The Bandung Conference
Twenty-nine nations sent delegates to a city in Java. They represented 1.5 billion people, and twenty-three of them had not been independent before 1945
Open
Ask most people what happened at Bandung in nineteen fifty five, and they will tell you this is where the Non-Aligned Movement was founded.
It was not. The Non-Aligned Movement did not exist yet. It would not be founded for another six years, at a different conference, in a different city, by a different roster of governments.
What happened at Bandung was smaller and stranger. Twenty nine governments who agreed on almost nothing else, meeting in a room no Western power had organized and no Western power had been invited into.
Scene 1Gedung Merdeka, the morning of April 18
The morning of April eighteenth, nineteen fifty five. Sukarno walks to the podium inside Gedung Merdeka, the Freedom Building, in Bandung, Indonesia, wearing a white suit.
Behind him sit delegates from twenty nine countries. Outside, the streets of Bandung are lined with banners in dozens of languages.
India sent Jawaharlal Nehru. Egypt sent Gamal Abdel Nasser. China sent Zhou Enlai. Pakistan sent Muhammad Ali Bogra.
Sukarno does not open with pleasantries.
Sukarno told the delegates what he thought of the claim that colonialism was finished.
· Opening address to the Asian-African Conference, Bandung · April 18, 1955
“We are often told, Colonialism is dead. Let us not be deceived or even soothed by that. I say to you, colonialism is not yet dead. How can we say it is dead, so long as vast areas of Asia and Africa are unfree?”
He was speaking to a room that proved his own point. North and South Vietnam both sat in it, two delegations from a country the Geneva Accords had split eleven months earlier. Turkey, a member of NATO, sat beside communist China.
Five delegations came from sub Saharan Africa. Ethiopia, Liberia, Libya, Sudan, and the Gold Coast, which was not yet Ghana. Japan sat in the room too, the only former colonial power present.
Of the twenty nine delegations, six had been independent before nineteen forty five. The rest had won their own sovereignty within the previous decade.
Scene 2The bomb and the diplomat
One week before Sukarno spoke, on April eleventh, a bomb went off aboard the Kashmir Princess, a chartered Air India plane carrying the Chinese delegation's advance team from Hong Kong toward Jakarta.
The plane crashed into the South China Sea. Eleven people died. Three survived.
Zhou Enlai had been scheduled to board that flight. He changed his travel plans at the last moment and flew instead by way of Rangoon.
He came to Bandung anyway, leading a state that fewer than half the delegations in the room recognized.
The next day, Zhou Enlai took the floor and told the conference what he said China wanted.
· Supplementary speech to the Asian-African Conference, Bandung · April 19, 1955
“The people of Asia and Africa have no aggressive intent. All they want is to live in peace and be friends with all countries of the world.”
The bomb was attributed to Kuomintang agents operating from Taiwan. Zhou arrived and spoke anyway, three years after China had fought the United States in Korea.
Scene 3The Ten Principles
On April twenty fourth, the delegates adopted the Dasasila Bandung, the Ten Principles: sovereignty, non-aggression, non-interference in internal affairs, equality of all races and nations, peaceful coexistence.
The principles were not new that week. They drew on the Panchsheel Agreement, a nineteen fifty four treaty between India and China that Zhou Enlai and Jawaharlal Nehru had drafted to settle their own border dispute over Tibet.
At Bandung, a bilateral agreement between two governments became a multilateral framework for twenty nine.
Before the vote, Nehru told the plenary session what he wanted the conference to refuse.
· Address to the plenary session of the Asian-African Conference · April 22, 1955
“We do not wish to be used as pawns in power politics. We do not wish to be the playthings of others.”
The principles carried no enforceable mechanism. No court, no army, no budget. What they carried was the signature of governments representing one point five four billion people, fifty four percent of the world's population that year.
Scene 4Washington and Moscow
Secretary of State John Foster Dulles had tried to stop the conference before it happened, pressuring American allies not to attend. Turkey, Pakistan, and the Philippines came anyway.
Moscow called Bandung a front for the CIA. The CIA's own internal assessment said the opposite. It classified the conference as a genuine threat to Western influence.
