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

This study of the 1955 Bandung Conference is central to the history of international law and the post-colonial world order.

Luis Eslava (Edited by), Michael Fakhri (Edited by), Vasuki Nesiah (Edited by)

9781107561045, Cambridge University Press

Paperback / softback, published 13 December 2018

733 pages, 2 b/w illus.
22.8 x 15.1 x 3.7 cm, 1 kg

'The era of Bandung is over, and its spirit has dissipated. But that does not mean that the history that was made there is no longer relevant or that the spirit cannot be conjured to unimaginable feats in our present day. Bandung, Global History, and International Law mines that old history for nuggets that might inform our mapless present.' Vijay Prashad, Trinity College, Hartford

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.

List of illustrations
List of contributors
Foreword
Acknowledgements
Introduction: the Spirit of Bandung
Part I. Bandung Histories: 1. Anti-imperialism: then and now
2. Newer is truer: time, space, and subjectivity at the Bandung Conference
3. From Versailles to Bandung: the interwar origins of anti-colonialism
4. Bandung: reflections on the sea, the world, and colonialism
5. Nationalism, imperialism, and Bandung: nineteenth-century Japan as a prelude
6. Ghostly visitations: 'questioning heirs' and the tragic tasks of narrating Bandung futures
7. Bandung 1955: the deceit and the conceit
8. Not a place, but a project: Bandung, TWAIL, and the aesthetics of Thirdness
Part II. Political Solidarities and Geographical Affiliations: 9. Challenging the lifeline of imperialism: reassessing Afro-Asian solidarity and related activism in the decade 1955–1965
10. Bandung, China, and the making of world order in East Asia
11. Decolonization as a Cold War imperative: Bandung and the Soviets
12. Central Asia as an object of Orientalist narratives in the age of Bandung
13. Latin American anti-imperialist movements and anti-communist states during the Bandung era
14. Peripheral parallels? Europe's edges and the world of Bandung
15. The Bandung Conference and Latin America: a decolonial dialogue with Oscar Correas
16. A triple struggle: non-alignment, Yugoslavia, and national, social and geopolitical emancipation
17. 'Let us first of all have unity among us': Bandung, international law, and the empty politics of solidarity
Part III. Nations and their Others: Bandung at Home: 18. The colonial debris of Bandung: equality and facilitating the rise of the Hindu right in India
19. From Bandung 1955 to Bangladesh 1971: postcolonial self-determination and Third-World failures in South Asia
20. Reimagining Bandung for women at work in Egypt: law and the woman between the factory and the 'social factory'
21. Rethinking the concept of colonialism in Bandung and its African Union aftermath
22. China and Africa: development, land, and the colonial legacy
23. Bandung's legacy for the Arab Spring
24. Applying the memory of the Bandung: lessons from Australia's negative case study
25. Bandung in the shadow: the Brazilian experience
Part IV. Post-Colonial Agendas: Justice, Rights and Development: 26. The humanization of the Third World
27. Bandung's legacy: solidarity and contestation in global women's rights
28. Reflections on rhetoric and rage: Bandung and environmental injustice
29. From statesmen to technocrats to financiers: development agents in the Third World
30. Between Bandung and Doha: international economic law and developing countries
31. The Bandung ethic and international human rights praxis: yesterday, today, and tomorrow
Part V. Another International Law: 32. Bandung and the origins of Third World sovereignty
33. Letters from Bandung: encounters with another international law
34. Altering international law: Nasser, Bandung, and the Suez Crisis
35. Palestine at Bandung: the longwinded start of a re-imagined international law
36. 'Must have been love': the non-aligned future of 'a warm December'
37. The Bandung Declaration in the twenty-first century: are we there yet?
38. Virtue pedagogy and international law teaching
Epilogue: the legacy of Bandung
Index.

Subject Areas: Public international law [LBB], Comparative politics [JPB], National liberation & independence, post-colonialism [HBTR]