Международная научная конференция ЮВА в СПбГУ-65

Международная научная конференция, посвященная 65-й годовщине начала изучения языков ЮВА в нашей стране P. Charoenpacharaporn (University College London, London, ucrapc1@ucl.ac.uk) CIRCUMVENTING THE COLD WAR DIVISIONS: THAILAND AND INDIA IN THE SOUTH-TO-SOUTH DIPLOMATIC SPACE Abstract: As the Cold War intensified, tensions between the Western camp led by the US and Britain, and the Eastern camp led by the Soviet Union increasingly dominated international relations. Countries in Asia began to be pressured to identify their positions in the Cold War. India, Burma, and Indonesia decided to be non- aligned. Nevertheless, Thailand chose alignment with the US and other Western powers. These ideological divisions inevitably put constraints on the normal channel of diplomatic communications as different countries found themselves part of exclusive blocs. This paper considers the question of how non-aligned India and US-leaning Thailand used the Bandung Conference to circumvent the divisions of the Cold War This paper is inspired by the revival of academic interests in the Third World and its moment of postcolonial future during the 1950s. The Bandung Conference enabled unprecedented ‘South-to-South’ communications on the international platform, and this is the framework of this paper. This paper aims to place Thailand into the historiography of the Third World in the Cold War; this will be the first to narrate the relationship between Thailand and the postcolonial non-aligned moment. Furthermore, this paper makes an original contribution to the historiography of Indo-Thai relations by examining Thai participation