BUILDING SOVEREIGNTY, PREVENTING
HEGEMONY:
The Challenges for Emerging Forces in
the Globalised World
International and
Multidisciplinary Conference in the framework of a commemoration of the 60th
anniversary of the 1955 Bandung Asian-African Conference
Yogyakarta-Bandung-Jakarta,
Indonesia
October 26-31, 2015
POLITICS
The Bandung conference of 1955 was a world-historical event in the post-WWII context of national liberation movements, postcolonial development, and the Cold War. Opposing all forms of imperialism and (neo)colonialism while seeking solidarity and cooperation among newly independent Asian and African countries (Latin America did not participate in the conference at the time), “Bandung” was above all a political project from the outset. It stood for people’s sovereignty, international equality, non-alliance and, with the inclusion of Latin American nations in the spirit and aftermath of the conference, what came to be known as the Third World. It has since become a symbol of struggles of the Global South for social and global justice. Six decades on, despite immensity and intensity of changes in world conditions — local, national, transnational and regional, the goals of Bandung have not been achieved but remain imperative and achievable. To retain our commitment is to develop our analyses in the first place.
The Politics group is one of
the five thematic groups of the conference, along with Culture, Ecology,
Economy and Religion. Continuing from the program of Bandung+55, we are seeking
to focus on power, democracy and politics of emancipation or hegemony and
counter-hegemony, concerning the questions of national and popular sovereignty
as well as geopolitical issues of regionalization, globalization, south-south
relations, and internationalism.
We have already received the following
panel and paper proposals. Other panel and paper proposals in line with those themes
are welcome.
Panel 1, The Bandung Spirit
for the 21st Century:
“The revival of Bandung
Spirit and tricontinental internationalism”; “Speaking up: from a capacity to a
right – the Bandung spirit and the African decolonization movement”;
“Collectiveness and togetherness: A new approach to the Afro-Asian history”;
“Beyond nationalism: problems of sovereignty, self-determination, and the
Chinese political discourse of the Third World in the Cold War”.
Panel 2, Popular sovereignty:
“Dreaming of Bandung in the
age of robotics: space, empires and the reconfiguration of southern
sovereignty”; “Popular sovereignty in Africa and Asia”; “Regional identity
building in a comparative perspective”; and “Managing election dispute
resolution in Nigeria: Patterns mapping and evolution”.
Panel 3, Revisiting the agrarian
question:
“Land grabs in Africa” and
“Land relations in China and India: toward a new moral economy”.
We welcome more individual and joint
submissions from diverse engagements and perspectives to address the central
themes as indicated above. The areas of contribution below are merely
suggestive:
Revisiting Bandung: the Bandung spirit, the
five principles of peaceful coexistence, third-worldism as method and/or
strategy, the revival of non-alignment or project of new alignment, cross
continental construction of sovereign countries in the developing world;
organization and coordination of counter-hegemonic struggles in the south,
resistance against military domination and new imperialist interventions;
alternative to neoliberal and imperialist globalization – can there be an
alternative global system of political economy constituted of equal and
autonomous nations? How might such a vision be pushed forward?
Popular sovereignty: national liberation and
statehood; social movements in resistance against oppressive and exploitative
ruling interests, domestic or foreign; legitimacy challenges to nationalism and
regionalism; the role of state in economic and social development, public
policies in meeting basic needs, poverty alleviation, and social security and
equity; issues of citizenship concerning inclusion and exclusion, democracy as
power of the people – are democracies working for the commoners, direct
producers and the poor? How might democratization be pursued or deepened?
Social relations: the questions of class,
caste, ethnicity, gender, aboriginality or tribal rights since Bandung;
capital-labor relations or the dignity and wellbeing of labor; ethnic relations
or the protection of minorities and equality among different ethnic groups,
gender relations or women’s equal treatment along with children’s protection,
and the plight of the peasantry and (semi-)proletarianized migrant workers as
the “precariat”. What is the meaning of “cheap labor”? How and why have ethnic
or sectarian conflicts risen and what can be done to manage them? Where women
have succeeded or failed to improve their conditions?
Political economy: alternative to new forms of
unequal exchange and dependent development; state-market-society relations;
present responses to the classic agrarian question, issues of land grabbing,
land regime and land right, of seeds and food security/sovereignty, of bankrupt
petty peasants in the global market; comparative experiences of the politics of
development and ecology; loss of farmland to urban expansion, real estate and
soil pollution along with depletion of other resource commons which threaten the
livelihood of hundreds of millions of people in the capitalist peripheries – is
there an alternative to standardized modernity of urbanism and industrialism?
Is a new moral economy possible?
Political and ideological struggle: counter-hegemony as a project
of transforming received knowledge and knowledge production in social sciences
as much as mass media; the question of public commitment and class/social
consciousness; the task of new imaginaries of world order and their
re-theorization initiated in Bandung. What kind of a feasible world we should
desire and begin or continue to create? Which social forces might be the agents
of change?
In the Bandung spirit, we aim, through
discussions and debates at the conference, at reaching some broad consensus on
an assessment of the past, an understanding of the present, and an orientation
toward the future, since 1955.
Ms Lin Chun, China/UK (Dr., Political
Sciences, London School of Economics) & Mr. Aziz Fall, Egypt/Senegal/Canada
(Pr., Political Sciences, Centre Internationaliste Ryerson Fondation Aubin,
Montreal)
Ms Amy Niang, Senegal/South Africa
Mr. Boutros Labaki, Lebanon
Mr. Dani, Indonesia
Mr. Hikmawan Saefullah,
Indonesia/Australia
Mr. Irwansyah, Indonesia/Australia
Mr. James Okolie-Osemene, Nigeria
Mr. Lazare Ki-Zerbo, Burkina
Faso/France
Mr. Martin Uadiale, Nigeria
Ms Polina Nedialkova-Travert,
Russia/France
Ms Roswita Aboe, Indonesia
Mr. Samson Bezabeh, Ethiopia
Mr. Tyson Tirta, Indonesia
Mr. Yin Zhiguang, China/UK
Ms Zornitza Grekova, Bulgaria