While the view that only states act as global actors is conventional, significant diplomatic and cross-cultural activity is taking place in cities today. Economic growth and fiscal experiments all occur in urban contexts. Political reforms, social innovation, and protests and revolutions generate in cities. Criminal activities, terrorist actions, counterinsurgency, missile attacks (indeed, atomic bombs), and wars are centered in big cities. They are sources of global pollution as well as of environmental transformations such as urban gardening. Knowledge production, big data collection, and tech innovation all spur from intense interaction in cities. They are the meeting points between different cultures, religions, and identities.These increasingly international cities develop twinning networks and projects, share information, sign cooperation agreements, contribute to the drafting of national and international policies, provide development aid, promote assistance to refugees, and do territorial marketing through decentralized city-city or district-district cooperation. Cities do what “municipalities” used to do many centuries ago: they cooperate but also enter into intense competitive dynamics. To understand current sociopolitical dynamics on a planetary level, we need to have two mental maps in mind: the state-centered map and the nonstate centered map. We must take into account the existence of a complex diplomatic regime based on different overlapping levels—the urban and the state.
Raffaele Marchetti is Deputy Rector for Internationalization and Professor of International Relations at the Department of Political Science and the School of Government of LUISS in Rome.
List of tablesAcknowledgmentsSetting the stage: The relevance of cities in global affairsPART I: Cities in global affairsChapter 1 Non-state actors in global politicsGlobal governance and the pluralization of international affairsTransnational strategies and organizational forms of NSAsChapter 2 A world of citiesDemographic and economic trendsFrom world cities to urban archipelagosPART II: City diplomacyChapter 3 Structural factors of city diplomacyCity diplomacy: Definition and trendsCities in global governanceLegal dimension of city diplomacy: National trendsLegal dimension of city diplomacy: International trendsActors, goals & drivers of city diplomacyChapter 4 Fields of operations of city diplomacyPolitics: global governance, twinning, networks, and mega eventsEconomy: Push & pull activities, and territorial marketing & city brandingCulture and environmentSecurity: from conflicts to covidHuman rights, migration and developmentPART III: For the futureConcluding remarks on the cities in the XXI centuryReferences
"...the book contributes a well-rounded and contemporary collection of thought that helps scholars and practitioners keep pace ahead of the rapidly expanding and evolving sphere of activity by cities in the world affairs." —European Review of International Studies
Daniele Archibugi, Mathias Koenig-Archibugi, Raffaele Marchetti, Daniele (National Research Council of Italy) Archibugi, Mathias (London School of Economics and Political Science) Koenig-Archibugi, Libera Universita Internazionale degli Studi Sociali Guido Carli in Roma) Marchetti, Raffaele (Assistant Professor in International Relations
Daniele Archibugi, Mathias Koenig-Archibugi, Raffaele Marchetti, Daniele (National Research Council of Italy) Archibugi, Mathias (London School of Economics and Political Science) Koenig-Archibugi, Libera Universita Internazionale degli Studi Sociali Guido Carli in Roma) Marchetti, Raffaele (Assistant Professor in International Relations