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.