On the seventieth anniversary of the Bandung Asian-African Conference (Bandung Conference)—the first gathering of the leaders of Asian and African countries in history—the legacy of that historical event and its continued relevance in today’s world present interesting questions for study. The significance of the Bandung Conference undoubtedly lies in its ushering in the Non-Aligned Movement in international politics and related developments such as the “New International Economic Order” of the 1960s and 1970s.1 From a policy perspective, the Ten Principles announced at the end of the Bandung Conference (Bandung Principles) have defined Third World values in post-war international relations. This essay argues that the perspective of the People’s Republic of China (China or PRC) with regard to international law has been influenced to a considerable extent by the Bandung Principles. As a conference participant, China endorsed the outcome. Its view of the international legal order has evolved during the intervening years; indeed, it was only in 1971 that China took back its rightful seat in the UN system and began to engage with the international community at all levels. Bandung has nonetheless remained a referent throughout its rise to the status of a major world power. Tracing the evolution of Bandung’s influence on China, and vice versa, is meaningful, given that the international order is presently facing existential challenges of climate change, pandemics, and rifts in interstate relations.

Decolonization, naturally, assumes the presence of colonization. For most formerly colonized states decolonization has meant: (1) honoring the inherited colonial treaties; and (2) accepting uti possidetis juris. But what does decolonization mean for the Bandung states that were never formally colonized? For these states, colonial treaties are allegedly unequal while uti possidetis is a restriction on acquiring imagined pre-colonial territories. This essay argues that Bandung’s platitudes about Third World unity notwithstanding, states that were never colonized, or non-colonials, had a different and at times tense relation to some of Bandung’s fundamental commitments. The cases of the law of the sea (LOS) negotiations between 1972 and 1982 and China’s claims to the South China Sea show that these tensions are still unresolved.

The Final Communiqué of the Bandung conference included a set of ten principles that emphasized “respect for the sovereignty and territorial integrity of all nations” and “abstention from intervention or interference in the internal affairs of another country.”1 In this essay, I examine the impact of these emphases on the domestic law of one of the Bandung states, specifically the law of citizenship in India. Given the significance of state sovereignty and the demarcation of the domestic and international spheres, international law has only generated partial and uneasy responses to questions of citizenship and the intentional creation of statelessness through state policy.2 Using the Indian case study, I argue that Bandung’s focus on borders has facilitated the disenfranchisement of religious minorities, requiring a rethink of the nation-state as the basis of the international order.

We remember history through our own national identities, and recollections of Bandung are no exception in that respect.1 Colonialism’s “illegitimacy” had many meanings for the twenty-nine countries that joined the 1955 conference. Countries like China and Japan in Northeast Asia and ancient kingdoms in Southeast Asia like Thailand sought civilizational equality during the colonial era. China has since recovered territory such as Hong Kong which it sees as having been acquired through unequal colonial era treaties,2 but elsewhere in Asia and Africa Bandung became a declaration of liberation instead. Today, however, there is a tendency to circumvent the complications of these historical differences when advancing a unitary understanding of Bandung’s Final Communiqué.3 This essay uses the example of North Borneo and juxtaposes that against well-known Chinese views in returning to a theme I have explored elsewhere.4 It argues that while some Bandung nations might find it undesirable to reject every incident of their European creation, others might simply treat all of colonialism’s acts as illegitimate.

The idea of decolonization that animated the spirit of the 1955 Bandung Conference continues to power imaginations of an alternative to the world Bandung inhabited. In this essay, we look upon Africa from Bandung, and simultaneously from Africa to Bandung, to recover an “otherwise”—a seeing of the future from Africa’s pasts. In the future envisioned in Bandung and beyond, flag independence was regarded as the first stop in the project of decolonization.1 The conference was to provide both “guidance to mankind … [on] the way which it must take to attain safety and peace” and “evidence that Asia and Africa have been reborn, nay, that a New Asia and a New Africa have been born!”2 As critical accounts have noted, the alternative “otherwise” Bandung offered was far from singular; it was multivocal and divergent, and this diversity is integral to the multiple readings and memories of Bandung.3 This multivocality made Bandung a successful performance of different visions of the world, including those of capitalism, communism, and socialism. Yet, Bandung was far from an ecumenical platform that offered little more than a cacophony of diverse voices and visions. The remedies may have been varied but the diagnoses of the malaise were unanimous—cultural imperialism and the racialism (i.e., racial and religious subordination) that instantiated and sustained it. Bandung was an opportunity to reimagine a world beyond imperial hierarchies. In what follows, we scrutinize Bandung’s legacy through the lens of Africa’s pasts. We note that for all the decolonial ethos that powered Bandung, its insistence on colonial legal forms inadvertently sustained rather than overturned imperial forms of subordination. We then offer an alternative mode of reimagining the world by drawing on recent recoveries of international legal histories of Africa prior to European colonization.

There are worlds we name, and worlds we summon into being. The Arab World has long inhabited both roles—invoked in international law as geopolitical reality, yet shaped by repetition, signification, and remembered alignments. It appears over the centuries not as a subject with agency, but as a revenant: referenced for its solidarity and unity, yet rarely allowed either coherence or consequence. What holds the “Arab World” together in international law, this essay argues, is not essence but performance, not institutional substance, but the staging of collectivity. Bandung (1955) made this dynamic briefly visible: nine Arab states, fragmented in voice and agenda, appeared united; Palestine, symbolically central, remained formally absent. The pattern endures, from the choreography of the Arab League to strategic posturing in relation to Gaza’s ongoing genocide by Israel. The “Arab World,” in this light, is not an unfulfilled project, but a legal and political arrangement, summoned, displayed, and sustained in a state of permanent deferral.