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This chapter argues that the 1955 Bandung Conference’s anticlimactic impact is most usefully understood in the present as inevitable, yet its normative surplus remains valuable. It describes a collection of conditions that manifest in what it terms ‘Bandung’s fate’: a narrow understanding of Bandung’s legal utility in its immediate present that was in many ways preordained. The chapter argues that pre-1955 discourses in the ‘First World’ created a place for Bandung in its immediate aftermath from which it could not escape, and it draws this understanding primarily from newspaper reporting from major outlets in the First World and contemporaneous reports from Indonesia’s National Archives that detail Indonesia’s understandings of First World perceptions of Bandung. After contrasting these with reports that detail perceptions from the ‘Third World’, the chapter suggests that for the nations that controlled international law, Bandung served preordained purposes that undermined its immediate impact. However, recent scholarship revisiting and revising the story of Bandung, along with renewed interest in what the failure of the NIEO can teach us in the present, indicates that the Conference created a ‘normative surplus’—an unveiling of acceptable norms at a particular point uncodified in law. In specifying elements of Bandung’s ‘normative surplus’ that could be revived, the chapter attempts to recast Bandung not as a story of possibilities lost but a catalyst for new possibilities in the present and future.

This chapter examines the colonial argument for the claim that human rights are Western. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights has been labelled or at least treated by some as Western on account of it being implicated in some forms of colonialism. Based on a speech by Carlos Romulo — a member of the working group involved in drafting the Universal Declaration of Human Rights — during the International Conference of African and Asian Nations at Bandung in 1955, it is suggested that the colonial argument is not without substance if one recalls that much of the world's population was not represented in the UN in 1948: large parts of Africa and some Asian countries remained under colonial rule; and the defeated axis powers — Japan, Germany, Italy, and their allies — were excluded as well.

This chapter examines diaspora as a territorializing practice of foreign policy. It is concerned with understanding the changes in India's diaspora policy, from inclusion during the colonial period, to rejection from 1947–1999, followed by a selective reincorporation from the early 2000s. The chapter first offers a historical summary of the emergence of a globally dispersed Indian nation. It argues that India turned its back on its diaspora on gaining independence to assuage the concerns of its Asian neighbors. By the end of the century, however, India was concerned with bringing elements of its overseas population “home,” in particular, upper-caste and middle-class Hindus. This process of reterritorialization and deterritorialization was driven by contradictions in the definition of the Indian nation exacerbated by domestic social upsurge.