"Bandung Spirit Reloaded” Podcast – 71st Anniversary of the Bandung Asian African Conference: Essential Viewing/Listening on the Bandung Spirit, the Non-Aligned Movement, Sukarno, Indonesia, Scotland’s Decolonisation, and Global Reordering

Seventy-one years ago, in the Indonesian city of Bandung, twenty-nine nations from Asia and Africa gathered to declare that the world would no longer be managed for them by colonial powers. They were the majority of humanity, and they were done asking permission. The Bandung Asian African Conference (Konferensi Asia Afrika) of 18-24 April 1955 was not merely a diplomatic event. It was a civilisational statement, a refusal to accept that history had ended on terms written by colonial empires.

Scotland has not yet written its own Bandung moment. But it belongs in that tradition. For Scotland, still bound within an English colonial state that extracts its resources, erases its political agency, and manages its trajectory from Westminster, the Bandung Spirit is not a foreign inheritance. It is a mirror. The struggle for Scottish self-determination is not a parochial grievance or an ethnic reflex. It is a decolonisation process, and it sits squarely in the arc of history that Sukarno, Nehru, Nasser, Zhou Enlai and so many others set in motion in 1955 in Indonesia.

That is why this podcast, released to mark the 71st anniversary of the Asia-Africa Conference, matters for every Scot who has ever asked why sovereignty remains out of reach, and for every voice in the Global South who knows what it means to have your future decided elsewhere.

Bandung Spirit Reloaded brings together four figures from markedly different vantage points to address the enduring power and the unfinished work of the Bandung Spirit, the Non-Aligned Movement, and Sukarno's thought as strategic frameworks, not nostalgic symbols, for the world we are living in now.

The speakers are:

• Connie Rahakundini Bakrie, international defence and security expert, Professor of International Relations at Saint Petersburg State University, Ambassador of Science and Education of Russia, and member of the Valdai Discussion Club. Professor Connie is close to both former President Megawati Soekarnoputri, former President of the Republic of Indonesia and daughter of the founding father of Indonesia, President Sukarno, and to President Vladimir Putin, President of Russia.
• Christophe Dorigné-Thomson, Doctor in Politics from Universitas Indonesia, author of Indonesia's Engagement with Africa (Palgrave Macmillan, 2023), published with Palgrave Macmillan, Routledge, and ISEAS-Yusof Ishak Institute, member of Liberation Scotland's Secretariat and editor of Still Yours For Scotland.
• Angie Natesha Goenadi Go, member of the Bandung Regency Regional House of Representatives (DPRD), representing PDI Perjuangan, the Indonesian Democratic Party of Struggle chaired by former President Megawati Soekarnoputri, Sukarno's daughter, with a focus on community representation and regional development, bringing the voice of ground-level politics from the very city that gave this spirit its name.
• Baskara Tulus Wardaya SJ, Jesuit priest, historian, and Professor of History at Sanata Dharma University, Yogyakarta, specialist on Indonesia-United States relations and author of Cold War Shadow: United States Policy toward Indonesia, 1953-1963 (2007), contributor to Tempo and various media.

This is a discussion that refuses to remain abstract. The Bandung Spirit, as explored here, is tested against what it delivers on the ground, in Indonesian villages notably, in education, in health, in the material lives of ordinary people who are never the ones setting the terms at international tables. Sukarno's vision is not treated as a relic of Third Worldism but as a living strategic framework for how the formerly colonised world can build sovereignty, solidarity, and structural transformation simultaneously.

The conversation moves from Sukarno's intellectual and political legacy to the internal contradictions of Indonesian democracy, from the architecture of the Non-Aligned Movement to the urgent question of reforming a United Nations Security Council still structured around the victors of a war that ended eighty years ago. It speaks honestly about power asymmetries and about what it takes to convert geopolitical vision into material progress, the only measure that ultimately counts.

And it speaks about Scotland. Not as a curiosity grafted onto a Global South conversation, but as a constitutive part of it. Scottish decolonisation, understood in genuine solidarity with Global South liberation and not as an exercise in British i.e English colonial liberal nationalism, carries specific geopolitical weight. A free Scotland, re-entering the international community as a sovereign state, would be a new voice for multilateralism, for UN reform, for a world order that does not continue to concentrate security council power in the hands of former empires. That is Bandung logic applied to the North Atlantic, and it is no less urgent for being unexpected.

The vast majority of the world, the peoples of Asia, Africa, Latin America, the Caribbean, and the Pacific, live in the long shadow of decisions they did not make, in institutions they did not design, under rules they cannot change. The Bandung Conference was their first collective refusal. Seventy-one years on, that refusal is not yet victorious. The work is unfinished. The Non-Aligned Movement needs reloading. The global order needs restructuring. And the decolonisation of every people, including Scotland, remains a live and urgent cause.

This podcast does not offer comfortable answers, but it insists on the right questions: Who benefits from the current order? Who pays for its continuity? And what would it take, concretely, to build something better, for the people, all the people, in the spirit of Bandung? Scotland is very important from that perspective, following the Bandung Spirit and the Non-Aligned Movement.

As a colonised country, Scotland is a member of the Global South.

Still Yours For Scotland | decolonise.scot

Christophe Dorigné-Thomson