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This is the second of a series of workshops organised within the bilateral research project Globe_EXCHANGE: Models and Practices of Global Cultural Exchange and Non-aligned Movement. Research in the Spatio-temporal Cultural Dynamics.

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The research focuses on emergent visual assemblages and new models of cultural exchange from the second half of the 20th century developed as a consequence of decolonization, forms of radical political and aesthetic interventions into the dynamics of global Cold War and North-South relations. The workshop continues our exploration of the economic, social, cultural and political imaginaries of NAM through a spatio-temporal, or conjunctural, frame. NAM is considered, here, as an unstable, dynamic, set of practices connected, in complex and underexplored ways, with broader networks of cultural and political solidarity, of South-South exchanges, and contributing to a common political agenda of decolonization. Challenging the supposed universality of colonial modernity and questioning capitalist concepts of development, a conjunctural political economy of NAM explores the material conditions and socio-political contexts of cultural exchange.

Close to the 60th anniversary of the Belgrade summit that heralded the formation of the Non-Aligned Movement (1-5 September 1961), this conference, organised by the Institute of Art History, Zagreb in collaboration with the NGO Drugo more from Rijeka, explores aspects of a critical conjunctural political economy of non-alignment and cultural politics. It has four broad aims:

1. To explore aspects of the political economy of the Non-Aligned Movement and cultural politics across different spatio-temporal conjunctures with particular reference to its impacts in terms of North-South and West-East divisions and struggles, and in terms of the complex inter-relations between capitalism, colonialism and hegemonic racialised structures.

2. ​To address the complementarities, contradictions and conflicts between non-alignment and other anti-systemic worldmaking projects including the Bandung spirit of Afro-Asian solidarity, the Tri-Continental, Pan-Africanism, pan-Arabism, and others, in terms of counter-hegemonic cultural politics.

3. ​To identify contestations and complementarities in terms of socialist internationalist worldmaking in terms of cultural politics and cultural exchange, with particular reference to Soviet and Chinese politics and practices.

4. ​To note elements of the spatio-temporal 'afterlives' of non-alignment and their significance for contemporary cultural politics, including Nasserism, Yugoslavism and Tricontinentalism.​