Federici, Silvia, 351–352
environmentalism, in Third World, 473–475 feminism, 338, 343–353, 453, 461. See also
as resistance strategy, 475–479 women’s rights
Enwezor, Okwui, 147–148 among African American women, 351
epistemic community, 446 in Egypt, state-sponsored, 343–348
epistolarity, for Nehru, 563–567 through dual legal systems, 349
equality labor rights and, 348–353
Bandung Communiqué and Principles and, narrow interpretation of, 350
321 through personal status legislation,
in international law, 32 349–350
Erem, Moshe, 600 scope of, 353–354
Eritrea in Global North, 460
Ethiopian claims on, 355–356 in Global South, 452–453, 460
independence movement in, 363–365 population control and, 453–459
Eritrean Liberation Movement, 356 Draft WPPA and, 454–455
ERLs. See Emergency Recovery Loans national strategies on, 455
ES rights. See economic and social rights NIEO and, 454
Eslava, Luis, 3–32 as rationalization for military interventions,
Esmeir, Samera, 27, 81–94 461–463
Ethiopia reproductive health and, 453–459
colonialism by, 355–356 in Third World, 453
Eritrea claims by, 355–356 violence against women as core issue,
racial discrimination policy in, 357 460–461
Eurocentrism, 342, 556, 556n20, 567–570, 572 War on Terror and, 461–463
defined, 569 Washington Consensus and, 460–461
in international law, 425, 556, 561, Ferry, Jules, 166
567–572 FIDEL. See Liberation Front
Index 685
Final Communiqué. See Bandung Final Gathii, James, 154, 368–369

Communiqué and Principles GATT. See General Agreement on Trade and
financiers, 492–495 Tariffs
FDI by, 492–493 Geertz, Clifford, 543
IFIs, 493 General Agreement on Trade and Tariffs
ISDS provisions for, 492–493 (GATT), 508
World Bank reports on, 493–494 multilateralism embraced under, 511–513
Finkle, Jason, 454 RTAs and, 512–513
First International Congress (Brussels), 66–67 General Union for Tunisian Workers
Fisher, Michael, 661 (UGTT), 389
Fitzpatrick, Peter, 555 genocide, in Pakistan, 330
“Five Principle No-s,” 144–147 Genocide Convention, 296
commissioning of, 145 Germany, anticolonialism in, IAH and, 66–67,
international applications of, 145–147 72
five principles of peaceful coexistence. Ghana, 134–135. See also Nkrumah, Kwame
See Panchsheel Principles NAM and, 303
FLN. See National Liberation Front ghosts. See spirits
For Men Only, 345 Girard, Francoise, 460
Ford, James W., 76 Glimpses of World History, Being Further
foreign direct investment (FDI) Letters to His Daughter Written in
by financiers, 492–493 Prison, and Containing a Rambling
in Global South, 482 Account of History for Young People
foreign investors, land grabbing by, 45–46 (Nehru), 552–553
formalism, 649 global equality, 520
Four Asian Tigers, 28 Global Gag Rule, 456–457
France Global North, 38, 256, 259, 287, 331, 441, 450,
anticolonialism in 478, 488, 632
PCF and, 70 feminism in, 460
Union Intercoloniale and, 70 statesmen from, 488
PCF in, 70 Global South, 7, 11–12, 38, 87, 89, 148, 153n54,
Union Intercoloniale in, 70 214, 256–257, 259, 261–262, 290, 335,
FRAP. See Popular Action Front 412, 423, 441, 450, 455, 467, 474–475,
Free Officers Movement, 577 477–478, 482, 488, 493, 495–496, 527,
The Free Sea. See Mare Liberum 553, 554n9, 569, 572, 614, 638. See also
Freitas-Valle, Cyro de, 417–418, 424 Africa; Latin America
Freyre, Gilberto de Melo, 416 capital flows to, 482
Friedman, Thomas, 369 cooperation within, as Bandung ethic,
Fukuzawa, Yukichi, 96, 100, 104 517–518, 522–523
civilization theory for, 100–104 environmental issues in, 474–475
stages in, 101 FDI in, 482
on kokutai, 100–104 feminism in, 452–453, 460
as partisan, 103–104 international law and, 569
on universal justice, 103 restrictive economic measures in, 256
statesmen from, 488
Gaitán, Eliecer, 236–237 women’s rights in, 452–453
Galbraith, John Kenneth, 571 globalization
Galindo, George, 412 bilateralism and, revival of, 511–513
Gandhi, Mohandas, 67–68 economic coalitions as result of, 508–511
gangster capitalism, 340 economic integration and, 507–511
Garvey, Marcus, 76 of imperialism, 36
Gassama, Ibrahim J., 126–139 international rules with, 502
686 Index
globalization (cont.) Harvey, David, 461

multilateralism and, 511–513 Hasan, Aiah, 168
neoliberal, 498–499 Hassan, Bahey El Din, 393
paradox of, 507–511 Hassuna, Abd Al-Khalik, 599
political fragmentation as result of, 507–511 Hatem, Mervat, 343
regionalism and, revival of, 511–513 Hatta, Mohammad, 74–76, 211
Golwalkar, M. S., 312–313 Havana Declaration, 240
Gonzalez Casanova, Pablo, 268–269 Haya de la Torre, Victor Raul, 233
Good Neighbor Policy, 234 Hayford, Casely, 72
Goody, Jack, 562 Hearman, Vannessa, 161–176
governance Heart of Darkness (Conrad), 138–139
colonialism as, 439 hegemony
developmentalism and, 439–441 nested, 276, 281, 286, 289–290
World Bank on, 446–447 self-determination and, 286
Gowalkar, M. S. Higgins, Benjamin, 29–30
Hindu Nation and, definitions of, 315–317 Hindu Mahasabha, 313–315
in Hindu Right, 315–316 establishment of, 313
Great Britain Minto-Morley reforms and, 314
anticolonialism in, 72 Hindu majoritarianism, 312–313, 317–320
in Cyprus, colonial rule over, 250–254 Indian Supreme Court and, 320
Egyptian occupation by, 577 Hindu Nation, in India
ILP in, 77–78 All India Muslim League and, 314
in Palestine, 605–607 conceptual definitions of, 315
in Syria, 604–605 cultural distinction of, 313–321
Great Leap Forward policy, 271 Gowalkar on, 315–317
Greater Asia Conference, 106 Hindu Mahasabha and, 313–315
Greece, 250–253. See also Cyprus establishment of, 313
economic adjustment programs in, 258 Minto-Morley reforms and, 314
Grieco, Donatello, 418 Hinduism and, 315–316
Grivas, Georgios, 251 Nehru and, 313–314
Gromyko, Andrei, 505 rise of, 313–321
Grosfoguel, Ramón, 264 Hindu Right
Grotius, Hugo, 83–86, 89–92. See also seas and Babri Masjid mosque and, destruction of, 317
oceans BJP and, 317–318
Group of 77, xxix conceptualization of, 317
Grown, Caren, 452–453 Gowalkar and, 315–316
Guatemala, in OAS, 239–240 RSS and, 317–318
Guevara, Che, 254–255 secularism model for, 319
guided democracy policy, 133, 137, 173–174 Hinduism, 315–316
Guinea-Bissau, liberation movements in, Hinduness, 315
363–364 Hindus, selective genocide of, 330
Gupta, Akhil, 248–249, 278, 288–289 Hindutva, 315–316
Gupta, Priya S., 481–497 historically inflected jurisprudence,
Gusmão, Alexandre de, 424 568–569
Ho Chi Minh, 70–71
Hammarskjold, Dag, 171 Hobbes, Thomas, 146
Hanieh, Adam, 387 Hobsbawm, Eric, 43
Harb, Tal’at, 353–354 Hobson, J. A., 667
Hardt, Michael, 36 Hopkinson, Henry L., 250
on national sovereignty, 39 Horowitz, Donald, 614
Hartono, Iswanto, 144–147 Hoxha, Enver, 471
Index 687
human rights issues 314n17, 327, 338–339, 340n14, 355, 358,

