I

The Conference in Bandung held in 1955 brought together twenty-nine delegations united primarily by anti-colonial convictions, solidarity against racial hierarchy, and the shared urgency of dismantling white supremacist and imperial structures.Footnote ²¹ Bandung embodied South–South solidarity against colonial domination, grounded in the struggles for decolonization and racial justice.Footnote ²² Scholars of postcolonial studies emphasized the importance of the Afro-Asian Conference and the ‘spirit of Bandung’ in the NAM's formative process, with a major focus on a decolonial project.Footnote ²³ From this perspective, Bandung has been portrayed as a pivotal moment in the often mythologized history of the NAM, evoking the sense of solidarity among Third World countries first articulated at the 1955 conference.Footnote ²⁴

By contrast, the 1961 Belgrade meeting – the First Conference of Heads of State or Government of Non-Aligned Countries – marked the institutionalization of non-alignment as a diplomatic platform within the Cold War. Many scholars and journalistsFootnote ²⁵ have nevertheless claimed that Bandung laid the foundations of the NAM, often overlooking the profound differences between an anti-colonial Afro-Asian movement and the later strategic logic of non-alignment. Belgrade, differently from Bandung, emerged from efforts to navigate a bipolar world order and was shaped by the geopolitical manoeuvring of the Cold War’s ideological divide. It also reflected much of Tito’s search for diplomatic room after Yugoslavia’s split from the Soviet bloc – a dynamic driven more by Cold War realignments than by Afro-Asianism.

Despite overlaps in membership and broad aspirations for independence and development, the Bandung and Belgrade initiatives were driven by different political visions and experienced significant internal frictions.Footnote ²⁶ And despite often being seen in light of continuity, the movement from Bandung to Belgrade represents a political rupture rather than continuity, stemming from intellectual divergences and the superpowers’ ambitions to shape the outcomes of the conferences.Footnote ²⁷

The four reviewed books challenge the linear trajectory suggested by the ‘Bandung to Belgrade’ narrative, while expanding the spatial and temporal scope of the NAM scholarship. They highlight the agency of actors from the Global South and beyond, reconfiguring postcolonial states’ aspirations in tandem with Cold War strategies in ‘buffer zones’ such as Central Europe, as analysed by Kullaa.

II

A wide trend in the literature situates the origins of the Non-Aligned Movement firmly within the context of the Cold War, linking its emergence, significance, and scope to the dynamics of East–West rivalry.Footnote ²⁸ Much of this scholarship was rooted in political science and international relations, disciplines whose analytic frameworks tended to interpret the NAM primarily through the lens of superpower competition. Within this perspective, the NAM is often portrayed as a product of the Cold War, with its foundational principles, ideological orientation, and political actions understood primarily in relation to the bipolar tensions that defined the international order at the end of the Second World War. According to this line of thinking, non-aligned states sought independence from superpower rivalries and to avoid military alliances.Footnote ²⁹ The Cold War paradigm has thus largely defined the conceptual and ontological boundaries within which the NAM was created and developed, giving rise to two dominant interpretive approaches. The first approach sees the NAM as a unified ‘third force’ or ‘third bloc’ formed in reaction to the global bipolar order. The second reads the NAM as an expression of the ‘Third World’ identity and postcolonial solidarity.

The first school of scholars sees the NAM as a bloc-free coalition that sought to escape the pressures of NATO and the Warsaw Pact while advancing development-focused agendas, encompassing a broad coalition of small non-bloc states ranging from neutral European countries to newly independent postcolonial nations in Asia and Africa.Footnote ³⁰ While this approach portrays non-alignment as an attempt to escape bloc politics and resist the pressures imposed by both NATO and the Warsaw Pact, scholars such as Odd Arne Westad complicate this view by arguing that the NAM was not merely a passive or defensive project. Rather than simply avoiding entanglement in superpower rivalries, many postcolonial states actively engaged with the dynamics of the Cold War, using non-alignment as a strategic tool to balance, manipulate, and at times benefit from the competition between East and West. From this perspective, the NAM emerges not only as a bloc-free coalition seeking autonomy, but also as a flexible and pragmatic framework through which newly independent states could maximize political and economic gains. In this light, the movement’s apparent neutrality masked a more complex form of engagement, in which non-aligned countries did not stand outside the Cold War, but instead operated within it, shaping and being shaped by its global dynamics.Footnote ³¹

Non-alignment represented a post-war foreign policy approach that brought together countries with diverse historical backgrounds, levels of socioeconomic development, and cultural traditions. This diversity meant that the movement had to continuously evolve to reflect these varied expressions of non-alignment, resulting in an inherently fluid character with no rigid or fixed ideological boundaries.Footnote ³² While the NAM initially sought to present an alternative to bloc politics and contributed to key debates, its lack of coherence, internal rivalries, and gradual radicalization weakened its influence by the mid-1970s, leaving it in an identity crisis.Footnote ³³

