Cities and International Relations

The literature on cities and international relations (IR), or “global urban politics,” as it is sometimes termed, is a diverse stream of social science research that has developed in response to major demographic and economic shifts that began in second half of the 20th century and continue to today. During this time the world has witnessed dramatic globalization and urbanization, centralizing populations in cities. It is predicted that by 2050 close to 70 percent of the world’s population will live in urban areas, meaning that 21st-century challenges will be largely urban in nature. Across areas such as migration, health, environmental sustainability, and economic development, citizens and city governments are constantly exposed, and need to respond to, the impacts of globalization on cities. At the international level, multilateral organizations have recognized this shift and are increasingly involving cities, or networks of cities, as interlocutors in global forums. IR has been slow to acknowledge the increasing importance of cities in international affairs, as it conflicts with the state-centric paradigm of mainstream theory. Most early scholarship on cities and globalization came from urbanists and political economists, who studied the development of “global cities” that were acting as the critical nodes in the architecture of the world economy. This literature predominately identified cities as the sites of global processes, with limited capacity to influence or shape them. It also offered a narrow, economistic conception of cities that vastly prioritized the experiences of wealthy cities in the Global North. More recently, scholars have begun to study and theorize the role of cities as actors in global affairs, particularly through forms of networked governance and involvement in key multilateral discussions. This bibliography tracks the evolution of this research agenda from its conception to the present day. It begins with a limited background in the study of urban politics, providing a crucial framework for understanding how the diverse streams of research developed. It then details the continuing work on “global cities,” which recognized the increasing importance of cities to international affairs in the late 20th century, although largely defined in narrow economic terms. What follows is a broader theorization of the role of cities in global governance, which begins to afford some agency to cities to shape international affairs across a range of policy areas and brings them directly into the purview of IR. While most of this literature has still been driven by, and focused on, cities of the Global North, there have been efforts to broaden the geographic focus and recognize the way globalization and urbanization have been experienced differently in cities across the globe. Finally, the bibliography draws on a recent literature exploring some of the political and legal implications of this shift to the “urban century.”