Do you agree with the stand that the Non-Aligned Movement needs to be reinvented? (2000)
The Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) was built at Belgrade (1961) for a bipolar world: its identity lay in refusing both blocs, its agenda in decolonisation, apartheid and disarmament. After 1991 that identity dissolved and NAM became, in a common phrase, a movement in search of an agenda. I agree that it needs reinvention, but of its organisation and method, not of the principle of independent judgement at its core.
Why reinvention is necessary
- Lost rationale. With one superpower left, the bargaining logic of playing blocs against each other vanished. At the Accra ministerial of 1991, as T. P. Sreenivasan (2018) recalls, the movement came close to being wound up, saved largely by India.
- Ritual without results. Triennial summits issue vast consensus declarations that bind nobody; NAM has advanced little even where members agree, as on terrorism or drug trafficking.
- Institutional deficit. No charter, secretariat, monitoring mechanism or enforcement, and liberal membership criteria admitting states whose alignment is not in doubt.
- Competition. The G-20, ASEAN, the African Union and BRICS, with its New Development Bank, deliver concrete goods, so members invest there.
- Fading commitment. India has sent its Vice-President or External Affairs Minister, not its Prime Minister, to every summit since 2016, most recently Kampala (2024).
What reinvention should mean
- A new object: P. V. Narasimha Rao‘s reformulation, that non-alignment means every nation’s right to independence and development whether there is one bloc or more, should become the operative mission: a coalition for development and fair global governance.
- From declaring to bargaining: a lean secretariat, qualified decision rules, and a narrow agenda on debt, technology access, climate finance and unilateral coercive measures, the item the Kampala mid-term ministerial (October 2025) pressed hardest.
- Codifying, not only declaring: the chair’s call at the General Assembly on 23 September 2026 for a binding International Covenant on the Right to Development shows the shift from rhetoric to law-making.
- Networked, not isolated: a division of labour with the G-77 in negotiations, bridges to the G-20 and BRICS, and, as Sreenivasan suggests, a core of near-equals on the IBSA model.
- New issues: pandemic equity, digital and AI governance, migration and climate adaptation.
The counter-arguments
- Let it go. C. Raja Mohan (2016) judges the movement “in coma”, dysfunctional even before 1991 because so many divergent interests could never be harmonised; others urged it to declare its mission accomplished. Reform attempts at Jakarta (1992), Kuala Lumpur (2003) and Havana (2006) changed little, because heterogeneity is structural.
- No need. On Sreenivasan’s account, freedom of thought and action is valid with one bloc or none; on this view the doctrine needs no reinvention, as hedging by middle powers shows.
Both objections have weight. The first underrates the only forum outside the UN that some 120 states enter without invitation; M. K. Narayanan (2016) thought its obituary premature. The second shows the doctrine survives, not that the organisation works.
Conclusion
Reinvention is necessary but bounded. NAM will not again be a “third force”; it can become a standing normative coalition and bargaining platform for the South, in the spirit T. V. Paul (2018) calls soft balancing. Without reform it stays a legacy institution kept alive by ritual rather than purpose.