Making a World after Empire: The Bandung Moment and Its Political Afterlives

In April 1955, twenty-nine countries from Africa, Asia, and the Middle East came together for a diplomatic conference in Bandung, Indonesia, intending to define the direction of the postcolonial world. Representing approximately two-thirds of the world’s population, the Bandung conference occurred during a key moment of transition in the mid-twentieth century—amid the global wave of decolonization that took place after the Second World War and the nascent establishment of a new cold war world order. Conference participants such as Jawaharlal Nehru of India, Gamal Abdel Nasser of Egypt, Zhou Enlai of China, and President Sukarno of Indonesia seized this occasion of change to attempt the creation of a political alternative to the dual threats of Western neocolonialism and the cold war interventionism of the United States and the Soviet Union.

This collection of essays speaks to contemporary discussions of empire and decolonization and explores the precursors and afterlives of the Bandung moment. Making a World after Empire reestablishes the conference’s importance in the global history of the twentieth century.