Afro-Asian Visions: A collaborative research publication on Afro-Asian networks in the early Cold War, 23 August 2016 https://medium.com/afro-asian-visions/spectres-of-south-south-diplomacy-afro-asian- solidarity-or-afro-asian-competition-671c152a2224#.g68k7pgly Spectres of South-South Diplomacy: Afro-Asian Solidarity or Afro-Asian Competition? Research on the Global Cold War and the wider history of what is called the Third World proliferated after 2005, in the wake of Odd Arne Westad's landmark book. In the decade that followed the multi-centric approach, developed by Ryan Irwin, has emerged as an alternative to the nation-state framework while the influence of non- state actors has been acknowledged by Matthew Connelly who wrote about the Algerian war of liberation as a diplomatic revolution. An important topic historians still grapple with, however, is South-South diplomacy. Jeffrey Byrnes' Mecca of Revolution, for instance, traces how Third World Internationalism, initially a subversive phenomenon outside of the boundaries of the state, was embraced by newly independent countries, such as Algeria, who sought to strengthen their legitimacy. Someone like Houari Boumedienne who overthrew Ahmed Ben Bellah in 1965, sought control over all interactions between the domestic space and international organizations, in an attempt to prevent the kinds of transnational connections that had undermined colonialism. In this way Byrnes gives a convincing explanation of why the nation-state model prevailed. Nonetheless, it remains difficult for historians to identify the main fault lines of South-South diplomacy. Did not all postcolonial states unit in the struggle against colonialism? My research on the Bandung conference and Africa's international history after 1945 suggests Afro-Asianism was as much about solidarity as it was about competition. Specifically, my article in Cold War History seeks to challenge a protracted narrative on Afro-Asianism that came out of the Bandung Conference. The propensity to infuse the gathering with high minded symbolism - 'the Bandung spirit' - contrasts --
sharply with what Dipesh Chakrabarty has called the conference's shallow intellectual unity. Delegates had diverging territorial, economic and geopolitical interests. The Bandung meeting was a 'theatre' that aimed to create political capital to be used internationally as well as a negotiation structured by hard geopolitical interests. Bandung was simultaneously an event in the global Cold War and part of the quest for a new postcolonial order. Nonetheless, assessments of the Afro-Asian agenda often present readers with a realist or an idealist paradigm. Much of what we know stems from work that was written in the late 1960s and 1970s. Political scientists in particular, attempted to uncover what the Bandung delegates wanted to achieve in geopolitical terms, what distinguished their stance from traditional neutralism and how nonalignment transformed from the Bandung Conference of 1955, over Belgrade in 1961 to the Cairo Conference of 1965. In the 1990s social and cultural historians began to restore the role of race and the symbolism of the conference in their analyses through discourse-centred work that presented Bandung as a moment when international relations became overlaid with racial meaning. Recently opened postcolonial archives as well as declassification in the United States and the United Kingdom have made the pendulum swing back to more realist