Both capitals had reason to worry. Twenty nine nations refusing to choose a side threatened the alliance system Washington had built across Asia, and the bloc discipline Moscow depended on.
Scene 5After Bandung
Within five years of the conference, Ghana became independent, in nineteen fifty seven. The All-African People's Conference met in Accra the following year. Seventeen African nations gained independence in nineteen sixty alone.
The Non-Aligned Movement was formally founded at Belgrade in nineteen sixty one, with twenty five member states. By twenty twenty six, it has one hundred twenty.
Sukarno, the conference's host, did not get to watch most of that legacy unfold. He was removed from power between nineteen sixty five and nineteen sixty seven, in a United States facilitated military transition that killed an estimated five hundred thousand to one million people.
Five accounts
That is what happened at Bandung, roughly in the order it happened. What it meant depends entirely on which delegation you were sitting with.
Five accounts of that week exist. Each gets its own case, in its own terms, before anything is said against it.
victorThird Worldist / Anti-Colonial
Third Worldist / Anti-Colonial
The anti-colonial account holds that Bandung was the first time the colonized world organized as a political subject, not an object of great power competition.
The twenty nine delegations agreed on almost nothing else. India was socialist, Turkey was capitalist, China was communist. They agreed only that European control over Asian and African peoples was finished.
Its strongest fact is the chain that followed. Ghana's independence, the Accra conference, seventeen African nations free in a single year, and a Non-Aligned Movement that grew from twenty five founding members to one hundred twenty.
Sukarno described what he thought held the room together.
“We are united by a common detestation of colonialism in whatever form it appears. We are united by a common detestation of racialism.”
The colonized world did not wait for anyone's permission. It wrote its own rules.
Read the full account
Narrative
Sukarno opened the conference with a roll call of colonialism's geography. He named the countries in the room and the empires that had ruled them: Dutch Indonesia, British India, French Indochina, Belgian Congo, Portuguese Mozambique. "Almost all of us have histories stretching back thousands of years," he said. "Yet today we are called 'underdeveloped.'" The delegates, some in military uniforms, some in Western suits, some in traditional dress, represented states that had been administered from London, Paris, The Hague, Lisbon, Brussels, and Tokyo. They had not been asked. They had fought, marched, been imprisoned, been shot at, and won. Now they were writing new rules.
The Bandung Conference was the first time the colonized world organized as a political subject rather than an object of great-power competition. Vijay Prashad's The Darker Nations (2007) identifies Bandung as the founding moment of Third World solidarity: not a geography, not an economic category, but a political project. The 29 delegations did not agree on economics (India was socialist, Turkey was capitalist, China was communist), religion (the conference included Muslim, Hindu, Buddhist, Christian, and secular states), or Cold War alignment (Pakistan was in CENTO, China was aligned with the USSR). What they agreed on was that the era of European control over Asian and African peoples was finished.
The Ten Principles, the Dasasila Bandung, were the programmatic expression of this consensus. They banned colonialism, racial discrimination, and nuclear weapons from the conduct of international relations. They enshrined sovereignty, equality, and non-interference as the rights of all states regardless of size or military power. They drew on the Panchsheel Agreement (1954) between India and China but expanded its bilateral framework into a multilateral declaration. The principles were not enforceable. They had no institutional mechanism. They carried the force of collective moral authority from 1.54 billion people who had, within living memory, been subjects of empire.
The chain of events that followed Bandung was direct and traceable. Ghana became independent in 1957, the first sub-Saharan African nation to achieve sovereignty from a European colonial power. Nkrumah, who had watched Bandung from the Gold Coast, organized the All-African People's Conference in Accra in December 1958 (attended by delegates from 28 African territories, including representatives of liberation movements from South Africa, Kenya, Algeria, and Angola). In 1960, seventeen African nations gained independence in a single year, the "Year of Africa." The UN General Assembly adopted Resolution 1514, the Declaration on the Granting of Independence to Colonial Countries and Peoples, which declared that "the subjection of peoples to alien subjugation, domination and exploitation constitutes a denial of fundamental human rights." The Non-Aligned Movement was formally founded at Belgrade in September 1961, with 25 member states. By the 2024 Kampala summit, its membership had reached 120 nations, a majority of the UN General Assembly.
