The year 2025 marks the seventieth anniversary of the Asian–African Conference held in Bandung, Indonesia, in April 1955. That meeting of twenty-nine states and liberation movements represented a foundational moment in the history of international relations: it brought together the voices of newly independent and colonised peoples to articulate a vision of global coexistence based on equality, sovereignty, and mutual respect. The “Bandung Spirit” that emerged from the conference provided a moral and political vocabulary for challenging both the Cold War’s bipolar divisions and the hierarchies of the colonial order.
Seven decades later, the same principles continue to resonate in a world again undergoing systemic transformation. The diffusion of power, the emergence of new centres of influence, and renewed contestations over justice and development invite reflection on Bandung not merely as a historical episode but as a continuing frame of reference. Commemorating the seventieth anniversary therefore involves more than recalling the past: it offers an opportunity to reconsider Bandung’s contribution to global thought and to examine how its core ideas inform contemporary discussions of multipolarity, solidarity, and decolonial renewal.
Bandung 70 – Building the World Anew brings together scholars from Eurasia to engage with this task. The volume approaches Bandung as a living and evolving process rather than as a fixed event. Its aim is to investigate how the original agenda of political independence and moral equality has been translated into different institutional, regional, and intellectual contexts, and how these translations continue to shape the outlook of the Global South. The contributors represent a range of disciplinary and methodological perspectives, yet they converge in viewing Bandung as both an analytical category and a normative orientation: a way of thinking about international order that privileges dialogue, autonomy, and cooperation.
The essays assembled here trace Bandung’s presence across three broad and interrelated dimensions. The first concerns the reconfiguration of world order. Several contributions examine the systemic and structural implications of Bandung’s legacy, showing how the Non-Aligned Movement’s call for a more balanced international system anticipated later developments in global political economy. Annamária Artner analyses the continuity between the Movement’s developmental vision and the rise of BRICS as an alternative pole in world economic governance, while Gracjan Cimek interprets Bandung through the lens of critical security studies, identifying in contemporary notions of “indivisible security” the extension of an older critique of bloc politics. Complementing these perspectives, Affabile Rifawan and his co-authors explore BRICS and MIKTA as differing yet overlapping experiments in Southern multilateralism, and Tian Huifang traces the evolution of China’s non-alignment strategy, demonstrating the durability of the Five Principles of Peaceful Coexistence in a multipolar environment. Collectively, these studies recast Bandung as a conceptual foundation for re-imagining global structures beyond hegemonic dominance.
A second set of contributions turns from the systemic level to the regional and diplomatic domain, showing how Bandung’s ideals have been appropriated and adapted within Asian contexts. Ramachandra Byrappa’s study of India highlights the transformation of non-alignment into the current policy of multi-alignment, revealing continuity in the underlying pursuit of strategic autonomy. Apicha Chutipongpisit analyses Thailand’s efforts to balance its economic relations with China and its alliance with the United States, an exercise that reflects Bandung’s pragmatic accommodation of principle and necessity. Péter Klemensits reconstructs Cambodia’s long association with the Non-Aligned Movement and demonstrates how smaller states drew upon the moral capital of Bandung to navigate external pressures. Máté Szakáli examines forms of South–South cooperation in contemporary Southeast Asia, identifying regional initiatives that institutionalise Bandung’s ethos of partnership and mutual benefit. Together these essays depict non-alignment not as a static doctrine but as a repertoire of strategies through which states pursue sovereignty and cooperation under changing historical conditions.
The final group of studies extends the discussion from diplomacy to intellectual history and moral philosophy. Gábor Búr situates the “Spirit of Bandung” within Africa’s political imagination, linking it to decolonisation, Pan-Africanism, and present efforts toward continental integration. Ádám Stempler interprets Bandung as an ethical experiment in coexistence, arguing that the concept of (non-)alignment represents a normative stance on difference and dialogue rather than a purely strategic choice. In a complementary vein, Máté Szakáli connects Indonesia’s state philosophy, Pancasila, with the universalist ambitions articulated at Bandung, proposing that both articulate a form of decolonial humanism grounded in relational equality and plural modernity. Read together, these contributions position the Conference as a framework for producing alternative global imaginaries.
Across these three domains—the systemic, the regional, and the philosophical—the essays converge on a shared argument: Bandung constitutes an enduring framework for thinking about global order from the perspective of the post-colonial world. The conference’s guiding principles of sovereignty, mutual respect, non-interference, and cooperation remain analytically relevant and normatively compelling. They provide a basis for interpreting contemporary shifts in power and for envisioning a more equitable international community. The volume invites reflection on how these principles can be re-articulated considering present challenges such as economic dependency, environmental vulnerability, and technological inequality.
The editors are grateful to all contributors for their rigorous scholarship and to the supporting institutions that facilitated research and dialogue in honour of the seventieth anniversary of the Bandung Conference. In publishing this online volume, the Eurasia Center sought to bring together diverse regional perspectives and, in doing so, to recreate in scholarly form the spirit of deliberation that characterized the original 1955 Bandung Conference. The essays do not claim to speak for the Global South as a unified entity; rather, they illustrate the plurality of approaches through which Bandung’s legacy continues to be interpreted and applied. If the Conference once sought to build the world anew by asserting the agency of newly independent nations, this volume suggests that the same aspiration endures in the ongoing search for an international order based on justice and reciprocity. Seventy years after Bandung, the task remains both unfinished and indispensable.
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