This approach situates non-alignment within the shifting phases of the bipolar confrontation, emphasizing that its foundations lay in the NAM’s capacity to construct a viable alternative to both West and East. Through this lens, the movement’s central themes – decolonization, nuclear disarmament, economic development, détente, and the promotion of an independent foreign policy – come into sharper focus. As a ‘third force’ in the international arena, non-aligned countries asserted an independent path while deliberately disengaging from the two antagonistic power blocs of the Cold War. In this light, non-alignment was a ‘third force’ between NATO and the Warsaw Pact,Footnote ³⁴ a conscious choice to escape bloc pressures to advance development-focused agendas. The NAM also articulated its identity through a consistent refusal to enter Cold War alliances or military blocs, positioning itself in a neutral space between blocs without assuming a mediating role.Footnote ³⁵

The second approach frames the NAM as a collective effort by Third World and postcolonial countries to secure international recognition and assert their agency through the establishment of an independent foreign policy.Footnote ³⁶ Within this context, countries like Egypt, Ghana, and other Third World states have used the NAM summits to crystallize their identity and gain leverage over both blocs.Footnote ³⁷ As this outlook focuses on decolonization processes, regional gatherings such as the 1955 Afro-Asian Conference in Bandung and the 1961 Belgrade Conference take on particular significance, marking key moments in the formative phase of the NAMFootnote ³⁸ and highlighting the movement’s early aspirations for solidarity, autonomy, and an alternative global order. This approach traces a path ‘from Bandung to Belgrade’, implying a direct line of continuity and commonality, where the Bandung Conference served as a preliminary step leading to the establishment of the Non-Aligned Movement in Belgrade.Footnote ³⁹ Through this hypothesis, Bandung is ‘the real starting point of the Non-Aligned Movement’s evolution’,Footnote ⁴⁰ and non-alignment is seen as a policy supporting anti-colonial struggles, economic development and autonomy of newly independent states, allowing them to judge international issues based on merit rather than bloc loyalties.Footnote ⁴¹ In this light, instead of representing a voice between the West and the East, the NAM is situated in the North–South political, economic, and developmental divide.

Both these assumptions risk reducing the broader historical, intellectual, and geopolitical trajectories that underpinned the NAM’s foundation to mere reactions to US–Soviet antagonism or as an expression of independent foreign policy of Third World (today also Global South) countries.Footnote ⁴² Such a narrow lens overlooks the autonomous ideological aspirations, solidarities, and strategic priorities that many member states of the NAM, and not only its charismatic leaders, pursued beyond the confines of Cold War dynamics, as well as inner frictions within the movement itself

All four studies analysed in this article contest the idea that the NAM was a mere reaction to the Cold War superpower rivalry and the East–West antagonism. They locate the movement’s genealogy in deeper, more varied histories: Kullaa emphasizes European neutralism in the early Cold War; Mišković et al. trace its roots to anti-imperialist discourses since the 1930s; Dinkel locates its origins in the long history of South–South solidarity and opposition to global power imbalances; and Cavoški focuses on the institutional consolidation of the NAM through its summits, especially during the North–South conflict of the 1970s. Crucially, each work rejects the notion of the NAM as a monolithic ‘third bloc’ that reacted to the bipolar division of the international arena. Instead, they highlight the NAM’s genesis beyond Cold War paradigms and Afro-Asian postcolonial solidarity and focus on its diverse and sometimes contradictory character. As a result of these different research lines, the NAM emerges as a diplomatic arena shaped by heterogeneous political projects: Yugoslav socialism, Indian neutrality, Egyptian pan-Arabism, Indonesian anti-colonialism, and African nationalist movements. This pluralism, far from being a weakness, is presented as a constitutive feature of the movement’s adaptability and historical resonance, perhaps sometimes risking fragmentation of the NAM into too many overlapping narratives. It is also intrinsically connected to the centrifugal forces, ideological divergences, and geopolitical trajectories that define non-aligned countries. However, the inability of the NAM to bring about a real process of change worldwide was perhaps due to the lack of political force and the strength to turn common ideas and shared values into concrete and effective actions.Footnote ⁴³

III

The four works under review here – Kullaa (2012), Mišković et al. (2014), Dinkel (2018), and Cavoški (2022)– represent the core of the historiographical shift identified in this review article. Taken together, they redefine the origins, nature, and evolution of the Non-Aligned Movement, challenging the traditional Cold War paradigm that dominates older scholarship.

Kullaa shifts the NAM’s origins from Asia–Africa to Europe, arguing that the movement’s earliest foundations lay in Finnish neutralism and Yugoslavia’s post-1948 break with the USSR, not in Bandung. The main attempt of the book is to provide a new reading of Yugoslavia and Finnish historiography to reconsider their diplomatic relations with the Soviet Union and shed light on their different approach to neutralism. Focusing on the period between 1948 and 1958, the analysis explores how Yugoslavia, following its break with the Soviet Union, sought to define an independent foreign policy that could resist both Eastern and Western blocs. In this context, Finland’s model of neutralism served as a key reference point. By examining the diplomatic strategies and ideological reorientations of both Yugoslavia and Finland during this period, the study reveals a largely overlooked European contribution to the conceptual and political foundations of the NAM. Kullaa’s main contribution delves into the European genealogy of the NAM, expanding its geography and showing that neutralism developed simultaneously in the Global South and Europe.

