The idea had been gestating since the late 1940s. Indian Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru first glimpsed it at the Asian Relations Conference in New Delhi in March 1947, months before India itself was free. Indonesian President Sukarno saw it from the other side -- as a leader of a nation that had declared independence in 1945 but was still fighting the Dutch to make it real. By 1954, both men recognized that the newly independent nations of Asia and Africa were being pulled into a Cold War they had not started and did not want. At the Colombo Powers conference in April 1954, Indonesia proposed a broader gathering. A planning group -- Indonesia, India, Pakistan, Burma, and Ceylon -- met in Bogor, West Java, that December and decided on Bandung as the venue. The goals were ambitious: promote cooperation among new nations, confront racism and colonialism, and force the world to acknowledge that Asia and Africa were no longer stages for other people's dramas. Sukarno, who styled himself the leader of what he called the 'Newly Emerging Forces,' saw the conference as both a statement and a weapon -- particularly to build support for Indonesia's claim to West Papua against the Netherlands.

The conference opened on April 18, 1955, at the Gedung Merdeka -- the Freedom Building -- on Jalan Asia-Afrika in central Bandung. For six days, the delegates debated the shape of a world that the great powers assumed they would define on their own. The central question was whether colonialism meant only the Western variety or whether Soviet domination of Eastern Europe and Central Asia deserved equal condemnation. A memorandum titled 'The Moslem Nations under Soviet Imperialism' was submitted, accusing Moscow of massacres and deportations, but it was never formally debated. The compromise language condemned 'colonialism in all of its manifestations' -- a phrase broad enough to implicate the Soviet Union without naming it. Zhou Enlai, the Chinese premier, emerged as the conference's most skillful operator. He downplayed revolutionary communism, endorsed every nation's right to choose its own economic system -- including capitalism -- and projected a moderation that made a powerful impression on delegates and observers alike. Nehru, by contrast, was perceived as patronizing. Senior diplomats privately called him arrogant. Zhou himself reportedly said, 'I have never met a more arrogant man than Mr. Nehru.'

The conference's most enduring product was the Dasasila Bandung -- the Ten Principles of Peaceful Coexistence, styled after Indonesia's own Pancasila. The principles read like a charter for a world the delegates wanted but did not yet have: respect for sovereignty, recognition of racial equality, non-interference in internal affairs, peaceful settlement of disputes, and abstention from pressuring smaller nations. The final communique went further, arguing that developing countries needed to break their economic dependence on industrialized nations by exchanging experts and technology among themselves. It was an early articulation of what would later be called South-South cooperation. The conference did not create the Non-Aligned Movement -- that would come at the Belgrade Summit in 1961 -- but it laid the intellectual and diplomatic groundwork. The Bandung Spirit, as it came to be known, gave newly independent nations a vocabulary for asserting themselves on the world stage without aligning with Washington or Moscow.

The United States officially shunned the conference, at the urging of Secretary of State John Foster Dulles. The administration feared it would expand China's influence and complicate Washington's relationships with its European colonial allies -- allies whose empires were precisely what the conference had been convened to oppose. Behind the scenes, the US assembled a working group that included the CIA, the State Department, the Pentagon, and the United States Information Agency, deploying overt and covert propaganda to manage America's image among the delegates. But two unofficial American observers told a different story. Congressman Adam Clayton Powell Jr. of New York attended, sponsored by Ebony and Jet magazines rather than the government. And the novelist Richard Wright came with funding from the Congress for Cultural Freedom. Wright spent three weeks in Indonesia, attending the conference and meeting with Indonesian intellectuals including Mochtar Lubis and Asrul Sani. He came home and wrote The Color Curtain, a book that framed the conference as the moment when the world's non-white majority demanded to be heard. Both men -- a Black congressman and a Black novelist -- understood something about Bandung that the Eisenhower administration did not: the conference was not about communism. It was about dignity.

The Gedung Merdeka still stands on the street that was renamed in the conference's honor. In 2005, on the fiftieth anniversary, leaders from Asian and African countries returned to Bandung to launch the New Asian-African Strategic Partnership, pledging continued cooperation across the two continents. The seventieth anniversary in 2025 was marked by the Bharat Summit in Hyderabad, India, themed 'Delivering Global Justice.' The conference's legacy is contested -- critics note that Sukarno's primary motive was to rally support for annexing West Papua, and that the Non-Aligned Movement it inspired often aligned quite clearly in practice. But the Bandung Conference remains the moment when a majority of the world's population, gathered in a single room for the first time, declared that the age of empire was over. The Egyptian president Gamal Abdel Nasser used the conference to arrange Soviet arms deliveries via Czechoslovakia. China began voicing support for Palestine. The contours of Cold War politics in Africa, Asia, and the Middle East were redrawn in a week. All of it happened in a mid-sized city in the mountains of West Java.