Bandung Communiqué and, 450–451 363–364, 373, 382, 432, 470–471, 496,
at Bandung Conference, 338–343 518, 525, 531, 542, 554–555, 555n17,
in Egypt, after Arab Spring, 386–387 558–559, 582, 601, 607, 613, 620, 623,
European Commission on Human Rights, 251 658, 665. See also anti-imperialism
reemergence of, 452 in advanced capitalist nations, 37–38
Zhou Enlai’s endorsement of, 184 in Africa, 665
human rights practice, Bandung ethic and, agrarian crises under, 41–47
517–518, 520–526 international investment and, 41–42
anti-poverty goals of, 523–524 international property rights and, 41–42
ES rights as part of, 524 Bandung Conference on, 47–48
humanitarian concerns, 435 BICS countries on, 47–48
humanitarian law, 336 chronotype for, 56–57
humanization, 434–435 contemporary assessments of, 36–39
constructivist approach to, 435 in developing nations, 37–38
defined, 434 globalization of, 36
developmentalism and, 21–22, 436–439 in Japan, 95–96
circumstances and, distinctions between meaning of, 39
normal and exceptional, 441–442, nationalism and, 555
444–445 neocolonialism and, 36
decolonization and, 439 new, 36–37
governance practices and, 439–441 international lawyers on, 48
through relief agencies, 443–444, by Russia, 201
446–447 strategy of, 39
structure of, 439–446 import substitution policies, 504
postdevelopmentalism, as fragility, Independence for India League, 75
446–447 independence movements, global, 137. See
transitioning out of, 447 also Afro-Asian Peoples’ Solidarity
al-Husayni, Amin (Mufti Hajj), 598–599 Organization
al-Husayni, Jamal, 600 AAPSO and, 170–172
hybridity, 572 in Africa, 170–172, 363–365
in Algeria, 168–169, 296
IAH. See International Arbeiterhilfe Bandung Conference and, 164–165
Ibrahim, Sunn’allah, 348 Bandung ethic and, 520
IBSA (India, Brazil, and South Africa) in Bangladesh, 324, 332
countries, 509–510 in Biafra, 332–333
ICC. See International Criminal Court in Eritrea, 363–365
ICPD. See International Conference on Sukarno on, 161
Population and Development Independent Labour Party (ILP), 77–78
ICSID. See International Centre for India, 4–5. See also BICS Countries; BRICS
Settlement of Investment Disputes Countries; Hindu Nation; IBSA
IEL. See international environmental law countries; Nehru, Jawaharlal
IFIs. See international financial institutions armed conflicts and, 173
ILP. See Independent Labour Party Bengali Muslims in, 325
Imai, Aya, 369 economic development in, 471
IMF. See International Monetary Fund Hindu majoritarianism in, 312–313, 317–320
immigration, 632–633 Indian Supreme Court and, 320
imperialism, 3, 8–9, 11, 13, 18, 21, 23, 26, 30, 32, Hindu Right in
35–39, 47–48, 51–53, 56–57, 74–82, Babri Masjid mosque destruction by, 317
95–107, 126–127, 131, 136, 161–176, 197, BJP and, 317–318
207, 232, 239–245, 250, 255, 288, 304, conceptualization of, 317
688 Index
India (cont.) International Comintern Congress

Gowalkar and, 315–316 (Comintern), 70–71
RSS and, 317–318 LAI and, 75
secularism model for, 319 International Conference on Population and
Hinduism in, 315 Development (ICPD), 456–457
Hinduness in, 315 International Court of Justice, 549
Hindutva in, 315–316 International Criminal Court (ICC), 596–597
as independent nation, 325 International Economic and Trade Law, 434
Indian National Congress in, 313–314 international environmental law (IEL),
land grabbing in, 46–47 467–469, 477–478
land reforms in, 42 CBDR principles for, 476–479
law of nations in, 665–667 international financial institutions (IFIs), 482,
Minto-Morley reforms in, 314 493
Muslim separation in, 314 international human rights law, 342
NAM in, 38, 326–327, 331–335 international law
neutralism in, 51–52 authority as challenge to, 560–561
nuclear weapons development program in, authorship as challenge to, 560–561
297 Bandung Conference in, 9–10, 14–22
Pakistanian conflict with, 322–323, 325–328 as people’s history, 11
under Pashkent Agreement, 327 CBDR principles for, 476–479
Security Council resolutions against, 326 Chinese presence in African under, 371–373
Panchsheel Principles and, 538–539 chronotype for, 54–56
Representation of the People Act in, 320 during Cold War, 501–507
Indian National Congress, 313–314 decolonization and, 424–426
indigenous peoples, land grabbing from, in Egypt, 576
46–47 equality in, 32
Indonesia, 4–5. See also MINTs countries; Eurocentric origins of, 425, 556, 561, 567–572
Sukarno European, 568
AAPSO in, 169–173 Global South and, 569
Afro-Asian solidarity and, role in, 174–175 IEL, 467–469, 477–478
anticolonialism movement in, 75–76 justice in, 32
citizenship in, for Chinese citizens, 543 in Latin America, 427
colonial history of, 83–86 myths of, 15–16
guided democracy policy in, 133, 137, Panchsheel Principles as influence on, 539
173–174 pedagogical means of, 562
nationalization of Dutch companies in, 167 postcolonial theory for, 433–434
neutralism in, 51–52 as project, 142–143
Perhimpunan Indonesia, 75–76, 211 public, 636
PERTI in, 166–167 in Soviet Union, 197–199
political transition period in, 134 colonialism and, 199–209
Sino-Indonesia Treaty on Dual during interwar years, 199–204
Nationalities, 191 socialist approach to, 198
Soviet financial assistance to, 304 space as concept in, 51–60
West Irian dispute in, 544–546 Suez Canal under, 582–586
integrated sources initiative (ISI), 407–408 time concept in, 51–60
internal colonialism, 268–269 treatment of native peoples under, 662–663
International African Service Bureau, 79 Treaty of Westphalia and, 15–16
International Arbeiterhilfe (IAH), 66–67, 72 virtue pedagogy and, 646–652
International Bank for Reconstruction, 19–20 virtue theory for, 636
International Centre for Settlement of International Law Society, 424
Investment Disputes (ICSID), 482 international lawyers, on new imperialism, 48
Index 689
International Monetary Fund (IMF), 19–20, Jorno do Brasil, 413–415

