Across Africa, Asia, Latin America, and the Middle East, there is a tendency for states to increasingly reject the muscular transactionalism of great powers. Many in the Global South tend to hedge rather than align, resist rather than submit, diversify markets, reroute finance, and preserve their strategic options. Power today is seen not simply as the capacity to dominate, but as the capacity to try to choose—and to revise those choices without forfeiting autonomy. The task is complex and challenging yet widely viewed as worthwhile. The modern political relationship between Africa and Asia — or Afrasia (Mazrui and Adem 2013) — 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 at a moment when much of Africa remained under colonial rule. Six African states — Egypt, Ghana, Sudan, Ethiopia, Libya, and Liberia — were represented, symbolizing Africa’s emerging political agency and its determination to engage Asia as an equal partner in shaping a postcolonial international order. Never before had Asia and Africa met in this way on the same stage. 

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 marginalization in the Eurocentric hierarchies of power, it marked the first collective political assertion by non-white peoples on the world stage. Bandung articulated what later came to be known as the Bandung Spirit, which was grounded in anti-imperialism, sovereign equality, and the principle of nonalignment (Weber and Winanti 2018).  

The continuing relevance and enduring legacies of Bandung and nonalignment in contemporary times become clearer when viewed through four paradoxes that emerged from the Afrasian experience (Adem 2023: 5-6). The space–time paradox—shorter but more comprehensive colonial rule in Africa versus longer but more selective colonization in Asia—helps explain divergent postcolonial trajectories. The time–change paradox—Asia’s relative cultural resilience despite prolonged colonial domination—challenges linear assumptions about Westernization and modernity. The culture–economy paradox—Africa’s cultural Westernization without commensurate economic transformation, contrasted with Asia’s economic modernization without deep cultural Westernization—raises fundamental questions about autonomy and development. Finally, the paradox of divisive peace and prosperity reveals that Afrasian solidarity was strongest under conditions of shared struggle and weakest during periods of relative success, suggesting that nonalignment functioned more effectively as a strategy of resistance. 

At its core, the Bandung Spirit rested on a set of overlapping solidarities that shaped relations within the Global South in the decades that followed. These included pigmentational solidarity, arising from shared experiences of European racial prejudice; cultural solidarity, a reaction to common exposure to Eurocentric civilizational prejudice; anti-imperial solidarity, based on direct or indirect experiences of colonial domination; and the solidarity of nonalignment, expressed through collective efforts to avoid subordination within Cold War bipolarity by rejecting the notion of automatic alignment with either camp. 

However, nonalignment was also an attempt by countries in the Global South to reclaim autonomy in a world structured by imperial legacies and superpower rivalry (see Abraham 2008: 195-219). Participation in Bandung was defined less by a uniform colonial experience than by a shared condition of being non-white within a racially stratified international order. While........

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