by Walden Bello, with contributions from Shalmali Guttal
The Bandung Conference in April 1955 has achieved the stature of being a mythical moment in the history of the Global South. There have been many accounts that have highlighted its downsides—among them, the underrepresentation of leaders from Sub-Saharan Africa and the absence of anyone from Latin America, the way Cold War geopolitical rivalries found their way into the meeting, its legitimization of the nation-state as the principal unit of interaction among the peoples of the post-colonial world, the “rivalry” between Indian Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru and Chinese Foreign Minister Zhou En Lai, and the…