A Missing Peace: The Asia-Pacific Peace Conference in Beijing, 1952 and the Emotional Making of Third World Internationalism

This article recovers the largely forgotten Asia-Pacific Peace Conference which took place in Beijing in October 1952 and elaborates what has been lost in its forgetting. Moving beyond the traditional focus on the diplomatic "summitry" of Bandung and non-alignment, it insists on reading back into diplomatic histories the emotive and affective dimensions of Third World internationalism in the 1950s, and for the expansion of our idea of the political to encompass them. Turning to peace expressions in Southeast Asia, it argues not only for the inadequacy of Cold War labels like "communist" and "front" to understanding these mobilities, but also that we cannot understand the broad popular appeal of the "Bandung spirit" and later Afro-Asianisms without attempting to take account of the realms of affect and emotion in underpinning and driving them to expression in the contested international spaces of the early Cold War.