Description
Adom Getachew’s thought-provoking Worldmaking After Empire has reinvigorated the vocabulary of “worldmaking” in scholarly discussion of post-colonial international politics. Yet, the term is potentially reductive, and threatens to occlude the variegated means of reimagining and pursuing emancipatory changes to the international order. This paper attempts to explore the anatomy of anticolonial worldmaking through the history of international political thought of post-colonial Indonesia. Owing to its hosting of the 1955 Afro-Asian Conference in Bandung and its role as a key progenitor of the Non-Aligned Movement, Indonesia under founding father Sukarno is often perfunctorily recognised as a post-colonial pacesetter. Yet, scholarship has rarely seriously integrated the Indonesian experience into its overarching body of theorising. This has been detrimental to analyses of post-colonial worldmaking, as recounting key episodes of the Indonesian leadership’s post-Bandung international activity reveals valences of worldmaking in a rich fashion: along destructive/constructive axes, and allowing for a specification of its forms within three categories - performative; discursive; and organisational. The paper concludes by reinscribing post-colonial Indonesia’s worldmaking ventures into our post-colonial imagination in order to invoke critical commentary on contemporary formations like the BRICS, which some commentators have interpreted as inheriting the mantle of post-colonial projects.