The anti-colonial reading of Bandung is a narrative of collective self-determination. It celebrates the conference as proof that the colonized world could organize without Western permission, set its own agenda, and reshape the international order. It measures Bandung's success by the institutional architecture it generated (the NAM, the G-77, the UN Conference on Trade and Development) and by the simple arithmetic of sovereignty: in 1945, 51 nations founded the United Nations; by 1970, there were 127 member states. Most of the new members came from territories represented at Bandung.
Arguments
- Bandung was the first time the colonized world organized as a political subject, not an object of great-power competition
- The Ten Principles (Dasasila) gave decolonization its diplomatic vocabulary of sovereignty, equality and non-interference
- The conference directly preceded Ghana's independence, the All-African People's Conference, and the UN's decolonization resolution
- The NAM grew from 25 founding members (Belgrade, 1961) to 120 by 2026, a majority of the UN General Assembly
Sources
- The Darker Nations: A People's History of the Third World
- Bandung, Global History, and International Law
- The Bandung Conference and the Rise of the Third World
bystanderCold War / Western Realist
Cold War / Western Realist
The realist account starts with arithmetic, not sentiment. Twenty nine nations refusing to choose a side threatened the alliances Washington had built around the Soviet perimeter: NATO, SEATO, CENTO, and bilateral pacts across Asia.
Non-alignment was also partly illusory. India took Soviet aid, Egypt took Soviet weapons after Bandung, Indonesia took Soviet naval vessels. Both superpowers courted the room they claimed to be shut out of.
John Foster Dulles said what he believed the position Bandung had taken actually amounted to.
“The concept of neutrality is an obsolete, immoral, and shortsighted conception.”
Its strongest fact is a ratio. The delegates in that room represented fifty four percent of the world's population, and controlled less than eight percent of its industrial output.
Read the full account
Narrative
John Foster Dulles had a word for non-alignment: immoral. In a world divided between freedom and communism, neutrality was complicity. "The concept of neutrality," he told a press conference in June 1956, "is an obsolete, immoral, and shortsighted conception." When the Bandung Conference convened in April 1955, Dulles read it as a direct challenge to American containment strategy. If 29 nations refused to choose sides, the network of alliances, bases, and mutual defense treaties that Washington had built around the Soviet perimeter (NATO, SEATO, CENTO, bilateral pacts with Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, and the Philippines) was undermined from within.
The US response to Bandung operated on two tracks. Publicly, Washington dismissed non-alignment as naive, a posture available only to nations protected from Soviet aggression by American military power. Privately, the CIA increased its operations across the Bandung world. The pattern had already been set: Operation AJAX overthrew Iran's elected Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh in August 1953, eighteen months before Bandung. Operation PBSUCCESS overthrew Guatemala's Jacobo Arbenz in June 1954. After Bandung, the targets included nations whose leaders had sat in Gedung Merdeka. Sukarno was removed from power in 1965-1967 through a military transition facilitated by the CIA. The US Embassy in Jakarta provided lists of suspected communists to the Indonesian military, and between 500,000 and 1 million people were killed. Nkrumah was overthrown in a February 1966 coup while visiting Beijing; declassified CIA cables confirm American foreknowledge and encouragement. Patrice Lumumba of the Congo, who had attended the All-African People's Conference in Accra in 1958, was assassinated in January 1961 with CIA complicity.
Odd Arne Westad's The Global Cold War (2005) argues that both superpowers instrumentalized decolonization. The US and USSR offered aid, weapons, and development assistance to Bandung participants in exchange for alignment. Non-alignment was partly illusory: India received Soviet economic aid and military equipment; Egypt received Soviet weapons after Bandung and nationalized the Suez Canal with Soviet diplomatic backing; Indonesia received Soviet naval vessels. The conference participants needed Cold War patronage to build their states, and both superpowers exploited that need. Non-alignment was a negotiating position, not a geopolitical reality.