This perspective shifts the analytical focus from Afro-Asian solidarity to Tito’s non-aligned strategy, making him a central actor in Kullaa’s narrative. In doing so, it usefully highlights how the NAM emerged from multiple geopolitical trajectories and the agency of individual actors, rather than from a single postcolonial moment. However, Kullaa’s emphasis on a European genealogy tends to underplay the foundational role of Afro-Asian actors, particularly Egypt and India, whose political and ideological agendas were central to shaping the movement’s early identity. By downplaying these contributions, her account risks rebalancing the narrative too far away from the postcolonial contexts that gave non-alignment its broader ideological coherence. Indeed, while highly convincing in recovering a neglected European dimension, Kullaa’s argument ultimately overcorrects the historiography, privileging state strategy over the broader ideological and postcolonial dynamics that gave the NAM its global resonance.

The edited volume by Mišković, Fischer-Tiné, and Boskovska reframes the NAM by placing it within longer anti-imperialist and internationalist traditions dating back to the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The common ground of each chapter is a rejection of Cold War-centric narratives and an emphasis on transregional entanglements and the agency of non-Western actors. It reveals the NAM as a heterogeneous, contested, and multi-regional project, drawing from multifaceted experiences. The first three chapters put together Afro-Asian solidarity as a founding principle of the NAM, exploring Indian national policy in the interwar period, the Asian Relations Conference as a converging platform of pre-war anti-imperialism and post-war decolonization.Footnote ⁴⁴

The second part of the book investigates the Cold War entanglements. Across all three chapters, a common argument emerges: the Non-Aligned Movement, despite its founding commitment to neutrality, was continuously constrained by the geopolitical realities of the Cold War and by the internal contradictions among its members. Lüthi shows that the NAM became entangled in Cold War dynamics because its members lacked a shared strategic vision and often aligned – explicitly or implicitly – with one of the superpowers during crises such as the Middle East conflict or the Indochina war.Footnote ⁴⁵ Mišković examines Tito and Nehru’s correspondence during the Soviet invasion of Hungary in 1956, capturing their early efforts to shape what would become the NAM. This chapter highlights how the two leaders navigated the crisis by relying on mutual trust while balancing their idealistic commitment to non-alignment with the pragmatic need to maintain stability and manage relations with the superpowers. The author argues that Tito and Nehru were unable to uphold pure non-alignment when faced with the 1956 Hungarian crisis, revealing the tension between their idealistic commitment to peaceful coexistence and the pragmatic need to maintain stable relations with the Soviet Union.Footnote ⁴⁶ Das Gupta further illustrates how the German Question exposed the NAM’s structural limits, as member states navigated between East and West under pressures such as the Hallstein Doctrine, a key principle of West German foreign policy from 1955 to the late 1960s, prioritizing bilateral interests over collective principles.Footnote ⁴⁷

The last three chapters show that the early Non-Aligned Movement emerged not as a unified bloc but as a contested political space shaped by competing national agendas, strategic ambitions, and efforts to influence global opinion. Rey demonstrates how Arab participation at Bandung reflected divergent interpretations of anti-colonialism and non-alignment, with states like Iraq and Syria using the conference to assert rival visions and bolster domestic legitimacy.Footnote ⁴⁸ Čavoški highlights Yugoslavia’s deliberate strategy to use the 1961 Belgrade Summit to consolidate its autonomy, mediate between radical and moderate Third World states, and institutionalize non-alignment as a structured movement under Tito’s leadership. Dinkel shows that the NAM summits were also crafted as global media events, where states sought visibility and prestige by shaping international press narratives. Collectively, these chapters call into question the coherence of the NAM, presenting it instead as a negotiated political arena shaped by competing national interests. They further reveal non-alignment as a flexible and negotiated project, less a coherent ideology than a dynamic space in which states advanced their own priorities while performing solidarity on the world stage.Footnote ⁴⁹ This reinterpretation is particularly convincing in its ability to capture the fragmented and negotiated nature of non-alignment, as well as its origins before the Cold War, thereby moving beyond earlier homogenizing narratives. However, the volume’s strong emphasis on diversity and contingency risks reduces the Non-Aligned Movement to a loose collection of case studies, making it difficult to discern shared features and, consequently, to identify what sustained it as a coherent political project. In contrast to Kullaa’s state-centred European genealogy and Mišković et Al. ’s transregional approach, Jürgen Dinkel shifts the focus to collective action, asking not where the NAM came from geographically, but how and why it cohered as a movement at all. Dinkel analyses the origins of the NAM and points out that its plural roots are the League Against Imperialism (1920s–1950s), the Bandung Conference (1955), and the early postcolonial solidarity networks across Asia, Africa, and Latin America. In his work, he applies social movement theories to conceptualize the NAM and explores the polycentric formation of the movement. As such, he argues that most of the literature tends to emphasize individual state interests and portray non-alignment as a national response to specific geopolitical pressures. This focus, however, does not explain the collective nature of the movement – why states with vastly different locations, economies, and political systems chose to come together. A key part of the answer lies in the shared language of anti-colonialism that emerged powerfully at the major conferences of the mid-twentieth century.Footnote ⁵⁰

By arguing that the NAM originated from the North–South divide rather than the East–West confrontation, Dinkel sheds light on two converging dynamics of the Cold War that are often treated through dichotomous lenses. He shows that North–South divisions predated the bipolar Cold War order, and that the use of concepts such as anti-imperialism and South–South cooperation functioned as forms of collective mobilization. In this sense, non-alignment appears closer to a social movement than to traditional frameworks of international relations based on diplomacy and high-level state interactions. This is a crucial step forward in the literature on the NAM, as it challenges conventional state-centric and bipolar readings, foregrounding the role of transnational mobilization instead, shared political language, and the agency of postcolonial actors, without neglecting the importance of the NAM summits and the institutionalization of the movement. In this sense, his framework is convincing in explaining collective mobilization. Moreover, Dinkel demonstrates the plural roots of the NAM and traces its evolution over time.

