| Abstrak/Abstract |
It must come as no surprise that traces of any continuing relevance of
the ‘Bandung spirit’ are enthusiastically being sought in the wake of
the sixtieth anniversary of the Asian-African Conference. It was the
first high-profile formal conference of newly independent (or
‘about-to-be independent’) post-colonial states at a rather
momentous historical conjuncture: the continuing struggles for
decolonisation were pronounced in the context of the Cold War.
The Final Communiqué of the Bandung conference strongly
articulated a collective political project against colonialism and
imperialism, and for self-determination and racial equality, while
already laying the foundations for the idea of strategic nonalignment
in the context of the Cold War. It is in this sense that the
Bandung conference has come to be emblematic of an event that
inaugurated a radically different international political landscape to
the immediate post-1945 world order. In this article, the authors
focus specifically on the development aspirations articulated at the
Asian-African Conference in Bandung, which they argue are
the site of struggles and contradictions. As the authors show, the
‘Bandung spirit’ underlined the political project of Third Worldism,
as well as the call for a new international economic order in the
1970s. Yet, they also identify some constraints and contradictions
that the ‘Bandung spirit’ had to navigate and the challenges it was
up against. In the final part of the article, the authors briefly
discuss the extent to which the ‘Bandung spirit’ continues to
resonate in contemporary global politics of development. |
