Beyond Continents,Colours, and the Cold War: Yugoslavia,Algeria, and the Struggle for Non-Alignment

While historians are paying greater attention to the role of the post-colonial Third World in international affairs, there is a tendency to focus on North–South relations and the discourse of the 1955 Bandung Conference. Relying principally on Yugoslav and Algerian archival sources, this paper re-emphasises the dynamic historicity of ‘Third Worldism’ and the significance of ‘South–South’ connections. It explores the evolution of the Third World movement in the decade following Bandung, when smaller countries and non-state movements exerted greater influence while larger actors, such as India and China, quarrelled. The founding of the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) in 1961 represented a victory for smaller actors who took a more provocative and subversive approach to international relations, to the extent that NAM was a means for the weak to wage the cold war on their terms. Over the following half-decade, Non-Alignment supplanted Afro-Asianism as the primary organisational concept for the Third World, confirming that the Third World was a political project with a potentially unbounded membership rather than the expression of a non-Western, non-white identity.