Jovan Čavoški’s book reconstructs the movement’s evolution by examining its first seven summits – from Belgrade in 1961 to New Delhi in 1983 – showing that the NAM’s real power and visibility emerged not through military or economic strength but through its summits, where states articulated collective positions, asserted political legitimacy, and used global media to project influence.Footnote ⁵¹ Čavoški demonstrates that these gatherings were decisive moments in which non-aligned countries confronted both superpower crises and internal divisions, negotiated common strategies, and institutionalized the movement into a permanent actor in international politics. By shifting attention from abstract theories to concrete events and newly accessible archival sources, the book positions the NAM not as a passive by-product of the Cold War but as an active protagonist.

By foregrounding the early NAM summits as moments of institutional consolidation and global visibility, the book further reinforces this perspective. It shifts attention away from a superpower-centered narrative of the Cold War and instead highlights the agency of non-aligned and decolonizing states. Far from being marginal, these actors emerge as strategic participants who use summit diplomacy to navigate superpower tensions, expand their influence, and pursue pragmatic political objectives within an evolving international order. Moving beyond traditional narratives centred on superpower competition, he approaches non-aligned nations as active subjects of the Cold War, rather than passive objects responding to superpower dynamics.

Drawing on the perspectives offered by the authors of the four books reviewed in this article, the origins of the non-aligned mindset and foreign policy orientation predate the bipolar confrontation. Moreover, they stress that the non-aligned states did not seek to form a ‘third force’, challenging a common assumption embedded in traditional Cold War paradigms. Many scholars writing during the Cold War interpreted non-alignment through this lens. For example, Khalid I. Babaa and Cecil V. Crabb Jr. argued that non-alignment had crystallized into ‘a collective diplomatic creed whose purpose was to create an independent third bloc inside the UN and other forums’.Footnote ⁵² Nazli Choucri argued that Afro-Asian neutrality was consciously organized so that ‘together these states would acquire the weight of a third force capable of influencing the superpowers’.Footnote ⁵³

Most analyses link the ambition for a ‘third bloc’ to the idea of a counter-hegemonic coalition,Footnote ⁵⁴ viewing the NAM as a collective response to global imperialism. The division of the world into competing blocs was the dominant narrative during the Cold War.Footnote ⁵⁵ Although the NAM projected broader aims than merely reacting to bipolarity, its emergence and functions are often interpreted within the context of East–West competition, thereby reducing it to the schematic logic of being just another bloc.

Part of the recent historiography challenges the conventional narrative that the NAM aimed to become a unified third bloc in global politics. Jovan Cavoški emphasizes that non-aligned states did not seek to enter the bipolar competition as a cohesive third power, partly because they lacked the military and material resources to do so.Footnote ⁵⁶ In this regard, Čavoški makes an important contribution by highlighting the internal diversity, tensions, and competing forces within the NAM, as well as divergent views on the role the movement should play in the international system, thereby revealing the absence of a unified voice.

These states aimed to reform the international order and global economic structures, advocating for a more equitable system that reflected the interests of newly independent nations, as well as those of active neutralist states, like Yugoslavia, situated between the two blocs and committed to preserving their independence, as Rinna Kullaa argues in her monograph. From a systems-oriented perspective, this literature repositions the NAM as an active player in the Cold War, shifting attention from superpower dynamics to the agency of actors in the so-called ‘peripheries’.

In this sense, the edited book by Paul Stubbs traces this particular aspect, avoiding a Yugocentric assessment of the movement’s development and foundation by situating Belgrade within broader global networks of social, cultural, political, and economic relations.Footnote ⁵⁷ It highlights the NAM as an ‘antisystemic worldmaking project’Footnote ⁵⁸ that embodied visions of counter-hegemonic globalization, rooted in solidarity between the socialist semi-periphery (Yugoslavia) and the postcolonial periphery. It presents Yugoslavia’s position as both leading and liminal: outside the Global South but deeply entangled in its struggles, offering leadership while also being shaped by them.

In his comprehensive study of the movement, Jürgen Dinkel draws on a wide range of archival sources, including Yugoslav, German, British, US, Russian, and United Nations archival collections. This extensive empirical base strengthens Dinkel’s argument considerably. He also highlights that non-aligned states, shaped by their experiences of anti-colonial struggle and postcolonial state-building, chose to cooperate not to construct a third bloc but to engage with international institutions and assert their autonomy beyond the logic of bipolar rivalry. Their actions challenge the traditional narrative that global politics in the postwar era were shaped solely by the East–West confrontation. Instead, non-aligned states actively sought to redefine the terms of international engagement, using the NAM as a platform to advocate for their interests and influence global norms. For many member states, participation in the NAM was a strategic move – a way to gain international recognition and domestic legitimacy, and to pursue a foreign policy that transcended East–West dichotomies.

