Non-Aligned Movement Founding

The Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) was formally founded at 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 attended as full members, with several others present as observers. The conference produced the Belgrade Declaration, which condemned colonialism, called for peaceful coexistence, and urged direct negotiations between the United States and the Soviet Union to reduce Cold War tensions.

The intellectual groundwork had been laid years earlier. The 1955 Bandung Conference of Asian and African states articulated principles of sovereignty, non-intervention, and anti-colonialism that NAM later absorbed. A 1956 meeting on the Brijuni islands between Yugoslavia's Josip Broz Tito, India's Jawaharlal Nehru, and Egypt's Gamal Abdel Nasser is widely credited with shaping the movement's political vision. Sukarno of Indonesia and Kwame Nkrumah of Ghana are also commonly named among the founding figures.

NAM was not a formal alliance with a charter or secretariat. Instead, it operated through periodic summits and coordinated positions at the United Nations, particularly in the General Assembly and UNCTAD. Its founding criteria, set out in a preparatory meeting in Cairo in June 1961, required members to follow an independent foreign policy, support national liberation movements, and avoid multilateral military pacts tied to great-power rivalries.

In practice, "non-alignment" was elastic. Several founding members maintained close economic or military ties with one superpower while formally rejecting bloc membership. Despite this, NAM became a major diplomatic platform for the Global South, expanding to over 100 members in subsequent decades and addressing issues such as decolonization, apartheid, the New International Economic Order, and nuclear disarmament. The movement survived the end of the Cold War by reframing its agenda around development, sovereignty, and reform of global governance.