233–234, 256–258 justice
creation of, 264 historically inflected, 568–569
Yugoslavia and, 285 in international law, 32
international property rights, during agrarian universal, 103
crises, 41–42 justification, 640
international subjects, 60–62
International Trade Organization (ITO), 20 Kang’ara, Sylvia Wairimu, 367–380
International Trade Union Committee of Kant, Immanuel, 85
Negro Workers (ITUCNW), 75–77 Kanwar, Vik, 140–158
international universalism, 426–428 Kanyiga, Karuti, 371
International Women’s health Coalition, 457 Kapur, Geeta, 147–148, 153
Investor State Dispute Settlement (ISDS) Kapur, Ratna, 311–321
provisions, 492–493 Kardelj, Edvard, 278–292
Iran, 4–5 in Communist Party of Slovenia, 278
Iraq, 4–5 as constitutional architect, 284
Ireland international political theory for, 282–286
anticolonialism in, 247–248 on NAM, 278–282, 287–292
anti-imperialism in, 247–248 self-determination theory, 278–282, 285
economic adjustment programs in, 258 on socialism, 280
Isa, Ibrahim, 165, 170 socialist Bonapartism, 280–281
Isaac, Sally Khalifa, 382–383 on transnational solidarity, 288–289
ISDS provisions. See Investor State Dispute Kasa-Vubu, Joseph, 362
Settlement provisions Kemal, Mustafa, 67–68
ISI. See integrated sources initiative Kennedy, David, 142, 155
Islamic fundamentalism, 216 Kennedy, John F., 241, 503
Israel, at Bandung Conference, 601 Kenyatta, Jomo, 76
ITO. See International Trade Organization Kenyro, Sato, 105–106
ITUCNW. See International Trade Union Khan, Adil Hasan, 108–125, 554
Committee of Negro Workers Khan, Aga (III), 314, 671
Khan, Ayub, 328–329
Jain, Devaki, 341, 451–452 Khan, Shaybani, 217
James, Cyril L. R., 78–79 Khan, Yahya, 328–330
James, Selma, 351–352 Khorzami, Munis, 217
Jameson, Fredric, 152–153 Khosla, J. N., 174
Jansen, G. H., 110, 146 Kim Il Sung, 471
Japan. See also kokutai Kim Sung Won, 548–549
at Bandung Conference, 95–96 Koesoemasoemantri, Iwa, 211
Datsu A-ron policy in, 105 Koh, C. H., 60
Greater Asia Conference and, 106 kokutai (national spirit)
imperialism in, 95–96 Aizawa on, 96–100
in League Covenant, 105 ground-rooted military in, 99
during Meiji restoration, 100 religion and, 97–98
solemnization of rice economy in, 99 solemnization of rice economy in, 99
state religion in, 98–99 state religion in, 98–99
Tokugawa Feudal System (Bakufu) in, 96 Fukuzawa on, 100–104
under Expulsion Edict of 1825, 97 as partisan, 103–104
Jayawardena, Kumari, 453 Korean War, 178–179
Jeammaud, Antoine, 263 Korovin, Evgeny, 199–204
Jemaah Islamiah, 295–296 on anticolonialism, 207–208
Jinnah, Muhammad Ali, 314 on colonialism, 202–209
690 Index
Koskenniemi, Martti, 15–16, 286, 646, 663 Cuba excluded from, 241–242
Kotelawala, John, 50–51, 255, 296–297, 536–537 Cuban Revolution and, 239–240
Colombo Conference and, 536 development of, 235–242
on colonialism, 358–359 NAM and, 245–246
Zhou Enlai and, 357 participating nations in, 239–240
Kouyaté, Garan Tiemoko, 71 Resolution 93, 238–239
Kubitschek, Juscelino, 415 regional anticommunist agenda in, 235–242
regional defense of, 234–235
La Via Campesina (LVC), 44 Rio Treaty of Reciprocal Assistance and,
labor rights, in Egypt, 348–353 234–235, 502, 505–506
LADLA. See Anti-Imperialist League of the U.S. economic assistance to, 502–503
Americas through Point IV Program, 502–503
LaForgia, Rebecca, 397–410 Lauterpacht, Hersch, 664
LAI. See League Against Imperialism and for law. See international law
National Independence Law of Nationality, 190–191
Lake, Marilyn, 162 law of nations, 658–667
land grabbing, in Third World countries, 44–47. in India, 665–667
See also Principle for Responsible Laws of War, 434
Agro-Investment LDRN. See Ligue de Défense de la Race
by China, 45 Nègre
consequences of, 45–46 League against Colonial Oppression, 73–74
by foreign investors, 45–46 members of, 73–74
in India, 46–47 League Against Imperialism and for National
from indigenous peoples, 46–47 Independence (LAI), 9, 35, 66, 74–77,
through international alliances, 45 211, 465
land laws, in Africa, 367 Comintern and, 75
market bias of, 378–379 critics of, 74
land recapture, in Africa, 377 international organizations and, 74–75
land reforms, after agrarian crises, 42 in Africa, 76–77
in India, 42 NAACP and, 76
in Latin America, 42–44 Nehru and, 74–75
Latin America. See also Brazil League Covenant, 105
AAPSO and, 242 League of Coloured Peoples, 75, 79
Act of Chapultepec and, 234 League of Nations, 201, 667–668, 670
anti-imperialist solidarity in, 232–233 Soviet accession to, 207–208
APRA in, 233 Soviet Union in, 207–208
at Bandung Conference, 242–245 Lebanon, 4–5
CIA in, 233–234 Lee, Christopher, 68, 162–163
Cold War politics in, U.S. involvement in, on Afro-Asian solidarity, 175–176
233–235 legal positivism, 55
Cuba natural law to, shift from, 659
exclusion from OAS, 241–242 Leimena, Joseph, 173–174
Havana Declaration and, 240 Lennox-Boyd, Alan, 302
Tricontinental Conference and, 13, Letters from a Father to His Daughter: Being a
242–245 Brief Account of the Early Days of the
tricontinentalism in, 243–244 World Written for Children (Nehru),
Good Neighbor Policy for, 234 552–553
international law in, 427 Leviathan (Hobbes), 146
LADLA in, 233 Liberation Front (FIDEL), 243
land reforms in, 42–44 liberation movements, in Africa. See also
OAS and, 232 independence movements
Index 691
AU and, 363–365 as negative memory, in Australia, 402–403,

