Has the Non-Alignment Movement (NAM) lost its relevance in a multipolar world?

The Third Way in a Crowded World

In April 1955, delegates from twenty-nine Asian and African countries gathered in the Indonesian town of Bandung. Most of them had won their freedom only recently, and many were still poor, but they shared one refusal: they would not become pawns in a quarrel between Washington and Moscow. Six years later, at Belgrade in 1961, that refusal took institutional form as the Non-Aligned Movement. It has since grown to 120 members, the largest grouping of states after the United Nations itself. Yet the world that produced it has vanished. The Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, bipolarity gave way to a brief unipolar moment, and today power is spread among the United States, China, Russia, the European Union and a cluster of rising middle powers. The Non-Aligned Movement as an institution has lost much of its weight, but the idea that created it, the right of developing nations to judge every issue on its merits and to refuse to be anyone's camp follower, matters more in a multipolar world than it did in a bipolar one.

To judge relevance, one must first be clear about what non-alignment meant. It was never neutrality. Nehru, who did much to shape the idea, insisted that India would take sides on questions of freedom and justice, but would decide those sides for itself rather than by bloc loyalty. The principles of Panchsheel, agreed between India and China in 1954, and the meeting of Nehru, Nasser and Tito at Brioni in 1956 gave the idea its ethical vocabulary: respect for sovereignty, non-aggression, non-interference and peaceful coexistence. Non-alignment was thus a claim to strategic autonomy by countries that had just recovered their sovereignty and did not intend to surrender it again to a new kind of empire. Nehru put the point plainly to the United States Congress in 1949:

Where freedom is menaced or justice threatened, or where aggression takes place, we cannot and shall not be neutral.

On its own terms, the movement achieved a great deal. It gave newly independent states a collective voice at the United Nations, carrying forward the spirit of the 1960 declaration on granting independence to colonial countries and peoples and sustaining the long campaign against apartheid in South Africa. Together with the Group of 77, it pressed for a New International Economic Order in 1974, demanding fairer terms of trade and aid. It also preserved room for nation-building: India could build the Bhilai steel plant with Soviet help while drawing on American support during the Green Revolution. Non-alignment, in short, let poor countries trade with both camps without being owned by either.

Critics who say the movement has lost its relevance have a strong case. Its central reason for existing, a world divided into two military blocs, disappeared with the Cold War. Even during that era its unity was thin. Two members, Iran and Iraq, fought each other from 1980 to 1988 while the movement watched. Its response to the Chinese attack on India in 1962 was muted, and India's own treaty of friendship with the Soviet Union in 1971 blurred the line between non-alignment and alignment. The movement has no permanent secretariat, its declarations are long and seldom implemented, and its summits now draw thin attendance. When India's Prime Minister skipped the summit at Margarita in Venezuela in 2016, few observers were surprised, which itself showed how far the forum had drifted from the centre of world politics.

Yet a multipolar world does not remove the pressure to align; it multiplies it. Developing nations today are asked to choose not between two ideologies but between rival 5G vendors, payment systems, satellite networks, arms suppliers and sanctions regimes. The contest between the United States and China threatens to harden into a new bipolarity of technology and trade. Under such pressure, the old instinct of Bandung, to engage every power while belonging to none, is not an anachronism but a survival strategy. Many countries in Africa, Latin America, West Asia and Southeast Asia have refused to take sides in the war in Ukraine, buying from one power and investing with another. They are practising non-alignment even when they no longer use the word.

India's own journey shows how the idea has evolved rather than died. A group of strategic thinkers set out a case for "Nonalignment 2.0" in 2012, and India's diplomacy has since moved towards what External Affairs Minister S. Jaishankar, in The India Way (2020), describes as engaging multiple partners on issues that suit India's interests. India sits in the Quad with the United States, Japan and Australia, and in BRICS and the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation with China and Russia. In 2022 it abstained on several United Nations votes on Ukraine and bought discounted Russian oil while deepening defence and technology ties with the West. This multi-alignment is non-alignment adapted to many poles: the means have changed, but the end, autonomy of judgement, remains exactly what Nehru sought.

The movement's agenda also remains unfinished. Developing countries still bear the costs of a climate crisis they did little to cause and still seek the finance promised to them under the principle of common but differentiated responsibilities. During the pandemic, India and South Africa proposed at the World Trade Organization in October 2020 a waiver of intellectual property rules on Covid-19 vaccines, a classic non-aligned demand for equity. Disarmament, once NAM's signature cause, has stalled: the eleventh review conference of the Non-Proliferation Treaty ended in May 2026 without a consensus document, the third in a row to fail. On terrorism, debt distress and the reform of the Security Council, the voice of the developing world is needed as urgently as it was in 1961.

The real question is whether NAM is the right vehicle for that voice. In practice, much of its spirit has migrated to newer forums. BRICS expanded in 2024, the African Union became a permanent member of the G20 at the New Delhi summit in September 2023, and India convened the Voice of the Global South Summit in January 2023. These bodies are smaller, more focused and more effective than a 120-member movement that decides by consensus. Yet NAM retains a unique asset, the numbers of a near-universal coalition of the South, and its online contact group summit in May 2020, convened by Azerbaijan to coordinate the pandemic response, showed that the platform can still be useful when it chooses a concrete task.

Relevance, therefore, depends on reinvention. NAM needs to move from opposing blocs to building issue-based coalitions on food and energy security, climate finance, vaccine access, digital public goods and counter-terrorism. A small permanent secretariat could turn declarations into programmes. India, with its experience of sharing digital public infrastructure and its record of bridging North and South, is well placed to lead such a renewal, provided it treats the movement as a working forum and not as a ritual of nostalgia.

Has the Non-Aligned Movement lost its relevance? As a set of summits, it largely has. As an idea, it has not; the multipolar world has made it more necessary, because there are now more powers seeking followers and more ways to coerce the weak. The delegates at Bandung did not ask to be left alone by the world; they asked to be heard by it, on their own terms. That demand has outlived the Cold War. The test of non-alignment today is not whether its old movement survives, but whether the Global South can speak with one independent voice in a crowded and contested world. If it can, the spirit of 1955 will remain one of the most modern ideas in international politics.