What NAM is and how it works

What there is to join

The Non-Aligned Movement has no charter, no founding act and no founding treaty, and it keeps no permanent secretariat. Administration is the job of whichever member holds the chair, and the chair moves with the summit: it passed to Uganda at the nineteenth summit, held at Kampala from 15 to 20 January 2024. Positions are agreed by consensus and published as the final document of the meeting that agreed them. There is no depositary, no registry of instruments and no court.

That is unusual enough among the groups on this site to change what membership means. A state joins the United Nations by depositing an instrument on a stated day, and its record here carries that day. A state joins this movement when a summit or a conference of ministers agrees that it has, and what survives of the act is a paragraph in a document rather than a signature on one.

The movement was formed at Belgrade between 1 and 6 September 1961, by 25 states. It traces its principles to the conference held at Bandung from 18 to 24 April 1955, which 29 governments attended.

The five conditions of entry

A preparatory meeting at Cairo, from 5 to 12 June 1961, set out what a candidate had to look like, and the same list is still published as the admission criteria. A country should have adopted an independent policy based on the coexistence of states with different political and social systems, or shown a tendency to favour one. It should support national independence movements consistently. It should not belong to a multilateral military alliance concluded in the context of great power conflicts. If it holds a bilateral military agreement with a great power, or belongs to a regional defence pact, that agreement should not have been concluded deliberately in the context of great power conflicts. If it has granted military bases to a foreign power, the concession should not have been made in that context either.

The last two conditions are conditional and the third is not. A defence pact is admissible if it was made for other reasons; a multilateral military alliance made in the context of great power conflicts is named as a disqualification without qualification. The criteria govern admission. Nothing in the movement reviews them afterwards, because there is no organ with the standing to hear the question and no instrument under which it could be raised.

Two members and the same criterion

Iran belonged to the Central Treaty Organization, the pact signed at Baghdad in 1955. Its membership of the movement was approved at a ministerial meeting at Colombo in June 1979, the interim government announced the withdrawal from the pact, and Iran took part in the Havana summit of 3 to 9 September 1979. The order of those events is the point: the alliance was left, and then the movement was entered.

Belarus holds both. The Collective Security Treaty was signed at Tashkent on 15 May 1992 by six heads of state, Belarus joined it in 1993, and it entered into force on 20 April 1994 once the national ratifications were complete. The treaty became an organisation when its charter was approved at a summit in Chisinau on 7 October 2002. Belarus has been a member of the Non-Aligned Movement since 1998, and the record on this site carries the movement and the pact side by side. The catalogue prints the criterion and the two memberships and takes no view on whether they sit together, which is the only position available to a reference work when the body concerned has appointed nobody to take one.

What membership does not carry

No tariff schedule, no common market, no freedom of movement, no shared currency, no defence guarantee and no dispute procedure. Every arrangement of that kind on these member records comes from somewhere else, and the records show where.

Cape Verde takes its trade obligations from the Economic Community of West African States, which it joined in 1977, and its language ties from the Community of Portuguese Language Countries and the Francophonie, both entered in 1996. Iran's oil quota is a matter for the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries, joined in September 1960. Mexico carries the Organization of American States from 1948 and Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation from 17 November 1993. India carries the Commonwealth from 15 August 1947, the World Trade Organization from 1 January 1995 and BRICS from 16 June 2009. North Korea carries the movement and the United Nations, joined on 17 September 1991, and nothing further.

That last record is the clearest statement of what the movement is for. For a state with almost no multilateral membership at all, it is a seat in a room, and the room meets.

Where the edges are argued

The movement recognises three categories of participation. Members hold full rights and duties. Observers may take part only in the deliberation and the plenary sessions. Guests attend high-level meetings if the Coordinating Bureau approves it.

The participant list published by India's Ministry of External Affairs puts Mexico among the observer countries and not among the members. The record here files Mexico with the members, which is why the country appears on this page. Both readings are in print, one from the movement's own participant list and one from the catalogue's record, and the disagreement is recorded rather than settled.

The same list sorts members into four groups, Africa, Asia, Latin America and the Caribbean, and Europe, and files Azerbaijan and Belarus in the European one. The members catalogued here fall in all four.