This emerging literature views the NAM as representing a distinct mode of global engagement, one that cannot be reduced to Cold War paradigms centred on East–West antagonism, or on state-centric approaches that privilege the role of charismatic leaders. Taken together, these works demonstrate that the NAM was anything but peripheral; rather, it emerged as a central and proactive actor in the Cold War, intertwining East–West rivalries with the North–South conflict. At the same time, it was internally shaped by divergent ambitions and political orientations – ranging from more moderate approaches, as advocated by Tito, to more radical positions, as exemplified by Cuba – while remaining anchored in shared frameworks such as anti-imperialism, Third Worldism, disarmament, and neutralism.Footnote ⁵⁹ This moves the NAM away from the notion of a ‘third bloc’, given its internal centrifugal forces and divergent perspectives.

IV

In her monograph, Rinna Kullaa offers a fresh perspective on the roots of the Non-Aligned Movement. Her book challenges the dominant narrative that the NAM emerged primarily from Asian and African decolonization efforts – recalling the Bandung Conference in 1955 – arguing instead that its origins lie in Europe, particularly within the political margins of the Mediterranean and Northern Europe. She highlights the experiences of Yugoslavia and Finland between 1948 and 1958 as critical to understanding the early development of the movement.

Therefore, Kullaa relocates the origins of the Non-Aligned Movement from the postcolonial world to Europe – not in countries directly caught within Cold War spheres of influence but in neutral states. Her argument emphasizes Finnish foreign policy (particularly the so-called Paasikivi–Kekkonen Line) as a model of independence, developed to balance Soviet pressure along its western border. After the Tito–Stalin split in 1948, Finland’s neutralist stance became a model of autonomy for Belgrade.

Kullaa notably downplays the South–South dynamic, which to some authors has been central for newly independent states in creating alternative political formations and new forms of transregional community – such as those exemplified by the NAM.Footnote ⁶⁰ In addition to this, perhaps the major limitation of her perspective lies in the timeline of her study, which concludes in 1958 – before the movement’s more clearly defined formative phase. As such, her account underrepresents the broader geopolitical and postcolonial contexts that would soon shape the NAM’s global trajectory. Nonetheless, Kullaa is concerned with drawing out the core ideological foundations of the NAM, particularly its emphasis on state independence and agency in navigating a bipolar world. Neutralism, in her view, is neither passive nor apolitical, but rather emerges as an assertive stance that redefines non-alignment as an active strategy of autonomy.

The Bandung Conference held symbolic significance but failed, in this study, to establish lasting diplomatic structures. The Night Frost Crisis of 1958, a political standoff in which Moscow pressured Finland to replace Prime Minister Karl-August Fagerholm’s Western-leaning government, underscored Soviet sensitivity to perceived challenges in its sphere of influence. It was only after this crisis and the Soviet–Yugoslav rift that Tito revitalized his outreach to Asian and African leaders.Footnote ⁶¹ This led to renewed high-level visits – such as those by Nehru and Nasser – and a strategic deepening of Yugoslavia’s ties beyond Europe.

Kulla’s line of research opens a new dimension in the NAM historiography, one that situates the movement within a European genealogy of neutralism and highlights the role of smaller states in shaping alternative modes of global engagement. The chronological extension of non-alignment that is lacking in Kullaa’s book is addressed in Mišković et al., whose individual chapters explore diverse ideological stances and state positionalities in reconstructing the genesis of the NAM.

In their edited volume, Mišković et al. expand the ideological and chronological scope of the Non-Aligned Movement by drawing on postcolonial theory, Cold War studies, and transregional history. The book highlights the role of interwar anti-imperialism, media strategies, and race as structuring forces in international relations. Its interdisciplinary approach and non-Eurocentric perspective reposition NAM within a broader global history of dissent. Beyond its individual chapters, the volume argues that the NAM’s origins lie not solely in Cold War geopolitics but in longer-standing traditions of anti-imperialist and internationalist activism dating back to the late nineteenth century. It connects non-alignment to broader visions of peaceful coexistence and self-determination, shaped by socialist and anti-colonial ideologies.

What makes this book especially significant is its expansion of both the chronological and ideological boundaries typically associated with the NAM studies. It situates the movement within broader anti-imperialist discourse well before the onset of the Cold War, challenging conventional narratives that reduce the NAM to merely a passive intermediary in a bipolar world.Footnote ⁶² Deeply engaging with postcolonial theory and incorporating perspectives from scholars such as Gayatri Spivak and Dipesh Chakrabarty, the book aims to ‘provincialize’ Eurocentric narratives of global history, amplifying the voices of subaltern actors within the international order.Footnote ⁶³ Ultimately, this approach offers a more ‘decentred’ and multi-regional understanding of the NAM, highlighting its autonomous intellectual and political roots rather than portraying it solely as a reaction to superpower competition.

