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Accompanying this assertion of agency was a stirring call for international solidarity in the face of war, instability, and continued colonial exploitation by Western powers. The latter, Sukarno warned, “is a skillful and determined enemy” which “appears in many guises,” even in countries that have achieved formal political independence. Meeting these challenges, according to Sukarno, would require the countries of Asia and Africa to resist the temptation to withdraw into a politics of parochial nationalism. Rather, he argued, “the States of the world today depend one upon the other and no nation can be an island unto itself… The affairs of all the world are our affairs, and our future depends upon the solutions found to all international problems, however far or distant they may seem.”

Contained within Sukarno’s inaugural address to the Bandung Conference are the core principles of Third Worldism: an international political movement, born out of mid-20th-century decolonization and shaped by the geopolitical uncertainty of the Cold War, that sought to cultivate ties of fraternity and solidarity among the countries of Asia, Africa, and Latin America. Third Worldism offered a way for these countries to come together across racial, religious, and ideological lines to address the most pressing issues of their time—decolonization, peacebuilding, and nuclear disarmament all took center stage at Bandung—and married an anti-colonial political vision with a radically internationalist one.

This is not, however, the way that Third Worldism is usually remembered. As historians Gyan Prakash and Jeremy Adelman point out in the introduction to the 2022 collection Inventing the Third World: In Search of Freedom for the Postwar Global South, Third Worldism is widely regarded today as an anachronistic relic of the Cold War, its political vision remembered primarily for its status of non-alignment between the Western and Soviet blocs, rather than for its emphasis on anti-colonial solidarity and building a new global order free from hierarchy and domination. Even the term “Third World” itself has largely fallen out of favor; now viewed by many as offensive, it has been replaced by modern coinages like “developing countries” and the “Global South.” As Prakash and Adelman put it, “to recall the Third World is to dredge up failed dreams and forgettable nightmares.”

But perhaps we shouldn’t be quite so quick to consign the Third World to the dustbin of history. All it takes is a cursory glance at the daily headlines to plainly see that even today in 2025, on the 70th anniversary of the Bandung Conference, the issues that Sukarno identified in his address—the threat of conflict between nuclear-armed superpowers, continued colonial and neocolonial exploitation and violence, an international economic system designed to benefit wealthy nations at the expense of poor ones—still persist, often in even more malevolent form.

In many ways, one might even argue that the only thing that has significantly changed, apart from the rise of neoliberal globalization and the onset of the climate crisis—both of which, of course, only exacerbate the problems that occupied center stage at Bandung—is the end of Cold War-era bipolarity. What this moment therefore demands, I argue, is a revival of Third Worldism’s radically internationalist vision— what is often referred to as the “Bandung Spirit”—adapted to learn from the mistakes of the past and meet the needs of the present.

The League’s influence on the larger
cause of anti-colonial solidarity was apparent
at Bandung in 1955, where Sukarno made explicit reference to it in his opening speech. Like the League, Bandung was marked by the overwhelming diversity of its participants—a representative cross-section of Asian and African nations whose unity ultimately derived from their shared commitment to anti-colonial politics. The final communiqué from the Conference proclaimed that “colonialism in all its manifestations is an evil which should speedily be brought to an end” and declared its “support of the cause of freedom and independence” for all peoples subjected to “alien subjugation, domination and exploitation.”

In order to counter these invidious global forces, the Conference established a commitment to fostering solidarity between Third World nations on a number of fronts, including economic and cultural cooperation, as well as promoting world peace and complete nuclear disarmament. The international policy agenda laid out at Bandung was ambitious and far-reaching, but of even greater significance was the new politics of Third Worldist solidarity that the Conference represented. “The audacity of Bandung produced its own image,” writes Prashad, as people around the world “began to speak of the ‘Bandung Spirit.’ What they meant was simple: that the colonized world had now emerged to claim its space in world affairs, not just as an adjunct of the First or Second worlds, but as a player in its own right.”

