City Diplomacy: From City-States to Global Cities - Softcover

Raffaele Marchetti (author)

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0472055038 ISBN 13: 9780472055036

Publisher: University of Michigan Press, 2021

Synopsis

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.

About this title

About the Author

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.

Edition details

• Publisher: University of Michigan Press
• Publication date: 2021
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0472055038
• ISBN 13: 9780472055036
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 144