Eritrean Liberation Movement, 356 405–406
Liberation of Saguiet el Hamra and Rio de Oro Menon, Krishna, 587–588
(POLISARIO), 364–365 Menzes, Adolpho Justo Bezerra de, 419–420
Libya, 4–5 Menzies, Robert, 578–579
colonialism in, 603 Mercer, Kobena, 149
U.S. military aid to, 385 Mercosur, 267
Ligue de Défense de la Race Nègre (LDRN), 71 The Metaphysics of Morals (Kant), 85
Liu Xiaobo, 564 Mexico. See also MINTs countries
local resistance movements, after Arab Spring, 383 APRA in, 233
to forms of domination, 383 economic development in, 273
socioeconomic roots of, 388–392 in OAS, 239–240
Lumumba, Patrice, 127–129, 164, 170–172, Miaille, Michel, 263
361–362 Michelsen, Alfonso López, 246
lusotropical foreign policy, of Brazil, 416–420, Mickelson, Karin, 465–480
428 Mickelthwait, G., 253
Luxembourg, Rosa, 619 Mignolo, Walter, 143
LVC. See La Via Campesina military, kokutai and, 99
military coups, in Indonesia, 132–133
Madric Accord, 365 military interventions, in Bangladesh, 324
majoritarianism. See Hindu majoritarianism Minto-Morley reforms, in India, 314
Makarios (Archbishop), 247, 250–254 MINTs (Mexico, Indonesia, Nigeria, and
Malaysia, Afro-Asian solidarity and, 174–175 Turkey) countries, 527–528
Malcolm X, 622, 625–627 Mitchell, Timothy, 667
Malik, Charles, 300, 388, 540 MNL. See National Liberation Movement
Malta, in NAM, 256 Mobutu. Joseph, 172
Mamlyuk, Boris, 196–214 modernity
Mamoru, Shigemumitsu, 106 at Bandung Conference, 338–343
mandated territories, 668–669 chronotype for, 52–54
Mandelbaum, Michael, 369 modernization theory, for economic
Manela, Ezra, 70 development, 489–490
Mansour, Adly, 386 Modi, Narender, 317–318
Mao Tse-Tung, 152, 471 Mohieddin, Khaled, 169
March, Werner, 198 Molotov-Ribbentop Pact, 209
Marcuse, Herbert, 647 Monroe Doctrine, 245
Mare Liberum (The Free Sea) (Grotius), 83–86, Moore, Richard, 76
90–92 Morgenthau, Hans, 632–633
Marshall, George, 236–237, 502 Morland, O. C., 253
Marxism, decoloniality and, 263–275 Morocco
Marxist, 109, 213, 220, 222, 229–230, colonialism in, 355–356, 603
263–275, 280 SADR and, 365
Marxist-Leninist approach, 229–230 Morsi, Mohamed, 386
materiality, 576 Mossadegh, Mohammed, 127
Matua, Makua, 392 Moumié, Felix-Roland, 164, 166
Mazrui, Ali, 134 Movement for Colonial Freedom,
M’Beye, Keba, 470–471 78–79
McGregor, Katharine, 161–176 Moyo, Dambisa, 370
McKay, Claude, 617 Mozambique, liberation movements in,
Meiji restoration, in Japan, 100 363–364
memory, of Bandung Conference, 399–401 Mubarak, Hosni, 386
application of, in Australia, 406–409 Multilateral Agreement on Investment, 513
692 Index
multilateralism, economic globalization and, NEFOS. See New Emerging Forces

511–513 Negri, Antonio, 36
Münzenberg, Will, 66–67, 73–74 Negri, Ramon de, 73–74
Mutua, Makau, 154, 516 Negro Welfare Association, 75–77
Mwangi, Kimenyi, 371 Nehru, Jawaharlal, 50, 58–60, 66–68, 294,
My Wife is a General Director, 345 485, 564. See also Panchsheel
Myanmar Principles
neutralism in, 51–52 on ceremony, 563–567
Panchsheel Principles and, 550 economic development plans under, 471
education of, 570–571
NAACP. See National Association for the epistolary communication of, 563–567
Advancement of Coloured People five principles of peaceful coexistence, 180
NAASP. See New Asian-African Strategic on greatness of Asian civilizations, 559
Partnership Hindu Nation and, cultural distinction of,
NAIL. See New Approaches to International 313–314
Law imprisonment of, 552–553
NAM. See Non-Aligned Movement Indian National Congress and, 313–314
Namibia, liberation movements in, 363–364 LAI and, 74–75
Narula, Smita, 45 in League against Colonial Oppression,
Nasser, Gamel Abdel, 303, 337–338, 340–341, 73–74
361–362, 485, 574. See also Suez Canal; on plurality of laws, 555
Suez Crisis public reputation of, 553
Bandung Conference and, 591–594 on reclamation of world, 556–563
consolidation of power by, 346–348 decolonization and, 556
state feminism policy under, 344–347 Soviet Union and, 197
Natarajan, Usha, 465–480 UN envisioned by, 339
National Association for the Advancement of Nehru-Zhou En Lai Statement, 12–13
Coloured People (NAACP), 73–74 neocolonialism, 29, 36, 56, 126–127, 136, 151,
LAI and, 76 174–175, 186, 229–230, 243, 304, 361,
National Democratic Union (UDN), 415 380, 518, 525, 540–541
National Liberation Front (FLN) (Venezuela), after Bandung Conference, 127–128
243 Bandung ethic and, 517–518, 524–526
National Liberation Front (NLF) (Algeria), colonialism and, 361
166, 168 defined, 361
National Liberation Movement (MNL), 243 imperialism and, 36
national spirit. See kokutai Nkrumah on, 525
nationalism Sukarno on, 540–541
imperialism as inversion of, 555 neoliberalism, 39, 44, 108, 151, 266–267, 453,
postcolonial, 567 456, 461n40, 462, 498, 511
nationality. See dual nationality globalization influenced by, 498–499
nationalization, of Suez Canal, 577–579 Nesiah, Vasuki, 3–32
justification for, 580–582 nested hegemonies, 276, 281, 286, 289–290
nation-state neutralism, 51–52, 297
mandated territories and, 668–669 New Approaches to International Law (NAIL),
normalization of, 667–671 156
People’s Republic of China as, 189–190 New Asian-African Strategic Partnership
natural law, legal positivism and, 659 (NAASP), 122
natural resources, political sovereignty and, new colonialism, 358
473 New Emerging Forces (NEFOS), 173
Nawaii, Alisher, 217 new imperialism, 36–37
Ndii, David, 371 international lawyers’ response to, 48
Index 693
New International Economic Order (NIEO), educational policy of, 288

