Despite a growing body of scholarship reflecting renewed interest in the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM), there remains little agreement on how to interpret its origins, ideological coherence, political agency, and historical significance. This review article examines a selection of key English-language publications from 2011 to 2022, analysing them across three main dimensions: the NAM’s ideological foundations; its political and diplomatic practices; and its positioning within global and postcolonial historiographies. In doing so, the article challenges conventional narratives that depict the NAM as a reactive or marginal actor, while also highlighting emerging approaches that emphasize its ideological roots, strategic agency, and transnational entanglements. These contrasting perspectives expose an ongoing attempt to introduce an innovative outlook and perspectives within the field to resolve methodological and interpretive tensions. Ultimately, the article argues that recent literature offers important openings for rethinking the NAM not simply as a Cold War product, but as a dynamic actor in the making of global order, and points to the need for further research into its shifting meanings across time, space, and context.

Asianism, the idea that Asian nations should unite and overcome Western imperialism, was thought to have faded as the Second World War ended. At that point, China appeared embroiled in a civil war, India in Partition. Yet their visions for Asia’s future have been overlooked. This article examines how they envisioned Asia’s economic revival through the UN Economic Commission for Asia and the Far East (ECAFE). It argues that the Chinese diplomat P. C. Chang, frustrated with a Eurocentric UN, led UN members in the Global South to advocate an institution that supported Asia’s developmental aims. Although China and India believed that ECAFE should help Asian economies surpass their pre-war levels, they disagreed on how to achieve that object. ECAFE was not simply an example of the neglected post-war Asianism and non-Japanese Asianism. Chinese and Indian ideas about ECAFE helped redefine Asia’s self-identity: from a shared cultural heritage to prosperity and ‘modernity’. However, despite the rhetoric of unity, the disagreements between China and India over ECAFE indicate that Asia in the late 1940s lacked international solidarity. As Nationalist China declined, India supplanted its leadership of Asianism. The competition between different strands of Asianism helped lead to alternative post-war visions, such as Afro-Asian internationalism.

This article – arising from an ERC-funded project on the lived experiences of dictatorship – explores the development of and approaches to the history of everyday life under repressive political systems, presenting the historiographical, conceptual, and contextual points of contact, synergy, and divergence between historians working in and on Europe, Southern Africa, and Latin America. As a historiographical review article, this piece provides both a critical assessment of and novel intervention in these respective literatures, making the case for ‘decentring’ European histories and historiographies, to encourage greater engagement and collaboration between those working on different historical and geographical contexts.

Recently, there have been several histories of the British Empire written through the lens of a single family. These works – which this review refers to as imperial family biographies – trace the activities, ideas, and/or connections of a group of individuals from the same family, usually spanning more than one generation, as they roved across the time and space of empire. They facilitate an understanding of a networked, informal British Empire, held together by personal bonds and material goods, and an imperial politics shaped by emotions, affections, and identities. Currently, imperial family biographies tend to prioritize asking what families can reveal about empire, rather than what empire can reveal about families; family networks are used as case studies, dictating the bounds of study and illustrating wider imperial themes. This review argues that this genre of history writing is most successful when families are interpreted as imperial agents that drove historical change, rather than merely conduits for individual action or means by which individuals were connected across empire. This can be achieved through a thorough engagement with the historiography on families and through centralizing concepts such as family identity, family culture, family structure, and family function.