The “Bandung Spirit” was given further articulation at a series of subsequent conferences throughout the 1950s and 1960s. First came the 1957 Afro-Asian People’s Solidarity Conference in Cairo, which was twice the
size of Bandung. In his opening address to
the conference, Anwar Sadat—then an advisor to Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser— declared that the conference had been convened “partly in honor of the spirit of Bandung and as a reminder of the principles and ideals it stands for, and partly to push it a step forward.”

As Prashad points out, what most sharply distinguished the Cairo conference from Bandung was the role of women, who actively participated as delegates and speakers. Recognizing the vital contributions of women to national liberation struggles, the conference created an “Afro-Asian Federation for Women.” Both the 1957 conference and the subsequent 1961 convening of the women’s federation would adopt an agenda for women’s empowerment that encompassed both the economic and cultural spheres, taking positions supporting women’s equality in the workforce and opposing practices such as forced marriage and polygamy. In this sense, the primary contribution of the 1957 Cairo conference to the “Bandung spirit” was to infuse it with a distinctly feminist agenda, which joined calls for women’s empowerment with the same internationalist ethos that underpinned the larger Third Worldist project.

Four years after the Cairo conference, representatives of the Third World came together in Belgrade for a meeting that Prashad aptly refers to in The Darker Nations as “the Third World’s Yalta.” It was at Belgrade where the most famous legacy of Third Worldism, the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM), was born. Non-alignment, Prashad notes, had both a negative and a positive dimension—negative in the sense that it eschewed an alliance with either the Soviet Union or the United States, and positive insofar as it “indicated a principle for interstate relations that refused brute force in favor of mutual development.” Ultimately, however, NAM’s political diversity made it all but impossible for the organization to develop “an ideologically coherent and unified stance” on most issues, apart from nuclear disarmament and the democratization of the U.N. While NAM still exists today, its substantive impact on international politics has fallen far short of non-alignment’s initial radical vision.

In 1966, the Third World convened
once again in Havana for the Tricontinental Conference, which brought together the Third Worldist leaders of Africa and Asia with their counterparts in Latin America for the first time. Debates during the Conference centered on
the United States’s imperialist war in Vietnam, with a split between the delegates who wanted to achieve international justice through the peaceful strengthening of U.N. institutions, and those who preferred armed struggle as a means of anti-colonial liberation. In the end, Prashad writes, while “the Tricontinental neither went out of its way to promote revolutionary wars or violent acts, nor did it condemn them outright,” it did “offer its support for ongoing wars [of liberation] because, the final resolution contended, imperialists do not listen to exploited peoples.”

Today’s world, of course, looks very different from that of the leaders who gathered in Bandung and Cairo and Havana. Fifty-eight years on from the Tricontinental Conference and nearly 70 years on from Bandung, the transnational networks of anti-colonial solidarity that connected newly independent countries in the 1950s and 1960s have fractured, and the Third Worldist ideology underpinning these networks has all but vanished. So what went wrong?

Prashad’s analysis in The Darker Nations offers a number of interconnected answers that can help us answer this crucial question. “On paper,” he writes, “the Third World gleamed. As the project met governance,” however, “it began to tarnish rapidly” for several reasons, among the most significant
 of which was the failure to disrupt the positions of entrenched domestic elites that had enjoyed privileged status under colonial rule. In the absence of a “genuine social revolution” that could have radically reshaped the internal structure of formerly colonized societies, Prashad argues, the power of domestic elites only became further entrenched, and the Third World project quickly became inhibited by “the inculcation of sexism, and the graded inequality of clan, caste, and tribe.”

This was only exacerbated, says Prashad, by the failure of many national liberation movements across the Third World to continue to mobilize the masses after formal independence was achieved. As a result, many liberation movements crystallized into corrupt, authoritarian one-party regimes that ruled from
 the top down, rather than through popular democratic participation. (Algeria—where the FLN led the country to independence and established itself as a bastion of Third Worldism only to devolve into military rule and stagnated state capitalism—is an illustrative example of this phenomenon.) The institutionalization of nationalist parties as the sole governing organs of newly independent states across much of the Third World meant that the line between the national liberation movement and the state apparatus quickly became blurred beyond recognition, so that the prospect of an anti-colonial politics beyond or outside the state seemed all but unthinkable.