6, 22, 176, 255, 295, 448, 454–455, 470, Egypt and, 303
490, 498, 548 European nations in, 256
Bandung Spirit and, 305–306 in film, 616
doctrine of Permanent Sovereignty over formation of, 241, 450
Natural Resources and, 473 Ghana and, 303
establishment of, 498 in India, 38, 326–327, 331–335
financiers in, 492–495 internationalism of, 671–673
FDI by, 492–493 Kardelj on, 278–282, 287–292
IFIs, 493 legacy of, 303–304
ISDS provisions for, 492–493 Malta in, 256
World Bank reports on, 493–494 OAS and, 245–246
legacy of, 304–306 in Pakistan, 326–327, 331–335
population control and, 454 in Palestine, 613–615
purpose and function of, 500 Panchsheel Principles and, 538–539
statesmen in, 485–488 purpose and function of, 614
charisma of, 485 purpose of, 281–282
defined, 484 stability of, 303–304
from Global North, 488 women’s rights and, 341, 451–453
from Global South, 488 Yugoslavia and, 276
technocrats in, 488–492 nonalignment, 137
UNCTAD and, 490–492 thirdness and, 152–153
New Theses (Aizawa), 96–100 noninterference
New York Agreement of 1962, 546 at Bandung Conference, 541
Nguyen ai Quoc, 70–71 as Panchsheel Principles, 539–540
NIEO. See New International Economic Order nonintervention policies, 336
Nigeria. See MINTs countries at Bandung Conference, 541
Nkrumah, Kwame, 127, 303, 361 North Vietnam. See Democratic Republic of
on Afro-Asian solidarity, 174–175 Vietnam
deceitful behavior of, 134–135 Notebook of a Return to the Native Land
on neocolonialism, 525 (Cesaire), 8
pan-African movement and, 134–135 NPOs. See Organization of Latin American
political coup against, 175 Solidarity
Nkrumahism, 137 Nu, U., 50
NLF. See National Liberation Front nuclear disarmament, promotion of, 487
Non-Aligned Movement (NAM), 4, 6, 13, 38, nuclear war, chronotype for, 58–60
140, 152, 161, 173, 176, 241, 248–249, 253, nuclear weapons development programs,
256, 276–277, 292, 294, 324, 326, 341, 297
372, 382, 450–463, 465, 480, 501, 515, Nussbaum, Martha, 639, 648
530, 539, 613, 614n104, 616, 624n23, 631,
633, 671–672 OAS. See Organization of American States
in Africa, 372 OAU. See Organization for African Unity
Afro-Asian solidarity and, 173, 175–176 Obregón, Liliana, 20–21, 232–246
Bandung Conference as influence on, 277, Oegroseno, Arif Havas, 631–635
465–466, 501 oil resources, in Central Asia, 216
in Belgrade, 173 Oistrakh, David, 220
birthplace of, 140 Okafor, Obiora Chinedu, 515–531
Castro and, 246 Oklopcic, Zoran, 276–292
China and, 303 Oliviera Salazar, Antonio de, 416
Colombia in, 246 “Open-door Policy,” in Egypt, 337–338
Cyprus in, 256 Operation Pile Up, 587–588
694 Index
Organization for African Unity (OAU), 136, Palestine

360, 364n35. See also African Union Arab people in, 604
Organization of American States (OAS), 232, Bandung Conference and, 597–602
235–242, 504 British mandate in, 605–607
Cuba excluded from, 241–242 Chinese support of, 607–610
Cuban Revolution and, 239–240 colonial rule in, 603, 606
development of, 235–242 in Final Communiqué, 602–613
NAM and, 245–246 UN Partition of, 610–613
participating nations in, 239–240 Zhou Enlai’s support of, 608
Resolution 93, 238–239 Palestinian Liberation Organization, 600
Organization of Latin American Solidarity Pan-African Congress, 79
(NPOs), 244 pan-African movement, 73, 245, 372
Organization of Solidarity with the People of Pan-Asianism, 106–107
Asia, Africa, and Latin America Panchsheel Principles, 145–147, 178–181, 298, 535
(OSPAAAL), 13, 243, 304 China and, 538–539, 550
founding of, 243 Indo-Chinese agreements under, 538–539
orientalization, of Central Asia, 227–228 international law influenced by, 539
Osborne, Peter, 142–143 Myanmar and, 550
OSPAAAL. See Organization of Solidarity with NAM and, 538–539
the People of Asia, Africa, and Latin noninterference in, 539–540
America sovereignty and, 537–540
OSTP. See Tricontinental Solidarity Panchsheel Treaty. See Nehru-Zhou En Lai
Organization and Peoples Statement
An Outline of the Theory of Civilization Parfitt, Rose Sydney, 49–65
(Fukuzawa), 96, 100 Parkes, Harry, 103
Oxfam, 44–45 Parkes, R. W., 253
Özsu, Umut, 209, 293–307 Parti Communiste français (PCF), 70
Pasha, Muhammad Sa’id, 577
Padmore, George, 74–79 Pasha, Mustapha Kamal, 397, 399–401. See
Pahuja, Sundhya, 117, 119–120, 552–573 also Australia
Pakistan, 4–5 Pashkent Agreement, 327
AL in, 329 Pashukanis, Evgeny, 199–204
armed conflicts and, 173 on anticolonialism, 207–208
Bengali Muslims in, 325, 329 on colonialism, 203–209
during Cold War, 326–327 Patel, Vallabhbhai, 667
democratic elections in, 329–330 Paul, Herman, 643–644
Indian conflict with, 322–323, PCC. See Communist Party of Cuba
325–328 PCF. See Parti Communiste français
under Pashkent Agreement, 327 Peace of Westphalia, 665
Security Council resolutions against, peasant land, 367
326 Pederneiras, Raul Paranhos, 411
military intervention in Bangladesh, Pedersen, Susan, 670
324 Pedrosa, Mario, 414
under military rule, 328–329 Peevers, Charlotte, 574–594
NAM and, 326–327, 331–335 People’s Republic of China
nuclear weapons development program in, Afro-Asian solidarity and, 192
297 Bandung Conference and
selective genocide in, 330 long-term legacy of, 189–192
self-determination in, 328–335 political goals for, 182–183
U.S. military support to, 326 preparation for, 181–183
Pakistan People’s Party (PPP), 329 sponsors for invitation to, 181
Index 695
border consolidation by, 191 Powell, Adam Clayton, Jr., 210

establishment of, Western reaction to, PPP. See Pakistan People’s Party
178–181 PRAI. See Principle for Responsible
exclusion from UN, 179 Agro-Investment
Korean War and, 178–179 Prashad, Vijay, 68, 140, 256
Law of Nationality in, 190–191 Prebisch, Raul, 238
military pacts with, 179–180 Principle for Responsible Agro-Investment
as nation-state, 189–190 (PRAI), 46
Sino-Indonesia Treaty on Dual Projective City, 142–143
Nationalities, 191 property laws, in Africa, 367
Sino-Soviet Treaty of Friendship, 179 market bias of, 378–379
Perhimpunan Indonesia, 75–76, 211 property rights. See also international property
Permanent Sovereignty over Natural rights
Resources, doctrine of, 473 in Africa, Chinese role in, 376–379
Persatuan Tarbiyah Islamiyah (PERTI), protectorates, 664–665
166–167 public international law, 636
personal status legislation, in Egypt, 349–350
PERTI. See Persatuan Tarbiyah Islamiyah Qatar, 386
Petersson, Fredrik, 66–80
phantasms, 109. See also spirits racial discrimination policies, in Ethiopia,
Philippines, 4–5, 297–298 357
Pickens, William, 73–74 racial domination, colonialism and,
The Plague (Camus), 138 360–361
plurality of laws, 555 racialism, 487
Poetics (Aristotle), 117–118 colonialism and, 57
Point IV Program, 502–503 direct, 558–559
Poitier, Sidney, 616 racism, 17, 59, 78, 161, 182, 184, 243, 297, 306,
POLISARIO. See Liberation of Saguiet el 311, 361, 403, 462–463, 540, 615n107
Hamra and Rio de Oro Bandung Conference and, 17
political authoritarianism, in Central Asia, 216 Zionism and, 615
polyphonic narratives, 54 Radhakrishnan, R., 342
Popović, Vladimir, 589 Rahman, Tunku Abdul, 174–175
Popular Action Front (FRAP), 243 Rajagopal, Balakrishnan, 342, 395
population control, 453–459 Rákosi, Mátyás, 296
Draft WPPA and, 454–455 Ramadan Bey, Mohamed Hafiz, 73–74
national strategies on, 455 Raqs Media Collective, 144–147
NIEO and, 454 Documenta 11, 147–151
Portugal Rashtriya Swayam Seva (RSS), 317–318
Brazil as colony of, 416–418 Rasulov, Akbar, 215–231
economic adjustment programs in, 258 Ratsiraka, Didier, 471
positivism, 649 reclamation of world, 556–563
legal, 55 decolonization and, 556
natural law to, shift from, 659 regional trade agreements (RTAs),
post-Bandung agenda, 22–32 512–513
postcolonial nationalism, 567 regionalism, economic globalization and,
postcolonialism, Arab Spring and, 384 511–513
authoritarian rule after, 395 relief agencies, 443–444, 446–447
postdevelopment theory, 433–434 religion
postdevelopmentalism, as fragility, 446–447 kokutai and, 97–98
transitioning out of, 447 state religion, in Japan, 98–99
poverty, problemization of, 437–438 Representation of the People Act, 320
696 Index
resistance movements. See local resistance Samour, Nahed, 595–615