Within this framework, Dinkel’s book carves out a distinctive position. Dinkel conceptualizes the Non-Aligned Movement as a social movement rather than simply a diplomatic alignment. Dinkel underscores the centrality of summits in the NAM’s political practice, particularly the first summit in Belgrade in 1961, which he identifies as crucial to defining the movement’s core principles and establishing its diplomatic format. He notes that summit diplomacy was more than symbolic – it functioned as a ‘negotiation platform’ and a ‘public display of unity’, even when big ideological differences existed.Footnote ⁶⁴

By applying social movement theory,Footnote ⁶⁵ he emphasizes aspects such as collective identity, institutional development, and symbolic politics. Crucially, Dinkel challenges the prevailing view that the 1961 Belgrade conference marked the inception of the NAM.Footnote ⁶⁶ Instead, he situates the movement’s institutional and political apex in the 1970s, during the height of the North–South conflict.Footnote ⁶⁷ This reinterpretation significantly moves away from top-down, leader-focused narratives, highlighting instead the grassroots foundations and structural characteristics of the movement that moved beyond the East–West rivalry.

Dinkel argues that the NAM’s origins lie in the anti-colonial resistance movements that emerged during the interwar period, evolved through post-colonial nation-building, and reached maturity in the 1970s. Through this book, he locates the NAM within global history, rather than treating it as a marginal Cold War phenomenon. During the 1970s, Dinkel identifies a decisive turning point, arguing that only in this decade did sustained cooperation among non-aligned states emerge, leading to the institutionalization of the NAM as an international actor representing the interests of the Third World in the international system.Footnote ⁶⁸

His emphasis on this period is highly persuasive, as it shifts attention away from earlier symbolic moments such as Bandung (1955) or Belgrade (1961), which, he contends, had not yet produced a stable or enduring organizational structure. In doing so, Dinkel offers a compelling corrective to earlier historiography that overemphasized charismatic leadership or diplomatic events, instead emphasizing the importance of long-term structural forces, above all the North–South divide and shared economic grievances, seen as the fundamental drivers behind the movement’s institutional consolidation. Consequently, the NAM cannot be seen merely as a byproduct of the Cold War or as an impulsive creation by charismatic leaders but rather as the collective effort to organize economic and political cooperation among non-aligned, developing, and post-colonial states. Dinkel’s argument is especially convincing in demonstrating that the movement’s coherence derived less from ideological unity than from a shared critique of an unequal international system and a common aspiration to reshape it.

As anticipated, Dinkel also refutes the notion that the NAM emerged solely from East–West competition, placing it firmly within the context of North–South tensions. This perspective explains why the end of the Cold War and the cessation of East–West rivalry did not spell the end of the NAM, as the fundamental dynamics of North–South economic exploitation and asymmetry persisted. While Dinkel acknowledges that East–West and North–South conflicts often overlapped or were periodically interwoven, his framework would benefit from a more explicit analysis of how these dynamics were interconnected rather than treated as analytically distinct.

Furthermore, Dinkel critiques existing literature for its tendency to focus predominantly on individual state interests and decisions. This focus, he argues, presents non-alignment merely as a national response to geopolitical circumstances, failing to account for its collective nature and unity among states with diverse locations, economies, and political systems.Footnote ⁶⁹ According to Dinkel, anti-colonialism, prominently articulated through mid-twentieth-century conferences, offers a more convincing explanation for this collective dimension. In this light, the policy of non-alignment emerges clearly as the postcolonial governmental elite’s strategic response to colonial oppression, economic exploitation, military occupation, and foreign domination.

Jovan Cavoški shifts the historiography from institutional anatomy to diplomatic performance. Accepting Dinkel’s insight that the NAM was not a product of the East–West rivalry but became a protagonist of the North–South struggle in the 1970s, Cavoški rebuilds that argument from the ground up by treating the first seven summits – from Belgrade 1961 to New Delhi 1983 – as his primary evidence.

Cavoški’s focus on high-level diplomacy leaves room to examine cultural diplomacy, educational exchanges, and transnational media campaigns, areas where Mišković et al.  hint at rich ideological linkages but do not fully map their trajectories. The summits, he argues, were not ceremonial footnotes but the chief medium through which the movement projected power, forged collective strategies, and claimed political legitimacy in a bipolar world. A closer focus on the NAM’s summits offers a revealing and innovative lens through which to examine the movement’s internal dynamics, bringing into view ideological divergences, competition among member states, and the coexistence of differing interests and perspectives. In doing so, the book provides an in-depth account of the movement’s multiple voices, agendas, and national priorities, moving beyond the formal, official, and seemingly unified stance projected externally. The analysis of each summit is closely embedded in its broader international context, allowing the internal debates within the NAM to be understood in relation to ongoing global developments. In this way, the book contributes to shedding light on the wider dynamics of Cold War international debates and development.

