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The 1955 Asia-Africa conference (the “Bandung Conference”) was a meeting of 29 Asian and African nations that sought to draw on Asian and African nationalism and religious traditions to forge a new international order that was neither communist nor capitalist, and led six years later to the non-aligned movement. Few would dispute the notion that the inaugural meeting in 1955 was a watershed in international history, but there is much disagreement about its long-term legacy and its significance for present-day international affairs. Was it a post-colonial ideological reaction to the passing of the age of empire or an innovative effort to promote a new regionalism? Were its principles of peaceful coexistence a rhetorical flourish or a substantive policy initiative? Did the Conference help define North-South relations? And in what way did the Conference contribute to the regional order of contemporary Asia?



The authors in the present volume argue that the Bandung Conference had a lasting normative influence on the contemporary regional order of Asia, and that it underlies the diplomatic principles and loosely defined normative framework that characterize present-day Asian international relations.

In April 1955, twenty-nine countries from Africa, Asia, and the Middle East came together for a diplomatic conference in Bandung, Indonesia, intending to define the direction of the postcolonial world. Representing approximately two-thirds of the world’s population, the Bandung conference occurred during a key moment of transition in the mid-twentieth century—amid the global wave of decolonization that took place after the Second World War and the nascent establishment of a new cold war world order in its wake. Participants such as Jawaharlal Nehru of India, Gamal Abdel Nasser of Egypt, Zhou Enlai of China, and Ahmed Sukarno of Indonesia seized this occasion to attempt the creation of a political alternative to the dual threats of Western neocolonialism and the cold war interventionism of the United States and the Soviet Union.

The essays in this volume explore the diverse repercussions of this event, tracing the diplomatic, intellectual, and sociocultural histories that have emanated from it. Making a World after Empire consequently addresses the complex intersection of postcolonial history and cold war history and speaks to contemporary discussions of Afro-Asianism, empire, and decolonization, thus reestablishing the conference’s importance in twentieth-century global history.

Contributors: Michael Adas, Laura Bier, James R. Brennan, G. Thomas Burgess, Antoinette Burton, Dipesh Chakrabarty, Julian Go, Christopher J. Lee, Jamie Monson, Jeremy Prestholdt, Denis M. Tull