movements Sandino, Augusto, 233
Resolution 93, 238–239 Sandoval Trigo, Germán Medardo, 263–275
Resolution on Permanent Sovereignty over Santos, Boaventura de Sousa, 264
Natural Resources, 22 Sastroamidjojo, Ali, 50, 56–57, 173–174, 181, 211,
revolutionary, 31, 50, 71, 74, 115, 135, 197, 209, 538
236, 239, 242–244, 279, 295, 384, 661 satire, Bandung Conference as, 109–111
Revolutionary Armed Forces (FAR), 243 Saudi Arabia, statehood for, 603
Reynolds, Henry, 162 Sauvy, Alfred, 436–439
Reynolds, John, 247–262 on problemization of poverty, 437–438
right to day care, in Egypt, 349 Savarkar, V. D., 312–313
rights. See also human rights issues; women’s on cultural distinctions between Hindus,
rights 315
labor, 348–353 Hindu Mahasabha and, 313–315
property Sayed, Hani, 431–449, 554
in Africa, Chinese role in, 376–379 Schmitt, Carl, 666
international, during agrarian crises, Scott, David, 111
41–42 SDAR. See Saharan Democratic Arab Republic
socioeconomic, 391–392, 394–395 The Sea is History (Walcott), 23–24
suffrage, 346–347 SEADO Treaty, 12–13
Rio Treaty of Reciprocal Assistance, 234–235, seas and oceans
502, 505–506 anticolonialism and, 81–83, 93–94
Rittich, Kerry, 461 collective power and, 93–94
Röling, Bert, 294 as commons, 86–89
romantic narrative, Bandung Conference as, free legal status of, 83–86
111–115 Grotius on, 83–86, 89–92
Romulo, Carlos, 297–298 in literature, 83–86, 90–92
Roosevelt, Eleanor, 557–558 as metaphor, 81–83, 89–92
Rostow, W. W., 489 in crossing narratives, 90–92
Rostropovich, Mstislav, 220–221 for Sukarno, as political metaphor, 81–83,
routinization of charisma, 483 161–162
Roy, Manabendra Nath, 71 trade and, 83–86
RSS. See Rashtriya Swayam Seva under UNCLOS, 87–89
RTAs. See regional trade agreements doctrines of, 87–88
Rukunegara (National Principles), 145 SEATO. See Southeast Asia Treaty
Russell, Betrand, 132–133 Organisation
Russia Second World War, anticolonialism after,
BICS countries and, 37 79
Bolshevik Revolution in, 199–204 secularism model, for Hindu Right, 319
BRICS countries and, 37 Selassie, Haile, 361
in Central Asia, 217–218 self-determination, 137
imperialism by, 201 anti-imperialism and, 340
as Bandung ethic, 517–518
El Saadawi, Nawal, 351 colonialism and, 362–363
Saberi, Hengameh, 636–653 hegemony and, 286
Sabri, Ali, 588 for Kardelj, 278–282, 285
al-Sadat, Anwar, 337–338 in Pakistan, 328–335
Saharan Democratic Arab Republic (SDAR), as right, 57, 274–275
364–365 sovereignty and, 542
Said, Edward, 18, 228, 439, 484–485 Soviet Union discourse on, 205–207
Sa’id, Karima, 345 statehood and, 557
Index 697
women’s rights and, 457–458 Chinese role in, 375–379

for Yugoslavia, 278–282 land recapture and, 377
Sen, Gita, 452–453 property linked with, 376
Senghpor, Lamine, 71 rights to sovereignty, 378
settler colonialism, 606, 615 as Bandung ethic, 517–518
Shafik, Doriya, 346–347, 349–350 for civilized states, 537–540
Shahabuddin, Mohammad, 95–107 colonialism and, 540–546
Shari’a law, in Egypt, 349 Eastphalian, 548–549
cultural censorship under, 349 for Egypt, 580–586
Shimazu, Naoko, 10–11 Hardt on, 39
Shkovsky, Viktor, 229–230 for nation-state, 540–546
Sholmov, Yuri, 211–212 natural resources and, 473
Shukairy, Ahmed, 599, 605 over Suez Canal, 586–591
Sieyès, l’Abbé Emmanuel Joseph, 437 Panchsheel Principles and, 537–540
Sinclair, Upton, 74 principle of, 283
Singerman, Diane, 351 restoration of, 39–41
Singh, Anup, 165–166 self-determination and, 542
Sino-Indonesia Treaty on Dual Nationalities, 191 Suez Crisis and, 586–591
Sino-Soviet Treaty of Friendship, 179 Soviet Union
Sino-Yugoslav disagreements, 280 anticolonialism and, 197–198,
El Sisi, Abdel Fattah, 387 207–208
Slovenia Bandung Conference and, 209–213
Communist Party of Slovenia, 278 Chinese response to, 215
as liberal-democratic nation, 285 from Soviet international law perspective,
social movements. See also La Via Campesina 197–199
non-party led, 42 Central Asia under rule of, 216
socialism, 137 cynical deployment of, 226
Arab, 344, 346 narrative constructions of, 221–227
Kardelj on, 280–281 role in foreign policy, 219–221, 224–225
socialist, 4, 13, 18, 74, 77–78, 118, 198n4, 205–207, discourse on self-determination, 205–207
219–220, 222, 243, 255, 271, 281, 298, 306, economic expansion by, 198–199
339, 466 Indonesia and, financial assistance to,
socialist Bonapartism, 280–281 304
socioeconomic rights, Arab Spring and, international law in, 197–199
391–392, 394–395 colonialism and, 199–209
Solanke, Lapido, 72 during interwar years, 199–204
solemnization of rice economy, in Japan, 99 socialist approach to, 198
Somoza, Anastasio, 238 in League of Nations, 207–208
Soong Qingling, 73–74 Molotov-Ribbentop Pact, 209
South Africa. See also BICS Countries; BRICS Nehru and, 197
Countries; IBSA countries Sino-Soviet Treaty of Friendship, 179
Apartheid in, 342 Yugoslav break from, 277
liberation movements in, 363–364 space, in international law, 51–60
South Vietnam, 4–5, 164–165 specters, 109. See also spirits
Southeast Asia Treaty Organisation (SEATO), of Bandung Conference, 121–122
301, 466 constitutive role of, 114–115
China and, 179–180 ‘Spirit of Bandung,’ 11–12, 249–256, 293
Pakistan in, 326–327 spirits, as metaphysical category, 109
U.S. and, 179–180, 505 Sri Lanka, 357. See also Colombo Conference;
sovereignty national Colombo Powers
in Africa state religion, in Japan, 98–99
698 Index
statesmen, 485–488 third space, 152–153

