Non-Aligned Movement

The Non-Aligned Movement grouped states that declined to formally align with either major power bloc, the United States and its allies or the Soviet Union and its allies, during the Cold War, arguing that newly independent and developing nations had interests distinct from either side's.

Its roots lie in the Bandung Conference of April 1955, where Asian and African leaders including Indonesia's Sukarno, India's Jawaharlal Nehru and Egypt's Gamal Abdel Nasser met to promote cooperation among recently decolonised states. The movement was formally founded at the Belgrade Conference of September 1961, organised chiefly by Yugoslavia's Josip Broz Tito together with Nehru, Nasser, Sukarno and Ghana's Kwame Nkrumah, whose governments became its founding core.

The Non-Aligned Movement's original rationale, standing apart from a Cold War rivalry that ended in 1991, has since faded, but the organisation persists as a forum where developing nations coordinate positions on global economic and political questions, still holding regular summits and counting most of the world's states as members even though the bloc confrontation it was built to avoid no longer exists.