Alongside the entrenchment of elite powers and the political demobilization of mass movements came the organized and violent destruction of the left across the Third World—often thanks to the direct support provided to right-wing movements and coup regimes by Western intelligence services—and the elevation of reactionary ethnic nationalism in its stead. The decimation of leftist movements throughout 
the Third World, Prashad writes, meant that “the most conservative, even reactionary social classes attained dominance over the political platform created in Bandung. As an adjunct to the military regimes, the political forces that emerged rejected the ecumenical anticolonial nationalism of the left and the liberals for a cruel cultural nationalism that emphasized racialism, religion, and hierarchy.”

Within formerly colonized societies, ethnic and religious minorities were no longer seen as belonging to the larger national community that had been forged in the fires of anti-colonial struggle—rather, they were scapegoated as outliers, traitors to the “true” ethnic nation. In order to channel discontent away from ruling elites, regimes disseminated nativist propaganda intended to erode social cohesion by producing mistrust and suspicion— and in many cases, genocidal hatred—against an imagined “enemy” that was often defined in racialized terms.

As a result of these converging factors, the “golden age of Third Worldism” eventually began to lose its luster—as golden ages tend 
to do. “By the 1980s,” writes Mark Berger, “Third Worldism as both a revolutionary and
a reformist project had entered into a period
of precipitous decline.” Even though Third Worldist politics had, in the 1970s, begun to coalesce around the U.N.-backed demand for a “New International Economic Order (NIEO)” that would reorient the global economy to level the playing field and eliminate structural inequalities between countries, this vision was ousted in the 1980s and 1990s by the rise of a U.S.-led project of neoliberal globalization, spurred on by the Reagan administration’s “reinvigorated anti-communist crusade” and the fall of the Soviet Union.

The so-called “developing countries” of the Third World were placed under immense pressure from Western superpowers and predatory financial institutions to abandon state-driven regimes of economic planning and social welfare in favor of economic liberalization and crippling austerity. Neoliberal reform was made a precondition for participation in the world market. With these distorting incentives in place, the Third Worldist vision of a radically reimagined international order rapidly faded into the distance. In our present moment of neoliberal hegemony, the alarming consequences of this decline are all too apparent.

Moreover, the constitutive role that colonialism has played in shaping the modern world means that colonial logics of governance and power manifest themselves not only in the relations between states on the international stage, but also in the internal structures of former colonizers and their former colonies alike. Thus, a country like India, despite having been formally independent from colonization for three-quarters of a century, still uses colonial-era laws to suppress protest and silence dissent. Meanwhile, former colonizing powers like Britain continue to enact imperial logics of racialized violence against their subjects through border and immigration regimes—to say nothing of the ongoing neocolonial practices by which countries in the Global South are coerced into opening their markets to the intrusions of Western capital.

Taken together, all of this means that a radical and substantive politics of anti-colonial internationalism is every bit as direly needed today as it was 50 or 75 years ago—if not more so. In the globalized world of the present, when the forces of neocolonial hegemony and international capital have converged more sharply and diffused more widely across the globe than ever before, it’s clear that what this moment desperately calls for is a revival of the “Bandung Spirit”—an ethos that marries a politics of anti-colonial resistance to internationalist solidarity, based on the understanding that empire is a global phenomenon that must be resisted on a global scale.

But what might such a revival look like in practice? How are we to go about resurrecting the spirit of a bygone age without ending up haunted by it? The answer, I think, lies in a fundamental reconfiguration of how we conceptualize anti-colonial politics and resistance. We must move away from old formulas and instead embrace a new, more flexible understanding
of these ideas that more accurately reflects the realities of a modern and increasingly multipolar global order. Articulating such an alternative requires us to learn from the mistakes of the past—namely, those that led to the failure of the original Third Worldist vision.

