Bandung, Global History, and International Law : Critical Pasts and Pending Futures

The 1955 Bandung Conference was a key moment in decolonization and the establishment of a new world order. This, the first sustained multi-disciplinary study of Bandung, explores the development of public international law from a Third World perspective as well as the place of Bandung within global intellectual history.

In 1955, a conference was held in Bandung, Indonesia that was attended by representatives from twenty-nine nations. Against the backdrop of crumbling European empires, Asian and African leaders forged new alliances and established anti-imperial principles for a new world order. The conference came to capture popular imaginations across the Global South and, as counterpoint to the dominant world order, it became both an act of collective imagination and a practical political project for decolonization that inspired a range of social movements, diplomatic efforts, institutional experiments and heterodox visions of the history and future of the world. In this book, leading international scholars explore what the spirit of Bandung has meant to people across the world over the past decades and what it means today. It analyzes Bandung's complicated and pivotal impact on global history, international law and, most of all, justice struggles after the end of formal colonialism.