After the Second World War the European colonial empires came under pressure from three directions: financially exhausted metropoles, colonial soldiers who had been mobilised during the war and were now returning home, and the changed international climate as the United States and the Soviet Union took anti-colonial positions for their own different reasons. India and Pakistan became independent in 1947, Burma and Ceylon in 1948, Indonesia in 1949 — the same year the People's Republic of China was proclaimed. Those three or four years were the threshold at which 'empire' as a form began to retreat from world politics. Whether the decolonising countries would have a common voice was still an open question.

The Bandung Conference was the institutional answer to that question. Organised at the initiative of Indonesian President Sukarno, Indian Prime Minister Nehru, Egyptian leader Gamal Abdel Nasser, and Chinese Premier Zhou Enlai, the meeting brought together 29 countries — roughly half the world's population. Sukarno's opening speech framed it as 'the first international conference of coloured peoples in the history of mankind.' After seven days of debate, the Ten Principles of Bandung were issued: respect for territorial integrity, non-interference in internal affairs, opposition to racism, fidelity to the UN Charter, and a common stand against great-power pressure. The Sino-Indian 'Panchsheel' (Five Principles) were extended into this wider framework.

The direct successor of Bandung was the founding of the Non-Aligned Movement at Belgrade in 1961, with Nehru, Nasser, Tito, and Sukarno as its principal figures. Its main effect, however, was to accelerate the wave of decolonisation. The 'Year of Africa' in 1960 brought seventeen newly independent African states in a single calendar year; Algeria won independence from France in 1962 after a long war; the Portuguese colonies of Angola and Mozambique became independent in 1975, Zimbabwe in 1980. Over the same process UN membership grew from 51 in 1945 to more than 150 by the early 1980s. The modern map of the world was largely redrawn within these twenty to twenty-five years.

The ledger of decolonisation is not, however, an unambiguous success story. Many of the new states inherited borders drawn arbitrarily by Europeans; ethnic tensions, civil wars (Nigeria 1967, Congo 1960, Rwanda 1994), single-party regimes, and long-running dictatorships are among the by-products of that inheritance. Cold-War non-alignment was hard to sustain in practice: many new states were drawn into the spheres of US or Soviet intervention, while others remained under the repressive rule of their own leaders. Even so, none of this changes the significance of what was said in 1955 — it is the moment at which peoples who had spent a century without a voice in international politics began to speak in their own names. The contemporary idea of a 'global south' has its origin in that week in an Indonesian city.