Re-Imagining Anti-Fascist Internationalisms

Three separate, but interlinked, attempts at progressive planetary internationalism all trace a direct lineage from struggles against fascism, colonialism, and racism: the Bandung Afro-Asian conference of April 1955, the Belgrade Non-Aligned summit of September 1961, and the Havana Tricontinental conference of January 1966. Revisiting the three events, and tracing their ‘afterlives’, allows for a more nuanced understanding of the contradictions, challenges, and achievements of global anti-fascism and, in particular, the tensions between reformist and revolutionary transformations and between struggles ‘from above’ and ‘from below’. An analytical discussion of fascism and anti-fascism is followed by a critique of the methodological nationalism and entrenched Eurocentrism of much of the study of fascism and anti-fascism to this day. The article then outlines some aspects of fascism and anti-fascism emerging in, or traveling to, the Global South and the importance of addressing the transnational dimension of anti-fascism before exploring what the study of these three events may bring to our understandings of anti-fascism now and in the future.