The Western realist critique of Bandung points to outcomes. The Third World project did not produce economic convergence between former colonies and former colonial powers. The New International Economic Order (proposed at the UN in 1974, demanding commodity price stabilization, debt relief, and technology transfer) was rejected by Western governments and never implemented. The NAM survived as an institution but, from the Western perspective, lacked coherence: its members included democracies and dictatorships, free-market economies and command economies, nations at war with each other (India and Pakistan, Iraq and Iran). By the 1980s, the NAM could not agree on the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, a test of the non-interference principle that split the movement.
The realist reading of Bandung holds that the conference articulated aspirations that the international system could not accommodate. Sovereignty for small states is constrained by the power of large ones; non-interference is a principle that the powerful ignore when it suits them; and the "third path" between superpower blocs was, in practice, a space where both superpowers competed for influence. The delegates in Gedung Merdeka represented 54% of the world's population. They controlled less than 8% of its industrial output.
Arguments
- Non-alignment undermined the US containment strategy built on alliances, bases, and bilateral defense pacts
- The CIA covertly targeted leaders who attended Bandung or its follow-up conferences; Sukarno, Nkrumah, and Lumumba were all removed from power
- Non-alignment was partly illusory, with most Bandung participants accepting military or economic patronage from one or both superpowers
- The Third World project failed to produce economic redistribution; the New International Economic Order was rejected by Western governments
Sources
- The Global Cold War: Third World Interventions and the Making of Our Times
- Killing Hope: U.S. Military and CIA Interventions Since World War II
- The Jakarta Method: Washington's Anticommunist Crusade and the Mass Murder Program that Shaped Our World
academicChinese / Zhou Enlai
Chinese / Zhou Enlai
The Chinese account begins with a diplomat who arrived isolated. Fewer than half the delegations recognized the People's Republic, and several of them belonged to American led military alliances built against communist expansion.
Zhou Enlai needed to reframe China, not as a communist threat but as a fellow post-colonial state committed to peaceful coexistence. On the floor, responding to accusations of Chinese expansionism, he set his prepared remarks aside.
“China has no desire to interfere in the internal affairs of other countries. We are here to seek common ground, not to create differences.”
He met privately with Nehru, Nasser, and U Nu of Burma. He left Bandung a statesman.
Its strongest fact is what came seven years later. China and India went to war over the Aksai Chin plateau, and the Panchsheel framework Zhou himself had helped draft did not survive it.
Read the full account
Narrative
On April 11, 1955, a bomb exploded aboard the Kashmir Princess, a chartered Air India Constellation carrying members of the Chinese delegation's advance team from Hong Kong to Jakarta. The plane crashed into the South China Sea. Eleven people died. Three survived. Zhou Enlai had been scheduled to board but changed his travel plans at the last moment, flying instead via Rangoon. The assassination attempt, attributed to Kuomintang agents operating from Taiwan, confirmed what Beijing already knew: attending Bandung was a risk. Zhou attended anyway. He arrived in Bandung as the leader of a communist state that most of the 29 delegations did not recognize and that the United States was actively working to isolate.
Zhou's strategy at Bandung was calculated and precise. China had fought the United States in Korea three years earlier. It was excluded from the United Nations, where the Republic of China (Taiwan) held the Chinese seat. Fewer than half the Bandung delegations recognized the People's Republic. Several (Pakistan, the Philippines, Thailand, Turkey) were members of US-led military alliances explicitly directed against communist expansion. Zhou needed to reframe China: not as a communist threat, but as a fellow post-colonial nation committed to peaceful coexistence.
He succeeded. On the conference floor, Zhou set aside prepared remarks and spoke extemporaneously, responding to accusations of Chinese expansionism from the Philippine and Thai delegations. "China has no desire to interfere in the internal affairs of other countries," he said. He invoked the Five Principles of Peaceful Coexistence, originally a Chinese-Indian formulation from the 1954 Panchsheel Agreement, and proposed extending them to all Asian and African states. He offered to negotiate directly with the United States on the Taiwan question. He met privately with Nehru, Nasser, and U Nu of Burma, building personal relationships that would anchor Chinese diplomacy in Asia and Africa for the next decade. Chen Jian's "China and the Bandung Conference" (2005) documents how Zhou transformed Bandung from a potential trap into a diplomatic triumph: he arrived isolated and left as a statesman.
