The Non-Aligned Movement and Cold War Geography

In April 1955, representatives of twenty-nine Asian and African states met in Bandung, Indonesia, for what became known as the Asian-African Conference, hosted by President Sukarno and attended by leaders including India's Jawaharlal Nehru, Egypt's Gamal Abdel Nasser, and China's Zhou Enlai. The conference issued a ten-point declaration on international peace and cooperation, condemned colonialism explicitly, and promoted a common Afro-Asian political identity independent of both Western and Soviet blocs — a gathering historian Vijay Prashad has described as a founding moment for what became known as the "Third World" project of postcolonial solidarity.