Bandung’s Fate

Abstract

This chapter argues that the 1955 Bandung Conference’s anticlimactic impact is most usefully understood in the present as inevitable, yet its normative surplus remains valuable. It describes a collection of conditions that manifest in what it terms ‘Bandung’s fate’: a narrow understanding of Bandung’s legal utility in its immediate present that was in many ways preordained. The chapter argues that pre-1955 discourses in the ‘First World’ created a place for Bandung in its immediate aftermath from which it could not escape, and it draws this understanding primarily from newspaper reporting from major outlets in the First World and contemporaneous reports from Indonesia’s National Archives that detail Indonesia’s understandings of First World perceptions of Bandung. After contrasting these with reports that detail perceptions from the ‘Third World’, the chapter suggests that for the nations that controlled international law, Bandung served preordained purposes that undermined its immediate impact. However, recent scholarship revisiting and revising the story of Bandung, along with renewed interest in what the failure of the NIEO can teach us in the present, indicates that the Conference created a ‘normative surplus’—an unveiling of acceptable norms at a particular point uncodified in law. In specifying elements of Bandung’s ‘normative surplus’ that could be revived, the chapter attempts to recast Bandung not as a story of possibilities lost but a catalyst for new possibilities in the present and future.