This chapter explores the relationship between Iran and Egypt during the 1950s and 1960s, placing it in a regional context. The two countries forged close ties during the 1930s, when the Iranian crown prince, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, married Egyptian Princess Fawzia Faud. Shared histories of colonial interference shaped the friendship between Egypt and Iran during the oil nationalisation crisis, yet in the years after the 1952 coup in Egypt, which brought down the monarchy and ultimately brought Nasser to power, Egypt and Iran’s paths diverged. At the Bandung Conference in 1955, while Nasser was inspired by the prospects of Afro-Asian solidarity, the shah’s government was concerned with the need for moderation, and to maintain close ties to the West. One year later, after the nationalisation of the Suez Canal, Nasser became the leading voice of pan-Arabism, which the shah viewed as a major threat both to regional security and to his reign. This divergence in perceptions of their places in the Global South ultimately led to a break in relations between Iran and Egypt. This chapter examines in detail the events that led to this fracture, and the ultimate emergence of Nasser as the shah’s main adversary.

Chapter 4 analyses the history, evolution, internalisation, and legal operationalisation of sustainable development in Africa. The analysis reveals how concepts like sustainable development flow through nations and regions without being influenced by the peoples and politics that matter to that part of the world. It reveals the colonial and postcolonial politics of natural resource access in Africa by mapping the concept’s progress. It discusses the concept and its link to the international law on nature conservation and how that history omitted Africa as a framework for analysing the law and politics of sustainable development. It also explores Africa’s perspectives on international law relative to the Global South’s position on sustainable development within the never-ending Third World international law-making project. It also reveals deficits in the dominant rights-based approach to sustainable development in Africa as uncritically empowering the state over non-state interests as the state has failed to purposefully incorporate customary and indigenous governance into sustainable development. In addressing this question, I examine the promise and failure of the implementation of sustainable development as seen through the work of Africa’s regional adjudicative institutions.

One of the founding events within narratives of Afro-Asian, South-South, and Third-World solidarity has been the 1955 Asian-African Conference held in the Indonesian city of Bandung. And one of the foundational accounts of the Asian-African Conference has been Richard Wright’s 1956 book The Color Curtain: A Report on the Bandung Conference, which Wright wrote based on a three-week sojourn in Indonesia. Drawing on alternative accounts and perspectives regarding the Bandung Conference and Wright’s concomitant interactions with Indonesian interlocutors, this essay examines Wright’s perspectives on colonialism and decolonization as well as his stance on questions of racial and colonial shame and the powers of postcolonial leaders such as Indonesia’s President Sukarno and the Gold Coast’s Kwame Nkrumah. These contexts—taken together with a historically relevant short story written by one of Wright’s main Indonesian interlocutors—illuminate the subject of Wright’s, and Bandung’s, relation to Third-World liberation in colonialism’s enduring wake.