When Brazil’s President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva opened the BRICS summit in Rio de Janeiro in July 2025, he described the grouping as an ‘heir of the Non-Aligned Movement’. While this might not come as a surprise from a leader of the Global South, it is striking when echoed by a European leader. Speaking at the UN General Assembly in 2023, Chancellor Olaf Scholz noted that the call for self-determination and sovereign equality made by African and Asian states in Bandung, Indonesia, seems more relevant today than ever before.[1]
That a vision set out 70 years ago is considered relevant in today’s vastly different environment speaks to the global yearning for the universality and shared solidarity it expressed. In that hopeful era, the leaders of 29 mostly newly independent countries from Africa and Asia enshrined their hopes for the post-colonial world in the ten Bandung Principles, including respect for sovereignty, non-interference and peaceful coexistence. Six years later, this led to the establishment of the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) in Belgrade, Yugoslavia, in 1961, as countries refused to take sides in the Cold War. While the non-alignment principle rejected a pole-centric view of the global order, the NAM had little choice but to accept it. At the same time, though, the NAM rejected the vision of an international system dominated by the Western and Soviet blocs. This shift marked a move from non-alignment as an ideal – seeking to avoid polarity – to the movement’s reality as a semi-organised bloc that effectively was a ʻthird poleʼ in the Cold War order.
Much progress has been made in line with the Bandung Principles. More of the world is attuned to Bandung today than ever: nearly three-quarter of countries are non-aligned – or multi-aligned. Nations are robustly defending their sovereignty; and, at least in principle, racial equality is an accepted fact, as, rhetorically, is the need for an equal distribution of power among countries. The four successive G20 presidencies held by developing countries – Indonesia, India, Brazil and South Africa – since 2022 and the African Union’s membership in the group signal how Bandung’s call for a more inclusive and multipolar order is now embodied in international platforms and groupings that have further amplified its global reach. The number of guest countries from the Global South invited to summits of the essentially Western G7 has increased.
Yet in 2025, so much remains the same. As in 1955, when the world was emerging from wars and colonialism, there is a polycrisis today. The ‘rulesbased order’, built on the Bretton Woods institutions and the United Nations, which made the world more peaceful and prosperous over a long period, is violated by its architects. With its erosion, multiple conflicts are ongoing while issues of sovereignty and territorial integrity, neo-colonialism and non-interference are back on the table. Normative revisionism is becoming the order of the day with international law and norms under assault from multiple sides. Issues of migration blur the line between domestic and international affairs. Meta-crises of health, climate change and poverty call for global collective action, yet such action is increasingly in short supply.
‘Veto-holding powers in particular display a distinct lack of interest in creating an equitable new order or reforming the old one.’
Veto-holding powers in particular display a distinct lack of interest in creating an equitable new order or reforming the old one. While many in Europe are aware of the necessity of international reform, they still question the legitimacy of those advocating it, as seen with the African peace mission to Russia and Ukraine in 2023, where scepticism toward Africa’s role as a mediator reflected broader doubts about who is entitled to shape international solutions. Even when it comes to new groupings like BRICS, their lack of collective advocacy limits their impact on efforts to reform or to remake the global order. Similarly, many in the Global South are sceptical about European calls for an alliance for multilateralism, seeing these as a self-serving attempt to maintain the status quo rather than develop a new multilateralism that is fit for purpose and has wider global legitimacy.
At Körber-Stiftung’s Global History & Politics Dialogue conducted in Bandung earlier this year, the discussions revealed the prevalence of three political principles 70 years after the Bandung Conference: non-alignment, multi-alignment and neutrality. Multi-alignment is often described as the new face of non-alignment. Yet it is crucial to understand that these terms fundamentally represent different things in international politics. Non-alignment was essentially about values and visions of the global order, including the rejection of the two main perspectives that were on offer during the Cold War. The ‘non’ in non-alignment was a deliberate choice for the leaders of the NAM.[2] More than just an international stance or a national strategy, in the 1960s, non-alignment aimed to be a collective movement that united countries with diverse interests in a common voice that was aligned with neither the West nor the East. The NAM sought to protect the independence of countries that were all too familiar with colonial rule.
But non-alignment, as a movement, also underpinned the process of crafting an agenda for collective self-reliance, as it did in 1974 with the call for a New International Economic Order (NIEO). Multi-alignment, on the other hand, comes across as a pragmatic hedging strategy – an adaptive approach for a multipolar world – that is increasingly relevant. Neutrality is also regaining relevance but, unlike non-alignment and multi-alignment, it is not merely a strategy but rather a principle that leads to nonalignment and non-interference. It must be understood as the unwillingness to join any military alliance or take clear sides on the major crises or conflicts, but it does not include the passivity with which it is often associated.
