The Bandung Ethic and International Human Rights Praxis: Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow

Between April 18 and 24, 1955, a group of twenty-nine African and Asian states gathered in Bandung, Indonesia, for the very first Afro-Asian summit in recorded human history. Almost every single African and Asian state that was independent at the time was represented at Bandung. It is no wonder then that this moment is widely regarded in the literature as “the foundational moment of the Third World.” Issued on April 24, 1955, the Conference’s Final Communiqué captured what I refer to in this chapter as the Bandung ethic. This conference also inspired a long line of subsequent meetings of the same kind and heralded the emergence of a relatively new political and socioeconomic movement in world affairs – one that eventually included Latin American and the Caribbean states. The nonaligned movement and the Group of 77 states (or the G-77) represent differing (though related) forms, dimensions, and iterations of this broad movement