While the superpowers could count on military strength and abundant funds, the NAM members leveraged widely publicized summits – and the media spotlight they attracted to articulate their autonomy, mediate internal quarrels, and rally international sympathy. Each gathering is read against the backdrop of contemporaneous crises – whether super-power brinkmanship or intra-movement rifts – demonstrating how non-aligned leaders used summit diplomacy to synchronize positions on peace, decolonization, and economic justice.Footnote ⁷⁰

Cavoški’s summit-centred lens thus complements, rather than duplicates, Dinkel’s institutional study. Together they signal a developing scholarship that moves beyond earlier abstractions to show the NAM as an active architect of Cold-War and post-colonial order, and as a forge for the Third World’s collective political identity.

V

Together, these four monographs radically reconceptualize the Non-Aligned Movement as a vibrant, multilayered phenomenon – one whose significance extends well beyond the familiar ‘Bandung to Belgrade’ storyline. First, by broadening both the geographical and the chronological horizons of the NAM’s history, they move past a narrow post-1955, Afro-Asian focus to recover earlier roots in European neutralism (Kullaa ), and interwar anti-imperialist networks (Mišković et al. ), and to trace the movement’s evolution through the 1970s North–South conflict and even into the post-Cold War era (Dinkel; Cavoški ).

Second, they emphasize the coalition’s internal diversity, portraying the NAM not as a homogeneous ‘third bloc’ but as a constellation of distinct political projects – Yugoslav self-management socialism, Finland’s Paasikivi–Kekkonen neutralism, India’s strategic non-alignment, and various strands of African nationalism – each bringing its own ideological priorities and diplomatic style.

Third, these studies recentre non-Western agency, demonstrating how leaders from the Global South and active neutralists alike shaped emerging international norms on disarmament, economic justice, and postcolonial sovereignty, rather than simply reacting to superpower dictates. They also pursued a reconfiguration of the international order through the instruments of the New International Economic Order (NIEO), formally launched in 1974, following the oil crisis of 1973, when the United Nations General Assembly adopted the Declaration on the Establishment of a New International Economic Order (Resolution 3201). The NIEO sought to establish new criteria for measuring and advancing the economic development of the Global South, reflecting broader post-colonial demands for equity, redistribution, and structural reform in the global economy.Footnote ⁷¹

Finally, by situating the NAM within long-term patterns of global inequality, they show that the movement’s real innovation was to press for structural reform of economic and political institutions; an argument that persists in relevance in the contemporary era where South–North asymmetries remain unresolved.

At the same time, this body of work opens up several fertile avenues for further investigation. An unsolved matter deals with the institutional impact: how effectively did the NAM’s collective demands reshape UN procedures, Bretton Woods institutions, or the New International Economic Order? Dinkel’s social-movement lens points toward the question of how the NAM’s transnational networks translated into concrete institutional change. But this aspect, crucial to understand the NAM’s positional and actual weight in the international system, has generally received less attention. Scholars are increasingly examining how non-aligned and post-colonial actors actively reshaped the practices and agendas of international organizations, particularly within the United Nations and in debates surrounding decolonization and development.Footnote ⁷² A second emerging line of inquiry can focus on the internal hierarchies and tensions within the NAM, moving beyond the rhetoric of solidarity to analyse how regional, ideological, and material asymmetries – such as those between Afro-Asian states, European neutralists, and resource-rich countries – generated competing visions of non-alignment and uneven forms of influence.Footnote ⁷³

Finally, it is worth examining how non-alignment has evolved beyond the Cold War, especially how its political language and strategic logic have been reinterpreted in new contexts and, in particular, within today’s multipolar world. Another neglected topic delves into the internal hierarchies and dissent. While Cavoški and Dinkel illuminate summit diplomacy and organizational structures, little is known about the ideological and regional fault lines – for instance, those fractures that emerged between Afro-Asian majority positions and European neutralists. Dinkel’s work does acknowledge the existence of ideological and regional fault lines within the NAM, including between Afro-Asian majorities and European neutralists. In this regard, Dinkel notes that Indonesia, China, and Algeria tried to revive an Afro-Asian conference tradition, while India and Yugoslavia opposed it, favouring the NAM centred on Belgrade.Footnote ⁷⁴ However, these divisions are simply acknowledged rather than examined in substantial analytical depth.

Cavoški investigates another major fault line that emerged within the Non-Aligned Movement, one rooted in opposing visions of non-aligned policy.Footnote ⁷⁵ Yugoslavia, under Tito’s leadership, pursued a moderate conception of non-alignment, grounded in neutrality, equidistance from both Cold War blocs, advocacy for reforms in global trade, and support for decolonization. In contrast, Cuba promoted a radical, pro-Soviet interpretation of non-alignment, framing the movement as an explicitly anti-imperialist and anti-colonial struggle that should find its ‘natural ally’ in the socialist bloc.Footnote ⁷⁶ By the late 1970s, these divisions had crystallized. The 1979 Havana summit vividly showcased the divergent approaches: Cuba positioned itself as the champion of anti-imperialist struggles, while Yugoslavia resisted being overshadowed and sought to preserve the independence and autonomy of the NAM.