The Bandung framework served Chinese interests precisely because it enshrined non-interference. Beijing's control over Tibet, its suppression of the 1959 Tibetan uprising, and its domestic political campaigns were shielded from international scrutiny by the same principle of sovereignty that protected all Bandung participants from external judgment. The Five Principles were simultaneously a statement of diplomatic idealism and a defensive shield.
The limits of Bandung's consensus emerged quickly. Within seven years, China and India were at war. The 1962 Sino-Indian War over the Aksai Chin plateau and the North-East Frontier Agency shattered the Panchsheel framework that both nations had co-authored. Nehru, who had championed "Hindi-Chini bhai bhai" (Indians and Chinese are brothers), felt personally betrayed. The war discredited Nehru's vision of non-alignment and strengthened the argument (made by Pakistan, which sided with China) that Bandung's principles were aspirational declarations, not binding commitments. By 1972, Nixon visited Beijing. China's path to great-power diplomacy had begun at Bandung, but it did not end there.
Arguments
- Zhou Enlai turned Bandung from a potential diplomatic trap into a triumph, arriving isolated and leaving as a respected statesman
- The Five Principles of Peaceful Coexistence (Panchsheel) were a Chinese-Indian co-creation that became Bandung's framework, positioning China as a principled actor
- The principle of non-interference shielded China's domestic policies, including Tibet, from international scrutiny
- The Sino-Indian War of 1962 shattered the Panchsheel framework and discredited the personal bond between Zhou and Nehru
Sources
- China and the Bandung Conference: Changing Perceptions and Representations
- Mao's China and the Cold War
- Zhou Enlai: The Last Perfect Revolutionary
revisionistPan-African / Nkrumah
Pan-African / Nkrumah
Kwame Nkrumah watched Bandung from the Gold Coast, still a British colony. He could not be a delegate. His country did not yet exist as a sovereign state.
Two years later, Ghana became independent, and Nkrumah organized the All-African People's Conference in Accra, attended by delegates from twenty eight African territories, to carry Bandung's example across the continent.
His book, Neo-Colonialism, argued that formal independence without economic independence was a hollow achievement.
“The essence of neo-colonialism is that the State which is subject to it is, in theory, independent and has all the outward trappings of international sovereignty. In reality its economic system and thus its political policy is directed from outside.”
Its strongest fact outlasted him. The CFA franc, controlled by the French Treasury, was still the currency of fourteen African nations in twenty twenty six.
Read the full account
Narrative
Kwame Nkrumah watched Bandung from the Gold Coast, still a British colony. He was not a delegate. He could not be: the Gold Coast did not yet exist as a sovereign state. But the conference confirmed what Nkrumah had argued since the Fifth Pan-African Congress in Manchester (1945): that colonized peoples had to organize across borders, and that political independence was only the first step. Two years after Bandung, on March 6, 1957, the Gold Coast became Ghana, the first sub-Saharan African nation to achieve independence from a European colonial power. Nkrumah stood in the Polo Grounds in Accra at midnight and told the crowd: "We are going to see that we create our own African personality and identity."
Nkrumah organized the All-African People's Conference in Accra in December 1958, Bandung's direct African follow-up. The conference was attended by delegates from 28 African territories, including representatives of liberation movements from South Africa (the ANC sent a delegation), Kenya (Tom Mboya attended), Algeria (the FLN was represented), and Angola (the MPLA sent observers). Patrice Lumumba of the Belgian Congo attended and returned home radicalized. Frantz Fanon, the Martinican psychiatrist who had joined the Algerian revolution, attended as a representative of the Provisional Government of the Algerian Republic. The Accra conference did for Africa what Bandung had done for Asia: it created a continental solidarity movement that accelerated the timetable for independence.