charisma of, 485 Third World
defined, 484 art development in, 153
from Global North, 488 Bandung Conference as influence on,
from Global South, 488 467–469
Stedile, Pedro, 43–44 national identity through, 12–13
Sudan, colonialism in, 603 unity and solidarity throughout, 50,
Suez Canal 164–165
equal sovereignty over, 586–591 birth of, 382
historical background for, 577–580 colonialism in, 355–356
under international law, 582–586 decoloniality in, 262
nationalization of, 577–579 decolonization of, 20–21
justification of, 580–582 divisiveness within, 35
Users’ Association for, 579–580, 585–586 environmentalism in, 473–475
Suez Crisis, 574–575 as resistance strategy, 475–479
alternative memory of, 593 feminism in, 453
equal sovereignty as factor in, 586–591 identity for, 12–13
international law and, compliance during, NAM and, 13
587 Kapur on, 153
Operation Pile Up and, 587–588 national development of, 20–21
suffrage rights, 346–347 as term, conception of, 152
Sukarno, 50, 56–57, 75–76, 164, 294, 485, as wedge, 153–154
540 Third World Approaches to International Law
on dangers of neocolonialism, 540–541 (TWAIL), 31, 86, 141, 154, 383, 467, 474,
deceitful behavior of, 132–134 478, 480, 516, 648
on global independence movement, 161 aesthetics of, 154–156
guided democracy policy, 133, 137, 173–174 thirdness and, 156–157
military coup against, 132–133 as analogy, 157
NEFOS under, 173 Arab Spring and, 383, 392–394
opening address of, 130 in Brazil, 412
post-independent leadership under, 133 generations of, 154–155
on seas and ocean, as political metaphor, historiography of, 157–158
81–83, 161–162 sources of, 156
Sun Yat-sen, 67–68 virtue pedagogy with, 647–648
Sunario, 190 thirdness
Syatauw, J. J. G., 306 Bandung Conference and, 151–156
Sykes-Picot Agreement, 28 defined, 152
Syria nonalignment, 152–153
British mandate in, 604–605 TWAIL and, 156–157
U.S. military aid to, 385 Three Worlds Theory, 152. See also
Non-Aligned Movement
Taha, Mai, 337–354 time, in international law, 51–60
Talented Tenth, 627 chronotype concepts and, 50, 52
Tatsunosuke, Takashi, 106 for colonialism, 59
TCC. See transnational capitalist class for imperialism, 56–57
teaching. See virtue pedagogy for international law, 54–56
technocrats, 488–492 for modernity, 52–54
UNCTAD and, 490–492 for nuclear war, 58–60
Telli, Diallo, 136 Tito, Marshall, 278
Thaat (Ibrahim), 348 Zhou Enlai and, 280
Tharoor, Sashi, 525–526 Tokugawa Feudal System (Bakufu), 96
Index 699
under Expulsion Edict of 1825, 97 TWAIL. See Third World Approaches to

totalitarianism, anticolonialism and, 77–79 International Law
Toure, Ahmed Sekou, 136–137
Touré, Ismail, 171–172 UAR. See United Arab Republic
Towards a New International Economic Order UDHR. See Universal Declaration of Human
(Bedjaoui), 470 Rights
TPP. See Trans-Pacific Partnership UDN. See National Democratic Union
trade UFP. See Uniting for Peace
under GATT, 508 UGTT. See General Union for Tunisian
multilateralism embraced under, 511–513 Workers
RTAs and, 512–513 UN. See United Nations
ITO and, 20 UN Convention on the Law of the Seas
on seas and oceans, 83–86 (UNCLOS), 87–89
under TTIP, 261–262 doctrines of, 87–88
WTO and, 482, 512–513 UN Mission in the Congo (UNOC), 170–171
Zhou Enlai on, 185 uncivilized nations, civilized nations compared
Transatlantic Trade and Investment to, 663–664
Partnership (TTIP), 261–262, 512–513 UNCLOS. See UN Convention on the Law of
European response to, 261–262 the Seas
translocality, 150 UNCTAD. See United Nations Conference
transnational capitalist class (TCC), 37 on Trade and Development
transnational social movements. See La Via UNEF. See United Nations Emergency Force
Campesina UNFCCC. See United Nations Framework
Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), 512–513 Convention for Climate Change
Treaty of Amity and Cooperation in Southeast Union Intercoloniale, 70
Asia, 194 United Arab Republic (UAR), 345
Treaty of Westphalia United Nations (UN)
Bandung Conference and, 16 Afro-Asian bloc in, 500
international law and, 15–16 decolonization by, 361–362
as mythical source of law, 657 membership in, 500
Tricontinental Conference, 4, 13, 232, 242–245 Nehru’s vision of, 339
Bandung Conference compared to, 245–246 People’s Republic of China’s exclusion
Cuba and, 13, 242–245 from, 179
Tricontinental Solidarity Organization and state system for, 340
Peoples (OSTP), 244 United Nations Conference on Trade and
tricontinentalism, 244, 244n37 Development (UNCTAD), 6, 234, 305,
Trigueiro, Oswaldo, 419, 421–423 490–492
Tronti, Mario, 352 establishment of, 500
Truman, Harry S., 238 United Nations Emergency Force (UNEF),
Tshombe, Moises, 129, 170–171 590–591
TTIP. See Transatlantic Trade and Investment United Nations Framework Convention for
Partnership Climate Change (UNFCCC), 476–477
Tully, James, 340 United States (U.S.)
Tunisia Bay of Pigs Invasion and, 268
Arab Spring in, 388–392 Castro and, attempts to overthrow, 506–507
human rights abuses in, 391 Cold War politics for, Latin American
socioeconomic rights and, 391–392 involvement in, 233–235
workers’ movements in, 389–391 Cuba and, political conflict with, 241–242
colonialism in, 603–604 economic assistance by, in Latin America,
UGTT in, 389 502–503
Turkey, 4–5. See MINTs countries import substitution policies of, 504
700 Index
United States (U.S.) (cont.) Weber, Max, 271

