Non-Aligned Media Flows: Anti-Colonial TV Collaborations and the Cold War

The first TV Festival of the Non-Aligned Countries took place in 1979 in the Montenegrin coastal town of Herceg Novi. Along with radio festivals held in India and Cuba, in the following two years, as well as the establishment of the joint News Agency Pool and shared “program banks” of different TV and radio content, this festival was emblematic of a broader set of initiatives to instantiate Non-Aligned media flows. The exchanges between broadcasting organizations from countries across Asia, Africa, Latin America, and Southeast Europe were the result of a decade of efforts by various local and regional media actors to create self-sustaining media operations, pitted against Western corporations' worldwide expansion. Centering the archival materials from Jugoslav Radiotelevision, this presentation teases out the underlying rationale of the Broadcasting Organization of Non-Aligned Countries (BONAC). It explores the issue of multiple scales and transcontinental ties that lie at the heart of these global media configurations, which intertwine infrastructure-building projects, the cultivation of channels for international cooperation, and struggles for global justice.

Sima Kokotović is a Postdoctoral Fellow, Center for Advanced Research in Global Communication.