Factory fires that kill hundreds of workers toiling over t-shirts. Government-imposed austerity programs that make fuel and food unaffordable for the barely alive. International trade regulations that render small farmers in tiny nations unable to compete. Innumerable, desperate vagaries of an international system dominated by the rich and powerful nations. Amid these tales of haplessness, in contexts as diverse as Dhaka and Delhi and São Paolo, finding hope, let alone common ground, is no easy task.

It is refreshing, then, that Vijay Prashad’s The Poorer Nations: A Possible History of the Global South begins with a moment of global alliance of a different kind. It took place in 1955 in Bandung, Indonesia, when the world’s poorer nations, galvanized by “the failures of capitalist mal-development” and led by the world’s wealthy nations, got together and “looked for the first time to each other for another agenda.” It was through this gathering that what Prashad calls the “Third World Project” was born.

Its agenda was centered around a loose set of goals crucial to the progress of what were becoming known as underdeveloped countries. The first was peace, specifically cooperation against the arms races of Western nations that imposed crippling defense demands on poor countries, stymieing their development. The second was bread, which implied that the way forward for developing countries would be to confront “the legacy of colonial economy with the advantages seized by Atlantic powers” as well as the “trade rules drawn up to benefit those historical and not comparative advantages.” The third and final demand was justice, based on the idea that the leaders of the Non-Aligned Movement  — Nehru of India, Nasser of Egypt, and Sukarno of Indonesia  — all realized that none of their interests could be forwarded without a more democratic international order.