Reviewing the history of this vision as outlined by Prashad in The Darker Nations, it quickly becomes clear that, despite its internationalist dimensions, the Third Worldist project was at heart intrinsically statist; it was ultimately beholden to the nation-state as the only conceivable vehicle for a politics aimed at liberating the colonized world. The internationalism of both the first- and second-generation Bandung regimes was an internationalism that reified, rather than challenged, the idea that the nation-state should be the default unit of analysis in anti-colonial politics.

The problem with this is that the nationalist project—particularly in an anti- and post-colonial context—necessarily involves a certain homogenizing tendency that is, in many ways, antithetical to the idea of genuine anti-colo
nial liberation. By nature, the nation-state is concerned first and foremost with preserving the security and integrity of a cohesive and clearly defined national community—a self-preserving impulse, resistant to change, which unfortunately lends itself all too easily to the subsumption and suppression of internal diversity in the name of national unity. In practice, this can range from state repression of political dissent to systematic persecution that, in the most extreme cases, can extend to the wholesale extermination of ethnic and religious minorities.

As such, the problems that Prashad identifies as having contributed in large part to the death of the “Bandung Spirit”—elite capture, the stagnation of revolutionary parties once in power, the violent suppression of leftist movements—are all problems that were not only exacerbated by Third Worldism’s overemphasis on the state, but were arguably made possible by it in the first place. (This becomes all the more clear, of course, when we consider that Third Worldism’s most vocal anti-colonial stalwarts, India’s Nehru and Indonesia’s Sukarno, both embraced their own projects of irredentist colonial expansion, in the form of their countries’ respective occupations of Kashmir and West Papua.)

It’s not difficult to see why the Third Worldist project took on this statist dimension—after all, the newly independent nations
of the mid-to-late 20th century were born into
a world, much like the one we live in today,
in which the nation-state was considered to be the only acceptable unit of sovereign political organization. The experience of post-colonial states, however, reveals the major pitfalls of this state-centric approach. As post-colonial scholar Partha Chatterjee argues in his 1993 book
 The Nation and Its Fragments, “the root of our post-colonial misery [lies] not in our inability to think out new forms of the modern community but in our surrender to the old forms of the modern state.”

As highlighted above, colonial logics continue to govern the domestic political life
of former colonizers and former colonies alike. Anti-colonial resistance in the present day, therefore, can and must take the form not only of resistance to colonial relations between states, but to those within states as well. This means shifting our focus away from the nation-state
as the primary agent of anti-colonial politics and instead broadening our horizons to include grassroots movements that are resisting modern-day colonialism in all of its manifestations, whether or not they explicitly frame their demands in anti-colonial terms—from standing up against state repression and violent ethnonationalism in post-colonial societies to fighting border imperialism and police violence in the current and former imperial core.

This also means recognizing that the state
is no longer the sole agent of global empire, and therefore can no longer be the sole focus
of anti-colonial politics. Ever since the rise of neoliberal globalization that followed the end
of the Cold War, private actors have come to play an increasingly significant role—in many cases acting semi-autonomously from the state itself—in the violent exploitation of land, labor, and resources across the Third World. It follows that, just as the Third World’s champions took an expansive view of anti-colonialism that included the broader question of non-alignment in a bipolar world alongside explicit national liberation movements, a modern-day politics
of anti-colonial internationalism ought to leave room for grassroots resistance against corporate greed and neoliberal globalization, conceptualizing these fights as distinctly anti-colonial in nature. Taken together with the aforementioned emphasis on the agency and significance of grassroots movements as anti-colonial actors in their own right, we might call this a politics of Third Worldism from below.

