Africa between Bandung and BRICS+

Across Africa, Asia, Latin America and the Middle East, states are increasingly rejecting the moral absolutisms of great-power rivalry.

They are hedging rather than aligning, negotiating transactionally rather than submitting normatively, diversifying markets, rerouting finance and preserving their strategic options. 

Power today is not simply the capacity to dominate but the capacity to choose — and to revise the choices without forfeiting their autonomy.

The modern political relationship between Africa and Asia — what Kenyan academic Professor Ali Mazrui and I described as Afrasia — is conventionally traced to the 1955 Bandung Conference in Indonesia. 

Co-sponsored by Burma, India, Indonesia, Pakistan and Sri Lanka, Bandung brought together nearly two dozen Asian and African countries when much of Africa remained under colonial rule.

Nevertheless, six African states — Egypt, Ghana, Sudan, Ethiopia, Libya and Liberia — were represented. Their participation symbolised Africa’s emerging political agency and its determination to engage Asia as an equal partner in shaping a postcolonial international order.

Bandung was not merely a diplomatic gathering but a foundational moment in the articulation of a shared political imagination.

Emerging from common experiences of colonial domination and marginalisation within Eurocentric hierarchies of power, it marked the first collective political assertion by non-white people on the world stage. 

Bandung articulated what later came to be known as the Bandung Spirit, grounded in anti-imperialism, sovereign equality and the principle of non-alignment.

At its core, the Bandung Spirit rested on overlapping forms of solidarity: pigmentational solidarity rooted in shared experiences of racial hierarchy; cultural solidarity shaped by resistance to Eurocentric civilisational prejudice; anti-imperial solidarity arising from colonial domination and the solidarity of non-alignment, expressed through the collective refusal to subordinate national interests to Cold War bipolarity. 

Non-alignment in this context was not merely strategic. It was also a moral and political project — an effort to reclaim autonomy in a world structured by empire and superpower rivalry.

Yet the optimism generated at Bandung was only partially realised.

With the end of the Cold War, the strategic rationale for non-alignment weakened and Afrasian cooperation increasingly gave way to competition for markets, investment and development assistance. 

Widening economic disparities within and between Afrasian societies further diluted the sense of horizontal solidarity that Bandung sought to institutionalise. 

This erosion, however, does not negate Bandung’s relevance. Rather, it underscores the contingent nature of solidarity and the need to reinterpret non-alignment under changing historical conditions.

The continuing relevance of Bandung becomes clearer when viewed through a set of Afrasian paradoxes. The space–time paradox — shorter but more comprehensive colonial rule in Africa versus longer but more selective colonisation in Asia — helps explain divergent postcolonial trajectories. 

The culture–economy paradox — Africa’s cultural westernisation without corresponding economic transformation, contrasted with Asia’s economic modernisation without deep cultural westernisation — raises enduring questions about autonomy and development. 

Finally, the paradox of divisive peace and prosperity suggests that Afrasian solidarity was strongest under conditions of shared struggle and weakest during periods of relative success, revealing non-alignment as most effective as a strategy of resistance.

Over time, Bandung’s ethos expanded beyond Africa and Asia. Solidarity based initially on colour and colonial experience evolved into the broader identity of the Third World, defined increasingly by economic marginalisation rather than race alone. 

In this sense, Bandung anticipated later South–South cooperation frameworks and remains a reference point for contemporary efforts to diversify global partnerships without reproducing new forms of dependency.

Contemporary debates often portray Brics+ as Bandung’s successor. The analogy is tempting but misleading. Like Bandung, Brics+ reflects dissatisfaction with a global order designed and managed by the US after World War II. Yet Bandung was more than a protest. It was also a moral project, underpinned by normative coherence. 

Brics+, by contrast, is a coalition without a shared creed. It aggregates power but does not yet organise meaning. 

Its internal divergences limit its capacity to serve as the ethical or institutional nucleus of a new world order.

Under these circumstances, Western anxiety about the erosion of the “rules-based international order” is understandable but its most significant undermining has come from the system’s principal architect.

From the 2003 invasion of Iraq to the intervention in Venezuela this year, repeated unilateral departures from multilateral commitments by the US have weakened the norms it claims to defend. It is evident that unipolar systems, lacking adequate checks and balances, encourage hegemonic irresponsibility.

For Africa, the emerging multipolar order revives core Bandung dilemmas. Engagement with China and other rising powers offers opportunities for diversification
and autonomy but also introduces new risks of dependency. 

The challenge, therefore, is not alignment but strategic non-alignment: engaging multiple partners while preserving policy space.

Seen in this light, the Bandung Spirit remains relevant not as nostalgia but as a flexible framework for navigating hierarchy, asserting agency and preserving autonomy in a world order that is loosening but not yet reimagined.

Dr Seifudein Adem is a visiting professor at the Institute for Advanced Research and Education, Doshisha University, Kyoto, Japan