But Nkrumah's critique went deeper than political sovereignty. His book Neo-Colonialism: The Last Stage of Imperialism (1965) argued that formal independence without economic independence was a hollow achievement. The former colonial powers retained control through multinational corporations, trade agreements that fixed commodity prices below the cost of production, currency arrangements that tied African economies to European central banks (the CFA franc, controlled by the French Treasury, was the currency of fourteen African nations), and development loans that created debt dependencies. Bandung's Ten Principles spoke of sovereignty and equality. They said nothing about who owned the copper mines, the oil fields, the cocoa plantations, or the banks.
The CIA distributed copies of Nkrumah's Neo-Colonialism to justify increased surveillance. On February 24, 1966, while Nkrumah was visiting Beijing, the Ghanaian military seized power. Declassified CIA cables, released under the Freedom of Information Act and analyzed by John Stockwell, a former CIA officer, in In Search of Enemies (1978), confirm American foreknowledge and encouragement of the coup. Nkrumah died in exile in Bucharest in 1972. The pattern repeated: Lumumba was assassinated in January 1961, Nkrumah was overthrown in 1966, Sukarno was removed in 1965-1967. Three leaders who had organized or attended the Bandung movement were eliminated within a decade.
The Pan-African critique of Bandung is not that the conference failed but that it did not go far enough. The Ten Principles were politically powerful but economically toothless. They addressed sovereignty without addressing the terms of trade. They opposed colonialism without opposing the economic structures that colonialism had built to extract wealth from the periphery to the metropole. The question Nkrumah posed in 1965 was never answered: what does sovereignty mean when your currency is controlled by your former colonizer's treasury?
Arguments
- Political independence without economic independence was a hollow achievement; the Ten Principles addressed sovereignty but not the terms of trade
- The All-African People's Conference (Accra, 1958) was Bandung's direct African follow-up, attended by delegates from 28 African territories including the ANC and FLN
- Neo-colonial control persisted through multinational corporations, commodity pricing, currency arrangements (the CFA franc), and debt, structures the Ten Principles did not address
- Three leaders of the Bandung movement (Sukarno, Nkrumah, and Lumumba) were removed from power within a decade, all with CIA involvement
Sources
- Neo-Colonialism: The Last Stage of Imperialism
- In Search of Enemies: A CIA Story
- The Wretched of the Earth
- Africa Must Unite
vanquishedFeminist / Women at the Margins
Feminist / Women at the Margins
The Final Communique of the Asian-African Conference runs to ten sections and twenty nine sub-articles. It mentions women zero times.
The delegates were overwhelmingly male, the heads of delegation exclusively so, in a room built to dismantle one hierarchy while it left another standing.
In Egypt, Doria Shafik had led fifteen hundred women in a march on Parliament in February nineteen fifty one, demanding suffrage. She was later placed under house arrest by Nasser.
One delegation was the exception. Turkey's included women. Turkey had granted women's suffrage in nineteen thirty four, earlier than France or Switzerland. It was treated as a marker of modernity, not a principle to be shared.
Kumari Jayawardena's history of the pattern across the Bandung world put the verdict plainly.
“The promise of national liberation was selectively fulfilled.”
Sovereignty for the nation was on the agenda that week. Sovereignty for the women inside it was not.
Read the full account
Narrative
The Final Communique of the Asian-African Conference runs to ten sections and twenty-nine sub-articles. It addresses human rights, self-determination, racial discrimination, nuclear weapons, colonialism, economic cooperation, and cultural exchange. It mentions women zero times.
Twenty-nine delegations met to dismantle one hierarchy, colonialism, while reproducing another. The delegates were overwhelmingly male. The heads of delegation were exclusively male. The conference's vision of sovereignty was a vision of nations led by men, negotiated by men, and narrated by men. Kumari Jayawardena's Feminism and Nationalism in the Third World (1986) documents the pattern across the Bandung world: anti-colonial movements recruited women as participants, as marchers, as organizers, as combatants, and then excluded them from the states those movements created.