While many countries have adopted neutrality on pressing geopolitical issues, they have also embraced multi-alignment to navigate the contemporary global disorder and emerging multipolarity in the international system. This is particularly true for energy-dependent countries like India, the world’s second-largest importer of oil, and for others like Egypt and even Brazil, whose dependence on fertilizers from Russia and Ukraine has been disrupted by the war against Ukraine. Keeping their economies running is a key reason for neutrality and multi-alignment. However, this approach has drawn considerable criticism from Europe, where neutrality toward Russia’s war is seen as difficult to reconcile with the UN Charter and collective responses to aggression. At the same time, many in Europe acknowledge the developmental and energy imperatives behind such choices, but stress that neutrality should not weaken efforts to uphold international law, which countries in the Global South accuse Europe of actively undermining during the Gaza war.
A key feature of the Bandung Conference was economic decolonisation and the ‘urgency of promoting economic development’.[3] The Bretton Woods conference in 1944 sought to set out the rules for economic engagement, but the terms of trade were unfavourable to developing countries, just as they were under colonisation. An attempt to rectify this was the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development held in 1964, where a set of proposals for more equitable trade and the dominance of international money, was put forward under the NIEO. The call for such an order, officially adopted in 1974, went unheeded, as the dominance of the order based on the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank grew. Several ideas for a new NIEO have been pursued since, from the Netherlands-based Transnational Institute[4] and even in books published by the UN recommending a ‘New, New International Economic Order’.[5]
Today, the complexity of the system has intensified. The debt crisis, especially for the developing world, is acute and unaddressed. The IMF’s dominance is reduced, but the U.S. dollar still dominates international trade and finance, even if an estimated 58 per cent of trade is de-dollarised.[6] For many of the Bandung countries, informal institutions provide crucial security and resilience, even if these are viewed as weak in the Global North. Remittances sent home by migrant workers and professionals abroad are an example of this as they often rely on informal networks such as the Hawala system.
Another feature of Bandung was an effort regarding energy, a scarce resource in much of the developing world. The Bandung communiqué mentioned especially the sharing of nuclear and atomic energy knowledge and systems. Over the years, the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries has kept energy prices stable, providing some predictability, while at times also abusing its price-setting power. While U.S. President Donald Trump has threatened sweeping penalties on all buyers of Russian oil, so far the brunt has fallen on India, which at the time of writing faces a 50 per cent U.S. tariff — from a European perspective a necessary step to curtail Russia’s revenue stream and end the war in Ukraine. Adding to the uncertainty is the limited supply of critical minerals, dominated by a few countries, that are crucial for clean energy technologies. The combination of technology, energy and critical minerals is a potent concentration of power, argued Ram Singh, director of the Delhi School of Economics, during our Bandung Dialogue in April.
How to overcome new monopolies in trade, funding and natural resources? One suggestion was that BRICS, which includes producers and consumers of energy, could provide a platform for energy cooperation, especially across the Global South. BRICS has a currency reserve arrangement, but its New Development Bank, which can provide an option besides the World Bank for developing countries, has not been strong or large enough to bail out troubled members. BRICS can provide a powerful critique of the global order and some of its members – such as Brazil, India, Indonesia and South Africa – potentially showcase the Global South’s version of multilateralism. However, so far, it has operated as a collection of communities, with hundreds of annual meetings of various officials and ministers. Experts agree that BRICS will serve as a platform for coordination and issue-based cooperation only, and not as a replacement for the G7.
Meanwhile, it is not difficult to replicate one Bandung success: continuous exchanges between the Global South countries. Bandung created an ‘everyday internationalism’, says Carolien Stolte of Leiden University, and everyday internationalists claimed the Afro-Asian space. The 1950s and 1960s were replete with student exchange projects, legal exchanges, and jurists’ visits.[7] Afro-Asian legal conferences took place without European influences. The first and largest Global South information exchange was the Non-Aligned News Agency Pool, a cooperation between non-aligned countries. It aimed to counter Western-biased reporting and was linked to the idea of a New World Information Communications Order, which sought a more balanced and democratised news flow, among 40 countries. Unfortunately, the agency faded away in the 1990s.
Even though today’s digitalisation and its ecosystems have democratised information down to the individual, these systems are in flux, becoming prone to propaganda, misinformation and the influence of giant tech corporations. While there are still student exchanges, legal exchanges and jurist visits only happen if they are driven by bilateral relations.
