Belgrade Declaration

The Belgrade Declaration is the founding political document of the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM), adopted at the close of the First Conference of Heads of State or Government of Non-Aligned Countries, held in Belgrade, Yugoslavia, from 1–6 September 1961. Twenty-five states participated, convened largely on the initiative of Yugoslav President Josip Broz Tito, Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser, Indian Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru, Indonesian President Sukarno, and Ghanaian President Kwame Nkrumah.

The declaration set out the political philosophy of non-alignment in the bipolar Cold War order. Its core commitments included:

• Peaceful coexistence among states with different political and social systems, building on the Panchsheel principles articulated earlier between India and China and the 1955 Bandung Conference.
• Rejection of military blocs and foreign military bases established in the context of great-power rivalry (a reference principally to NATO and the Warsaw Pact).
• Support for decolonisation and the right of peoples to self-determination, including explicit backing for the Algerian independence struggle and condemnation of apartheid in South Africa.
• A call for general and complete disarmament, including nuclear disarmament, and an appeal to U.S. President John F. Kennedy and Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev to resume negotiations.
• Affirmation of the United Nations Charter and strengthening of the UN as a forum for resolving disputes.

The Belgrade Declaration is typically read alongside the separate Statement on the Danger of War and an Appeal for Peace issued at the same summit. It established the template for subsequent NAM summits — Cairo (1964), Lusaka (1970), Algiers (1973) and beyond — and provided developing states with a diplomatic identity distinct from Washington and Moscow. For MUN and IR researchers, it is a foundational reference point for studying Third World diplomacy, South-South cooperation, and the origins of the New International Economic Order debates of the 1970s.