Women had fought in every struggle represented at Bandung. In India, women had marched in the Salt Satyagraha (1930), been arrested alongside men, and organized the All India Women's Conference (founded 1927). In Egypt, Doria Shafik had led 1,500 women in a march on Parliament in February 1951, demanding suffrage. She was later placed under house arrest by Nasser. In Indonesia, women's organizations had participated in the independence struggle against the Dutch and were later systematically targeted in the 1965-1966 anti-communist massacres. In Algeria, women fought with the FLN, as Fanon documented in "Algeria Unveiled" (1959), and were told, after independence in 1962, that women's rights would come "after the revolution was secured." The 1984 Algerian Family Code placed women under male guardianship, required a male relative's permission for marriage, and restricted divorce rights. Twenty-two years after independence, women's legal status had regressed.
Funmilayo Ransome-Kuti attended international conferences of the era as a Nigerian women's rights leader. She had organized the Abeokuta Women's Tax Revolt (1947-1948), mobilizing 20,000 women against colonial taxation and forcing the abdication of the local chief. She was a member of the Women's International Democratic Federation and traveled to the Soviet Union, China, and Eastern Europe. At every international forum, the World Congress of Women (Copenhagen, 1953), the Asian Women's Conference (Colombo, 1958), she argued that women's liberation could not be deferred until after national liberation. The anti-colonial movements disagreed. National liberation came first; women's rights were a secondary contradiction to be addressed later.
The one partial exception at Bandung was Turkey. The Turkish delegation included women. Turkey had granted women's suffrage in 1934, earlier than France (1944) or Switzerland (1971). But Turkey's example reinforced the broader pattern: women's rights were treated as a marker of modernity to be displayed, not a principle to be universalized. The "new nations" emerging from colonialism used women's participation to signal progress (women marched in Egypt, fought in Algeria, organized in India and Vietnam) and then restricted women's autonomy once state power was consolidated.
The feminist critique of Bandung does not reject the conference's anti-colonial purpose. It asks who was included in the "self" of self-determination. When the Dasasila proclaimed the equality of all races and nations, it did not proclaim the equality of all genders within those nations. The conference dismantled the hierarchy between colonizer and colonized while leaving intact the hierarchy between men and women within the newly sovereign states. Jayawardena's conclusion stands: "The promise of national liberation was selectively fulfilled."
Arguments
- The Final Communique mentioned women zero times across ten sections and twenty-nine sub-articles
- Anti-colonial movements recruited women as participants and then excluded them from the states those movements built
- Women fought in every struggle represented at Bandung (India, Egypt, Indonesia, Algeria) and were told women's rights would come "after" national liberation
- The conference dismantled the hierarchy between colonizer and colonized while reproducing the hierarchy between men and women
Sources
- Feminism and Nationalism in the Third World
- A Dying Colonialism
- For Women and the Nation: Funmilayo Ransome-Kuti of Nigeria
- Feminist Subversion and Complicity: Governmentalities and Gender Knowledge in Postcolonial South Asia
The turn
None of the five is a lie. Each has a gap, including the account a sympathetic listener wants to believe most.
Third Worldist / Anti-Colonial
The anti-colonial account leaves out that Turkey, Pakistan, and the Philippines clashed with the neutralists inside the same room, and that the principles it celebrates carried no institutional teeth.
From the record
Internal disagreements at Bandung, where pro-Western delegates from Turkey, Pakistan, and the Philippines clashed with neutralistsThe absence of enforceable mechanisms (the Ten Principles had moral authority but no institutional teeth)Sukarno's authoritarian consolidation of power before and after the conferenceThe failure of Third World solidarity to produce economic redistributionThe realist account leaves out the moral weight of one point five four billion people who had, within living memory, been ruled by someone else.
From the record
The legitimate grievances of colonized peoples that Bandung articulatedWestern complicity in maintaining colonial economic structures after formal independenceThe moral dimension of self-determination for 1.54 billion peopleBandung's institutional legacy in shaping multilateral diplomacy at the UNThe Chinese account leaves out that the same non-interference principle that made Zhou a statesman also shielded Beijing's own suppression of Tibet from outside scrutiny.
From the record
China's suppression of Tibetan sovereignty under the cover of non-interference principlesThe Sino-Indian War's destruction of the Panchsheel partnership within seven yearsMao's domestic campaigns, the Anti-Rightist Movement (1957) and Great Leap Forward (1958-1962), which contradicted Bandung's rhetoric of peaceful developmentChina's later abandonment of non-alignment for great-power competitionThe Pan-African account leaves out Nkrumah's own one-party rule in Ghana, and the divisions among African states that pan-African solidarity never fully closed.
