From the Bandung Conference to TICAD and FOCAC: The Institutionalization of Asia-Africa South-South Cooperation

The 1955 Bandung Conference supplied a powerful normative vocabulary for Asian-African cooperation, but it did not create a permanent economic institution capable of converting those principles into recurrent programs, implementation cycles, and follow-up. This article asks how that institutional gap was progressively filled. Institutionalization is understood here as the conversion of normative or political commitments into recurrent organizational practices, assessed through five observable dimensions: repeated high-level interaction, formalized principles and frameworks, programmatic commitments, implementation and follow-up mechanisms, and sustained intergovernmental coordination. The article argues that the post-Bandung architecture developed through institutional succession. Japan's Tokyo International Conference on African Development (TICAD), launched in 1993, established a durable high-level conference process built around African ownership, partnership, action-oriented agendas, and follow-up; the Forum on China-Africa Cooperation (FOCAC), created in 2000 and elevated to summit level in 2006, operated in the institutional field that TICAD had helped legitimate and scaled a comparable conference-action plan-follow-up repertoire with much greater commercial and financial weight. India's India-Africa Forum Summit and Indonesia's Indonesia-Africa Forum subsequently added further layers. The argument is not that these frameworks are institutionally identical or that Chinese or Indian officials explicitly copied TICAD. Rather, their comparability lies in recurrent Africa-wide high-level dialogue, programmatic commitments, multisectoral cooperation, and implementation or follow-up arrangements, while their political origins, financing structures, governance arrangements, and strategic objectives remain distinct. Organizational similarity is interpreted as institutional isomorphism and succession within a common post-Bandung field. Empirically, the article combines primary institutional documents with a deliberately narrow trade-network analysis for four Asian and six African economies. Weighted eigenvector centrality between 2000 and 2020 shows China's pronounced rise, India's growth, Indonesia's modest expansion, and Japan's relative decline. Because eigenvector centrality is normalized and relational, Japan's lower score cannot be read as institutional withdrawal or as proof of Chinese displacement. African governments and continental institutions are treated as participants in, and sometimes co-producers of, this institutional development rather than as passive recipients. The evidence therefore supports a reinterpretation of Asia-Africa summitry as cumulative institutional deepening in which rivalry and strategic pragmatism may coexist with institutional continuity and South-South cooperation.

Bandung Conference; TICAD; FOCAC; institutional succession

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