From Bandung to X: Africa–Asia Political Communication and the Zimbabwean Digital Afterlives of Solidarity
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.51415/ajims.v8i1.4615Keywords:
digital diplomacy, platform capitalism, political communication, South–south solidarity, X/TwitterAbstract
The Bandung Conference established a communicative framework for Africa–Asia solidarity grounded in anti-colonial diplomacy and state-led dialogue. However, existing scholarship has paid limited attention to how this communicative logic is reconfigured within contemporary digital platforms in the Global South. This paper addresses this gap by examining how Bandung’s legacy is translated into digital political communication in Zimbabwe’s post-2017 re-engagement period. Focusing on X, the study analyses three key hashtags: #ZimbabweIsOpenForBusiness, #AntiSanctions/#NoToSanctions, and #ZimbabweLivesMatter. It adopts a mixed-methods approach combining sentiment analysis, network analysis, and critical discourse analysis of 100 tweets from 2018 to 2025 enabling both the measurement of affective trends and the interpretation of narrative construction. The paper advances the argument that Africa–Asia solidarity has shifted from elite diplomatic communication to platform-mediated, networked discourse shaped by algorithmic visibility. The findings show that state-driven hashtags function as strategic tools of economic diplomacy and narrative control, while civic hashtags enable bottom-up activism and transnational visibility. However, both forms of communication remain structured by unequal visibility and platform dynamics. The paper concludes that while digital platforms extend Bandung’s anti-colonial communicative project, they also reproduce new forms of communicative inequality, highlighting the need for more inclusive and critically governed digital spaces in Global South political communication.
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