From the record
Nkrumah's own authoritarian governance and one-party state in GhanaInternal African political divisions that weakened pan-African solidarityThe achievements of post-colonial development (rising literacy, life expectancy, and institution- building) despite structural constraintsThe agency of African states in negotiating within the Cold War system for maximum benefitFeminist / Women at the Margins
The feminist account leaves out that the movements it criticizes still produced real, slow gains, and that the Western governments sitting outside that room were just as male run in nineteen fifty five.
From the record
Genuine achievements of post-colonial women's movements in education, legal reform, and political participationWomen's agency within anti-colonial movements, not only as victims but as strategic actors who shaped outcomesThe global context of women's exclusion; Western democracies were also male-dominated in 1955Internal feminist debates about the relationship between national liberation and gender liberation
Close
The Ten Principles said nothing about who owned the copper mines, the oil fields, or the banks.
In twenty twenty six, the CFA franc, controlled by the French Treasury, was still the currency of fourteen African nations.
The record
By the numbers
- Span
- 7 days18-24
- Killed
- None from the conference itself; the…
- Displaced
- 1.5Brepresented by the 29 delegations, 54% of world…
- Place
- Indonesia (host); 29 African and Asian nations attending
Key figures
- SukarnoPresident of Indonesia and host of the Bandung Conference; proclaimed Indonesian independence in 1945; coined the term "Newly Emerging Forces" for the decolonized world; removed from power in 1965-1967 following a US-facilitated military coup; died under house arrest1901 to 1970
- Jawaharlal NehruPrime Minister of India; co-author of the Five Principles of Peaceful Coexistence (Panchsheel, 1954) that became Bandung's framework; champion of non-alignment as Indian foreign policy; India and China went to war seven years after Bandung (1962)1889 to 1964
- Zhou EnlaiPremier of the People's Republic of China; survived an assassination attempt en route to the conference; turned Bandung into a diplomatic triumph by building alliances with non-communist states; proposed peaceful coexistence with the United States from the conference floor1898 to 1976
- Gamal Abdel NasserPresident of Egypt; represented the Arab world at Bandung; nationalized the Suez Canal sixteen months after the conference (July 1956); the Suez Crisis validated Bandung's anti-imperialist framework when Britain, France, and Israel invaded and were forced to withdraw under US and Soviet pressure1918 to 1970
- Carlos P. RomuloHead of the Philippine delegation; former UN General Assembly president; argued at Bandung that anti-colonialism must not become anti-Western; represented the pro-American position within the conference1899 to 1985
- Kwame NkrumahNot yet in power at Bandung (the Gold Coast was still under British rule) but sent observers and organized the All-African People's Conference in Accra (1958) as Bandung's African follow-up; became Ghana's first president in 1957; overthrown in a CIA-backed coup in 19661909 to 1972
Primary sources
· Opening address to the Asian-African Conference, Bandung · April 18, 1955
“We are often told "Colonialism is dead." Let us not be deceived or even soothed by that. I say to you, colonialism is not yet dead. How can we say it is dead, so long as vast areas of Asia and Africa are unfree?”
· Supplementary speech to the Asian-African Conference, Bandung · April 19, 1955
“The people of Asia and Africa... have no aggressive intent. All they want is to live in peace and be friends with all countries of the world.”
· Address to the plenary session of the Asian-African Conference · April 22, 1955
“We do not wish to be used as pawns in power politics. We do not wish to be the playthings of others.”
Threads
- The Indian Independence MovementA lawyer in a loincloth walked to the sea to pick up salt, and broke an empire’s monopoly on everything.
- The Scramble for AfricaFourteen nations met in a Berlin conference room in 1884. Not one African was invited. By 1914, Europeans controlled 90% of the continent.
- The Rwandan GenocideThe UN had a fax warning them. They reduced their force from 2,500 to 270. 800,000 died in 100 days.