In a world torn apart by geopolitical bullying and geoeconomic warfare, great-power conflict and inequality that concentrates wealth and statecraft in the hands of a few, the Bandung Conference is gaining renewed relevance. The developing world’s momentous meeting in 1955 laid the groundwork for a new international order and South-South cooperation. It asked a question that everyone, even rich nations, is asking today: who gets to write the rules of the global economy?
That moment needs retelling. In 1955, 29 nations of Asia and Africa, former colonies representing more than half the world, met in Bandung, Indonesia, for a conference hosted by President Sukarno. Riding on the wave of anticolonial struggles, they agreed on an ambitious framework founded on sovereignty and economic, cultural and political cooperation, elevating the United Nations Charter’s spirit of human rights above militaristic alliances.
The conference’s most powerful outcome was South-South solidarity: nations and peoples charting a path independent of the two great powers of that time – the United States and the Soviet Union. As the “Third World” alliance grew, practical efforts to support decolonisation emerged out of it, including the Non-Aligned Movement and bodies like UN Trade and Development (UNCTAD). As a new Al Jazeera film shows, the “Bandung spirit”, despite efforts not to antagonise great powers, was treated as a direct threat.
Many countries faced crushing pushback for committing to the decolonisation agenda – coups, invasions, economic warfare and debt and austerity crises – that left them beholden to old masters, not their development aspirations. Seventy-one years later, the structures of inequality persist. Despite dramatic growth in parts of the Global South, particularly in East Asia, Global North countries control 69 percent of global wealth while comprising just 20 percent of humanity.
Low- and middle-income countries spend on average nearly half their national budgets on debt repayments, mainly to rich creditors in rich countries. Meanwhile, wealth inequality has soared within nations, concentrating power within small elites while ordinary people struggle. Just 3,000 billionaires hold wealth equivalent to more than 15 percent of global gross domestic product (GDP).
It would be a stretch to suggest that the level of South-South cooperation envisioned at Bandung endures today. The Economist recently quipped, “A damp squib Bandung anniversary shows a lack of solidarity.” Yet external realities are forcing a reckoning that nostalgia cannot. The powerful are acting with impunity, breaking the brittle cover the so-called rules-based order relied on.
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