In fact, Prashad himself points to a similar politics in the concluding sentences of the book, where he predicts that a “genuine agenda for the future” will arise from the “many creative initiatives”—environmental movements and movements opposing economic inequality, struggles for women’s and Indigenous rights, pro-democracy and anti-corruption pro tests—that have emerged around the world
in opposition to “IMF-driven globalization
and revanchist traditionalism.” When such an alternative global agenda arises, Prashad writes, “the Third World will have found its successor.” In other words, if the “Bandung Spirit” is, in fact, successfully revived from below, future historians seeking to write its history will find its purest expressions not in official communiqués and joint declarations from international conferences, but in other, less tangible and more ephemeral sources: in the protest signs and sidewalk graffiti that draw connections between seemingly disparate struggles across the world; in the transnational networks of information-sharing and expressive solidarity that are constructed and transmitted via emerging digital technologies; in the rhetoric of activists who proclaim, in their speeches and writings and protest chants, that all of our struggles and all of our shared liberations are interconnected.

To be clear, I am not suggesting that the state has no role whatsoever to play in contemporary anti-colonial politics. Particularly
in the international arena, it is as crucial as
ever that governments, particularly those with their own histories of colonial subjugation, be willing and able to provide a voice of resistance to contemporary cases of imperialist aggression and coercion—as exemplified by South Africa’s legal case accusing Israel of genocide before
the International Court of Justice. However, it seems clear to me that any anti-colonialism that takes for granted that the nation-state is our salvation, or that assumes state power alone can possibly be sufficient to provide a counterweight to the depredations of modern empire, is an anti-colonialism that remains dangerously stuck in the past.

The left may not have much of a choice when it comes to the question of whether we should engage with the state—at least for the time being—but what we do have the power
to decide is how we engage with it, and more importantly, the extent to which we allow that engagement to shape and limit our political horizons. While a politics of Third Worldism from below can’t necessarily abandon the state altogether, it can and must maintain an alignment vis-à-vis the state that is fundamentally critical, rather than accommodating, in nature.

In our present political landscape, we can observe a compelling real-world example of precisely such a politics in the global movement for solidarity with the Palestinian liberation struggle—particularly since the onset of the barbaric genocide in Gaza, which at the time of writing has been now going on for over a year. During that time, cities across the globe have erupted with what is arguably the most significant display of internationalist solidarity against imperial violence since the global protests against the 2003 invasion of Iraq. For months, the streets of countless capitals and financial centers have echoed with cries of “in our thousands, in our millions, we are all Palestinian”—a chant whose ubiquity underscores the radical extent to which the Palestinian cause has been internationalized, to which an entire generation of activists across the world have adopted what might be the most significant anti-colonial struggle of our time as their own.

The significance of this global pro-Palestinian upsurge is twofold. First, it has provided—in a way that no other protest movement since the 2020 Black Lives Matter uprisings has managed to do—a common flag around which activists across virtually every leftist cause imaginable can rally, and with which they can draw crucial connections to their own various fights.

Second, and perhaps even more importantly, it has offered leftists around the world a much-needed way to challenge empire as a global structure of violence while simultaneously coming face-to-face with their own countries’ entrenched interests and power elites—tying together the national and the international fields of struggle in a truly revolutionary way. Because of this, I would argue, the Palestinian solidarity movement thus offers the left what is perhaps its most powerful opportunity in a generation to revive
 a genuine politics of Third Worldism from below. The question is what we will do about it.

For all its radical potential, the internal contradictions and structural deficiencies of that vision proved fatal to its ability to prevent the forces of neocolonialism and neoliberalism from once again reclaiming vast stretches of the world for imperialist exploitation. And yet, alongside these heightening contradictions, a spirit of resistance to the status quo is once again growing around the world—from the global explosion of the Palestine solidarity movement to renewed assertions of agency and sovereignty by Global South countries, who are no longer willing to remain under the thumb of imperialist Western interests. Whether the contemporary left has the wherewithal to seize this opportunity, drawing on the Third Worldist legacy to articulate a new ethos of anti-colonial internationalism for our present moment, still remains to be seen. ♦