Bookend to Bandung: The New International Economic Order and the Antinomies of the Bandung Era

The 1974 Declaration of a New International Economic Order (NIEO) is best understood as a closing expression of what might be conceived as “the Bandung Era.” Recognizing strong utopian currents of ambition and innovation within the NIEO, this essay nevertheless sees the NIEO as a retreat into international law and away from the mass movement workers’ radicalism that was evident (though still riven with contradictions) in the 1955 Asian-African Conference in Bandung, Indonesia. Periodizing the Bandung conference and the NIEO Declaration as bookends of a single era enables us to consider the dynamic relationship between the state and capital in the era of decolonization, and hence to more fully consider the legacies of both moments.