military aid Webster, Timothy, 368
in Arab region, 385 WEDO. See Women’s Environment and
to Egypt, 385–386 Development Organization
to Pakistan, 326 West African Students’ Union, 79
SEATO and, 179–180 West Irian dispute, 544–546
promotion of, 505 Westphalian system, 340, 398
War on Terror by, 461–463, 567 Wheeler, Geoffrey, 223–224
United States Singapore Free Trade Wilder, Gary, 671
Agreement, 407–408 Winichakul, Thongchai, 543
Uniting for Peace (UFP), 210 Women’s Environment and Development
Universal Declaration of Human Rights Organization (WEDO), 457
(UDHR), 335, 338–340, 388–389, women’s rights, 341, 343–344, 353–354,
539–540 450–464
universal justice, 103 Bandung Conference and, 341–342
UNOC. See UN Mission in the Congo at Cairo Conference, 456–457
U.S. See United States in Egypt, 343
Users’ Association, for Suez Canal, 579–580, in films, 345
585–586 labor rights, 348–353
legal modernization of, 343–348
Valladão, Haroldo, 424–426 through propaganda campaign,
Van Niekerk, Leoné Anette, 152 344–347
Vargas, Getulio, 415 suffrage rights, 346–347
Vattel, Emerich de, 657 in workplace, 350–353
Vergne, Philippe, 152–154 Global Gag Rule and, 456–457
Versailles Peace Conference, 69–74, 80 in Global South, 452–453
violence, against women, 460–461 NAM and, 341, 451–453
virtue epistemology, 639–643 organizations for, 455–456
justification in, 640 population control and, 453–459
virtue ethics, 639 Draft WPPA and, 454–455
virtue pedagogy, 643–652 national strategies on, 455
international law teaching through, 646–652 NIEO and, 454
pedagogical persona and, 643–645 as rationalization for military interventions,
with TWAIL, 647–648 461–463
virtue theory and, 644–645 reproductive health and, 453–459
virtue reliabilism, 641 self-determination and, 457–458
virtue responsibilism, 641 UDHR and, 341–342
virtue theory War on Terror and, 461–463
for international law, 636 workers’ movements, during Arab Spring,
scope of, 639 389–391
virtue pedagogy and, 644–645 World Bank, 42, 45–46, 233, 257, 264–265, 372,
Viswesarna, Kamala, 29 374, 445–446, 482, 493–494, 496n52,
Vitalis, Robert, 110, 295, 431 507, 513, 540, 547, 591
creation of, 264
Walcott, Derek, 23–24 ERLs and, 445
Wang Yi, 195 financier reports, 493–494
War on Terror, 461–463, 567 on governance mentality, 446–447
A Warm December, 616–618, 627–629 world peace, promotion of, 487
Warsaw Pact, 296 World Social Forum (WSF), 39
Washington Consensus, 369 World Trade Organization (WTO), 482
feminism and, 460–461 RTAs and, 512–513
Index 701
WPPA. See Draft World Population Plan of Yusoff, Zulkifli, 145

Action Rukunegara and, 145
The Wretched of the Earth (Fanon),
37, 617 Zhou Enlai, 50, 52, 57, 180, 294, 485, 605
Wright, Richard, 29–30, 129, 131 Afro-Asian solidarity and, 183–184
WSF. See World Social Forum through economic development, 185
WTO. See World Trade Organization through international trade, 185
Bandung Conference and, 181–186, 298
Xi Jinping, 370 conciliatory approach to, 185–186, 192
opposition to collective security alliances,
Yanukovich, Victor, 521 301
Yemen on Chinese communism, 186
Arab Spring in, 388 on Declaration on the Promotion of World
statehood for, 603 Peace and Cooperation, 189
U.S. military aid to, 385 dual nationality issues under, 190
Yifeng, Chen, 177–195 five principles of peaceful coexistence, 180
Young, Karen, 385 human rights endorsed by, 184
Young, Robert, 13, 243–244 on Indonesian citizenship, for Chinese
Younis, Mahmoud, 581 citizens, 543
Yugoslavia on international trade, 185
break from Soviet Union, 277, 291 Kotelawala and, 357
constitutional architect of, 284 Nehru-Zhou Enlai Statement, 12–13
dissolution of, 284–285 Palestinian support by, 608
IMF austerity policy for, 285 Tito and, 280
NAM and, 276 Zia, Ul Haq, 129–130
self-determination for, 278–282 Zimbabwe, liberation movements in,
Sino-Yugoslav disagreements, 280 363–364
as sociopolitical enterprise, 276–277 Zionism, 615

Bandung Global History and International Law

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Endorsements

This book covers the signiﬁcance of the Bandung Conference through a

Foreword by JUSTICE GEORGES ABI-SAAB

Cambridge University Press is part of the University of Cambridge.

List of Illustrations page xiii

part i. bandung histories 33

7 Bandung 1955: The Deceit and the Conceit 126

part ii. political solidarities and geographical

part iii. nations and their others: bandung at home 309

19 From Bandung 1955 to Bangladesh 1971: Postcolonial Self-

part iv. postcolonial agendas: justice, rights, and

part v. another international law 533

Kolkata (2004–2006). He has been a visiting professor at Brown University and

Dispute with Perú (International Court of Justice, 2014). He is editor of the

lawyering. Before joining the faculty of the University of Washington School

of the relationship between law and issues of development, migration, envir-

studies at the universities of Bonn, Birzeit, London (SOAS), Humboldt

political, cultural, or otherwise), are sometimes referred to as the North-South

A book such as this is a testimony to the kindness and intellectual commit-

luis eslava, michael fakhri, and vasuki nesiah*

Bandung was a conference against both imperialism and mere spectatorship. It

situating the power of bandung

simultaneously a reference point for Malcolm X,28 international economic

Whereas the participants need to be enfolded in inspiration! For that reason,

For us the metaphors of performance, actors, and audience are suggestive of

directions. If we follow this line of thought, it is possible to realize how

statecraft practices,44 to alternative conceptualization of the world and inter-

bandung in international law

understanding of what Bandung means in the larger sense. As we started to

describe our contemporary international order as Bandungian rather than

Bandung brought together, in this way, different nationalist projects and

Monetary Fund for unfairly treating or ignoring “underdeveloped countries”

justify, in turn, the continued disciplining of local realities – a project increas-

explicitly adopted and linked the language of development to “the problem

include in this conversation, and our own conversations about Bandung –

Then came the white sisters clapping

Yet that too was a false dawn:

and in the salt chuckle of rocks

of History, really beginning.

As a historical question, if Bandung represented a politics of decolonization,

notwithstanding their long residence in these countries.”94 Today this infam-

within many postcolonial states because of their adherence to certain shared

imperialism, it is because of the growing inﬂuence of transnational fractions of

may be mentioned. First, international institutions (such as the IMF, World

youth, religious and ethnic minorities, uncared-for elderly persons, refugees,

reconstituted at the global level.29 To speak of a global revolution against

dealing with agrarian crises and land grab

receive almost no attention in the world of international law, these may be

defeat neoliberalism without organization?”46 Furthermore, only the state can

have been cross-checked through triangulation.”52 The World Bank has

sovereignty.65 While the primary struggles still have to be conducted at the

This understanding, echoing a civilizing mission tone, has informed the

rose sydney parfitt*

time, space, and international law

the neutralists – primarily India, Burma (now Myanmar), and Indonesia –

the chronotope of modernity

nineteenth-century novel tracking the emergence of the free-willed individual

to “re-educate himself for life in a world that is . . . enormous and foreign; he

the chronotope of international law

the chronotope of imperialism

to speed it up, transforming it into a temporality, not of the then-and-now, but

the chronotope of nuclear war

Bakhtin’s frame of reference, nuclear time was depicted as a kind of terrifying

new international subjects as true