The arguments presented across the four works converge on identifying the factors that enabled the Non-Aligned Movement to persist beyond the Cold War. A shared premise among the authors is that the movement was not merely a derivative of the bipolar international order. Accordingly, while not all of the studies extensively address the post-1991 trajectories of the NAM, they collectively indicate that the movement rested on diverse and enduring ideological currents, rooted in the colonial era yet transcending the Cold War and continuing to shape global politics today.Footnote ⁷⁷

Dinkel argues that the NAM’s survival after the Cold War wasn’t just due to its role in addressing East–West tensions. By the 1970s and 1980s, it had become a major force in the North–South conflict, and in South–South cooperation, with institutions and ideals rooted in anticolonialism, calls for a New International Economic Order, and global justice. Its endurance, he claims, reflects lasting structural inequalities and ideological commitments beyond the East–West divide.

In recent years, scholars have documented how the Non-Aligned Movement has rearticulated its foundational ideology within the context of twenty-first-century multipolarity. Scholars increasingly argue that the NAM’s ideological foundations, once grounded in anti-colonial solidarity and resistance to bipolar domination, have been rearticulated through new platforms such as BRICS and emerging Global South alliances. Koehler notes that the NAM has shifted ‘from Cold War neutrality to a broader resistance movement challenging hegemonic practices in a fragmented global system’.Footnote ⁷⁸ This evolution is particularly evident in the increasing attention on South–South cooperation frameworks.

Some scholars recognize that BRICS has emerged as a key site where the ideological legacy of the Non-Aligned Movement is being reimagined in response to the shifting forms of global power. As Chakraborty argues, the formation and consolidation of BRICS reflect a collective effort by emerging regional powers to restructure global governance, offering an alternative to Western-dominated institutions like the IMF and the World Bank.Footnote ⁷⁹ He contends that ‘the gradual power transfer, from North to South, is taking place’,Footnote ⁸⁰ and that BRICS has assumed a strategic role in asserting the political and economic agency of the Global South within a multipolar framework. This shift is evident in BRICS initiatives such as the New Development Bank, which seeks to finance development independent of Western conditionalities, and in coordinated demands for reforming international institutions to be more inclusive and representative.Footnote ⁸¹ Moreover, the potential shift towards trading in local currencies is considered a challenge to the dollar’s hegemony in the Global South.Footnote ⁸²

These developments echo the NAM’s historical emphasis on sovereignty, self-determination, and equitable global participation, suggesting that while the movement may have, to some extent, diminished in formal relevance, its ideological impulses are alive within new formations suited to contemporary geopolitical realities.

VI

The recent historiography of the Non-Aligned Movement demonstrates that far from being a peripheral or reactive actor during the Cold War, the movement constituted a dynamic arena where postcolonial states, neutralist actors, and ideological projects converged to reshape international order. By broadening both the chronological and geographical scope of analysis, scholars such as Kullaa, Mišković et al., Dinkel, and Cavoški have revealed the NAM’s intellectual diversity, institutional adaptability, and enduring political resonance. These contributions disconnect from the established ‘Bandung-to-Belgrade’ narrative and reject the reduction of the NAM to a passive ‘third bloc’, instead framing it as a heterogeneous, transnational experiment in global governance.

Central to this reassessment is the recognition that the NAM’s genealogy cannot be confined to Cold War bipolarity. Its intellectual roots lie equally in interwar anti-imperialist networks, European neutralist traditions, and Afro-Asian decolonial solidarities (Mišković et al.; Kullaa). This pluralism not only shaped the character of the movement but also underpinned its survival beyond the collapse of the Cold War order, though in different forms and positionality in the contemporary world. The emphasis on autonomy, sovereignty, and structural reform – whether through summit diplomacy, advocacy for a New International Economic Order (NIEO), or calls for disarmament – underscored the NAM’s capacity to articulate long-term systemic critiques that remain relevant in today’s multipolar world.

Recent scholarship further emphasizes the NAM’s role as an incubator of alternative visions of globalization. Dinkel, for instance, highlights the importance of the NAM’s collective identity and transnational activism, while Cavoški demonstrates that summit diplomacy constituted not mere ceremonial rituals but powerful tools of political performance and agenda-setting. These perspectives align with broader currents in global history and postcolonial studies, which stress the agency of Global South actors in shaping international norms and institutions, challenging Eurocentric accounts of world politics (Mišković et al.).

The continued relevance of the NAM’s intellectual legacy in the twenty-first century underscores the need to situate the movement within contemporary debates about multipolarity, South–South cooperation, and global governance. Koehler has argued that non-alignment has evolved from Cold War neutrality into a broader form of resistance against hegemonic practices in a fragmented international system, while Chakraborty interprets the rise of BRICS as a modern embodiment of the NAM’s foundational impulses. Initiatives such as the BRICS New Development Bank and experiments in de-dollarization echo the NAM’s earlier calls for economic justice and structural reform, suggesting continuity in the Global South’s quest for autonomy.

In this sense, the NAM’s legacy extends well beyond its formal institutional structures. It endures as a normative and strategic framework through which states of the Global South negotiate sovereignty, resist domination, and pursue more equitable global orders. The historiographical revisions of the last decade not only restore agency to the NAM within Cold War history but also highlight its enduring relevance in today’s multipolar context. Future research must continue to examine the movement’s institutional efficacy and rearticulations in the contemporary international arena. Ultimately, the NAM’s significance lies not in its past limitations but in its ongoing role as a site of global contestation and imagination for alternative world orders.