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 (nowMyanmar), 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
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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 See Anghie, Chapter 32 in this volume. 4 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.
4 Luis Eslava, Michael Fakhri, and Vasuki Nesiah
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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–WorldWar 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.
The Spirit of Bandung 5
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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 See Parfitt, Chapter 2 in this volume. 17 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.
6 Luis Eslava, Michael Fakhri, and Vasuki Nesiah
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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.
The Spirit of Bandung 7
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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.
8 Luis Eslava, Michael Fakhri, and Vasuki Nesiah
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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).
The Spirit of Bandung 9
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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.
10 Luis Eslava, Michael Fakhri, and Vasuki Nesiah
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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).
The Spirit of Bandung 11
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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.
12 Luis Eslava, Michael Fakhri, and Vasuki Nesiah
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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.
The Spirit of Bandung 13
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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)”.
14 Luis Eslava, Michael Fakhri, and Vasuki Nesiah
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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 themodern 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.
The Spirit of Bandung 15
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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
16 Luis Eslava, Michael Fakhri, and Vasuki Nesiah
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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.
The Spirit of Bandung 17
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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.
18 Luis Eslava, Michael Fakhri, and Vasuki Nesiah
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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.
The Spirit of Bandung 19
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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
University Press, 2014), pp. 149–172.
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.
20 Luis Eslava, Michael Fakhri, and Vasuki Nesiah
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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
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003).
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.”
The Spirit of Bandung 21
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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.
22 Luis Eslava, Michael Fakhri, and Vasuki Nesiah
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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.
The Spirit of Bandung 23
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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
24 Luis Eslava, Michael Fakhri, and Vasuki Nesiah
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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.
The Spirit of Bandung 25
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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 AnnualMeeting of the American Society of International Law
408; “Symposium onCritical Race Theory and International Law:Convergence andDivergence”
(2000) 45Villanova LawReview 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) 26Cambridge Review of International Affairs 111; Adrian
A. Smith, “Migration, Development and SecurityWithin 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.
26 Luis Eslava, Michael Fakhri, and Vasuki Nesiah
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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 Ibid. 95 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 See Chatterjee, Epilogue in this volume. 100 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.
The Spirit of Bandung 27
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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 See Samour, Chapter 35 in this volume. 105 See Sayed, Chapter 26 in this volume.
106 Prashad, The Darker Nations: A People’s History of the Third World, p. 279.
28 Luis Eslava, Michael Fakhri, and Vasuki Nesiah
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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.107On 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.
The Spirit of Bandung 29
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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.
30 Luis Eslava, Michael Fakhri, and Vasuki Nesiah
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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) 65Modern 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.
The Spirit of Bandung 31
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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.
32 Luis Eslava, Michael Fakhri, and Vasuki Nesiah
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