1955–1961 CE · Bandung conference and Belgrade founding milestones · Global · Rights
Delegates from twenty-nine Asian and African states met at Bandung in April 1955 to debate colonialism, cooperation and peace. Six years later, a partly overlapping group formally founded the Non-Aligned Movement at Belgrade.
Atlas dossier · Cold War & DecolonizationFree device narration · synchronized English captions · transcript available
Why it matters
Twenty-nine Asian and African states attended the Bandung Conference from 18 to 24 April 1955. The Non-Aligned Movement was formally founded at Belgrade in 1961 by a partly overlapping group. Bandung influenced later non-alignment, but it was not the movement’s first summit or a single organisation with fixed membership.
U.S. Department of State: Bandung Conference ↗Delegates shared opposition to colonial domination and racial discrimination, yet differed over alliances, communism, national interests and development. The dossier treats the ‘Bandung spirit’ as a field of cooperation and argument, not a unified ideology. Ghana’s later Pan-African role matters to non-alignment, but Nkrumah is not presented as a delegate to the 1955 meeting.
United Nations Digital Library: Bandung ↗A visual presentation accompanying this entry. Read each image’s attribution to distinguish archival records, later depictions and reconstructions.
A group photograph from the Bandung Conference, April 1955; photographer unidentified in the linked record.
Asian–African Conference at Bandung April 1955.jpg — Unknown photographer; Source lists Public domain; via Nehru Memorial Museum and Library photo-gallery record / Wikimedia Commons. Resized, cropped and converted to WebP for Atlas display.
Source and reuse terms ↗Supplemental archival visual
A 2010 photograph of the conference hall in Gedung Merdeka, the building that hosted the 1955 Asian–African Conference. This is a later view of the historic venue, not a photograph of the delegates in session.
Open the item page and rights record ↗Conference Hall Gedung Merdeka — sbamueller, 29 January 2010; CC BY-SA 2.0. Resized and converted to WebP for Atlas display.
Interpretation note
This dossier distinguishes the event’s basic chronology from later arguments about meaning, responsibility and legacy. When comparing religious, national, Indigenous or scholarly interpretations, consult the primary and institutional sources above alongside peer-reviewed historical work.
Elsewhere in the world
1955–1968 CE · selected mass-movement and federal-law phase · AmericasCivil Rights MovementA selected phase of a much longer Black freedom struggle challenged segregation, disenfranchisement and racial violence through litigation, boycotts, direct action, community organizing and mass political mobilization.
1954–1984 CE · transplantation and immunosuppression milestones · AmericasOrgan transplantation and immunosuppressionA successful 1954 kidney transplant between identical twins avoided immune rejection; tissue matching, organ preservation and immunosuppressive regimens later made transplants between genetically different people increasingly viable.
1953–1973 CE · structure, genetic code and recombinant-DNA milestones · EuropeDNA structure and molecular biologyIn 1953 Watson and Crick proposed a double-helix model using constraints including Rosalind Franklin and Raymond Gosling’s diffraction work and Chargaff’s base ratios; later teams deciphered the genetic code and developed recombinant-DNA methods.
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