The Non-Aligned Movement
How newly independent nations in Asia, Africa, and Latin America tried to chart a path between the two superpowers during the Cold War.
Refusing to Choose Sides
The Cold War was often presented as a binary choice: capitalism or communism, Washington or Moscow. But for the dozens of nations gaining independence from colonial rule in the 1950s and 1960s, this framing ignored their actual priorities: national sovereignty, economic development, and freedom from all forms of external domination, whether colonial or superpower.
The Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) was born from this refusal to choose sides. Its intellectual foundations were laid at the 1955 Bandung Conference in Indonesia, where 29 Asian and African nations gathered to assert their independence from both blocs. The conference was organized by Indonesia's Sukarno, India's Nehru, Egypt's Nasser, Ghana's Nkrumah, and other leaders who had fought colonialism and saw the Cold War as a new form of great-power domination. The formal NAM was established at the 1961 Belgrade Conference, attended by 25 states.