In 1955, many countries felt alone and weak, says Nabil Fahmy, a former foreign minister of Egypt, and for them Bandung was an article of faith. At the conference, they found commonality and a path forward. Collective advocacy was the mark of Bandung. The Times of India wrote in 1954: ‘we will see if solidarity trumps ideology’. In 1955, there was considerable disagreement among participants yet, despite this, the 29 countries were stronger together.
In our multipolar world, with its multiple alignments, is it possible to be inspired by the still relevant Bandung Principles? And how to mobilize countries in the West with the spirit of Bandung to reform and innovate in the international system? What could be the common ground between middle powers in the Global South and Global North? What role can Europe and Germany play together with their multi-aligned partners to ensure the survival of multilateralism in this new era? More pressing, how can middle powers in the Global South and Global North make a common cause in defending international law, not least international humanitarian law, in a principled rather than selective manner?
In this publication, more than a dozen authors from countries that participated in the Bandung Conference, from the wider Global South, and from Europe and Germany tackle these questions. They do so along several dimensions: values and interests (sovereignty, non-interference, human rights, global equity, solidarity), strategies and instruments (climate-change adaptation, debt restructuring, digital sovereignty, resource nationalism), modes of cooperation (South-South and triangular cooperation, regional alliances and ad hoc coalitions, platform diplomacy from the G20 to World Bank, the UN Office for South-South Cooperation and BRICS). The articles are not intended to produce consensus but to stage an informed conversation across vantage points – showing where interests align and where they diverge, and which steps are feasible now. The contributions share a commitment to treating the Bandung Spirit as a lens or toolkit, not a script – to interrogate its relevance, to learn from its limits and to engage it critically in order to find workable proposals for a renewed multilateralism fit for today’s fragmented, multialigned order.
You can download the Bandung at 70: Multilateralism in a New Era of Multi-Alignment here.
Manjeet Kripalani is the Executive Director, Gateway House.
Florian Bigge is the Programme Director History Forum, Körber-Stiftung.
Julia Ganter is the Programme Director International Affairs, Körber-Stiftung.
Leona Harting is the Programme Manager, Körber-Stiftung.
Carlos Frederico de Souza Coelho is a researcher, BRICS Policy Center.
Paulo Esteves is a member of the Academic Council, BRICS Policy Center.
Galip Dalay is the Senior Consulting Fellow, Turkey Initiative, Middle East and North Africa Programme, Chatham House.
Dino Patti Djalal is the Founder of Foreign Policy Community of Indonesia FPCI.
Faisal Devji is a Professor of Indian History, Oxford University.
Steven Gruzd is the Head of African Governance and Diplomacy Programme, South African Institute of International Affairs (SAIIA).
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For interview requests or for permission to republish, please contact outreach@gatewayhouse.in.
References:
[1] Speech by Federal Chancellor Olaf Scholz at the 78th General Debate of the United Nations General Assembly New York. (2023). https://new-york-un.diplo.de/un-en/2618622-2618622
[2] Faisal Devji, historian, Oxford, at Körber-Stiftung’s Global History & Politics Dialogue. (April 16 – 18 2025).
[3] Final Communiqué of the Asian-African conference of Bandung. (1955). https://www.cvce.eu/obj/final_communique_of_the_asian_ african_conference_of_bandung_24_april_1955-en676237bd-72f7-471f-949a-88b6ae513585.html
[4] Center for AI and Digital Policy. (2025). Artifical Intelligence and Democratic Values. https://www.caidp.org/.
[5] Chang, H.-J. (2021). Building pro-development multilateralism: Towards a ‘New’ New International Economic Order. https://www.un-ilibrary.org/content/journals /16840348/2020/132/4
[6] Chhangani, A., de Kruijf, L. (2025). Dollar Dominance Monitor. https://www.atlanticcouncil.org/programs/geoeconomicscenter/dollar-dominance-monitor/
[7] From the Bandung communique (A2): ‘The participating countries agreed to provide technical assistance to one another, to the maximum extent practicable, in the form of: experts, trainees, pilot projects and equipment for demonstration purposes; exchange of know-how and establishment of national, and where possible, regional training and research institutes for imparting technical knowledge and skills in co-operation with the existing international agencies.’ http://www.cvce.eu/obj/final_communique_of_the_asian_ african_conference_of_bandung_24_april_1955-en676237bd-72f7-471f-949a-88b6ae513585.html