Global Cities, Governance and Diplomacy: The Urban Link

This book illustrates the importance of global cities for world politics and highlights the diplomatic connections between cities and global governance. While there is a growing body of literature concerned with explaining the transformations of the international order, little theorisation has taken into account the key metropolises of our time as elements of these revolutions. This volume seeks to fill this gap by demonstrating how global cities such as London have a pervasive agency in contemporary global governance. They are influential both in an 'actively passive' sense, recasting the geographies of local politics (defined here as their actantinfluence) as well as in the more active ways of diplomacy and transnational networking (their actorinfluence). The narrative therefore proceeds to first problematize the political geographies in which the global city-global governance link unfolds, the potential agency of the former in relation to the latter, and then undertake a more refined investigation of the mutually constitutive connection (or 'structuration') between the two. To develop the necessary conceptual apparatus that allows me to systematize an investigation of cities in global governance, I thus begin by illustrating the agencyof these metropolises in the geography of global governance first, and the structurationunderpinning the relationship between them afterwards. In light of this analytical orientation, the book argues that looking at global cities can bring about three fundamental advantages on traditional IR paradigms. First, it facilitates an eclectic turn towards more nuanced analyses of world politics. Second, it widens the horizon of the discipline through a multiscalar image of global governance. Third, it underscores how global cities have a strategic diplomatic positioning when it comes to core contemporary challenges such as climate change. This book will be of much interest to students of urban studies, global governance, diplomacy and international relations in general.