Non-Aligned Movement

The Non-Aligned Movement is an international organization of states that formally declare themselves not aligned with or against any major power bloc, founded at the Belgrade Conference in September 1961 during the height of Cold War tensions between the United States-led Western bloc and the Soviet-led Eastern bloc. Its founding was driven by leaders including Josip Broz Tito of Yugoslavia, Jawaharlal Nehru of India, Gamal Abdel Nasser of Egypt, Sukarno of Indonesia and Kwame Nkrumah of Ghana, building on principles of anti-colonial and anti-imperialist solidarity first articulated at the 1955 Bandung Conference of Asian and African states. The movement positioned itself as a political voice for newly independent and developing nations seeking to avoid entanglement in superpower rivalry while pursuing their own paths of economic development and sovereignty. It has continued to meet in regular summits after the Cold War's end, and with well over one hundred member states drawn overwhelmingly from Africa, Asia, Latin America and the Caribbean, it remains one of the largest formal groupings of states in the world after the United Nations itself.