In his inaugurating speech at the Bandung Conference in 1955, Sukarno plucked out the League against Imperialism as an intellectual and organisational forebear. Yet, while this rightly situated Bandung in a longer history of anti-colonial activity, the discontinuities between these two conferences are equally illuminating. This article sets out to establish one of the legacies of Bandung by tracing backwards rather than forwards. I argue that while the League against Imperialism represented a more diffuse and de-territorialised vision of anti-imperialism, by the time of Bandung, the route from anti-colonialism to post-colonialism was clear: it ran through the territorial nation-state. Thus, the principal contribution of this article to this special issue is to draw attention to this legacy of territorialisation in Bandung. I trace some principal international ‘pulls’ that drove the push towards territoriality. Moreover, I contest the characterisation of Bandung as creating a “pluralist” international order since it rested on this consolidation around a territorial nation-state monoculture in global politics.
Copyrights © 2025