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This article explores the nature of city diplomacy using newly available archives chronicling the ‘municipal foreign policy movement’ of the 1980s, in which US city governments intervened directly in late Cold War foreign affairs issues. Cases covered include US city governments’ involvement in the nuclear free zone movement, the Central American crisis and the anti-Apartheid movement throughout the 1980s. A theoretical synthesis of literature in world society theory, diplomatic studies and social movement theory is used to explain the normative, macro-sociological, legal, demo-cratic and sociopolitical dynamics of contentious city-government intervention in  foreign affairs. Emphasizing the normative processes at play, this article argues through a world society theoretical interpretation that ‘municipal foreign policy’ efforts repre-sent local-level codification of universal norms that the US federal government either neglected to enforce or directly violated.

This study tests the relationship between the hierarchical position of cities in the global economy and a typology of cultural, economic, political, and social external relations, namely city diplomacy. We conduct this test on a sample of 46 Chinese cities, seeking to bridge otherwise separate existing theories on the structure of the world city hierarchy and varied dimensions of city diplomacy. Contrary to expectations, we find that the aggregate of the typology of city diplomacy, rather than only the economic dimension, is most closely associated with position in the world city hierarchy. This tentatively suggests that the collective effect of internationally-oriented cultural, economic, political and social activities in Chinese cities reflect the global structure of the highest levels of globalized urban wealth.

This study shows that the position of cities in the world economy has diverged from national economies. Using data from 2016, we evaluate a network of 12,802 cities formed by the location decisions of 24,355 firms in terms of their point centrality, and show that the inter‐city and inter‐national systems have measurably decoupled, disrupting the previously‐observed pattern in which the most powerful cities in the world city system were located in core countries, "mid‐level" cities were in the semi‐periphery,and the least powerful cities were in peripheral countries. Our findings support predictions that globalizing cities would diverge from national economies and that globalization would generate a new global geography that transects long‐standing cleavages in the world system. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Modern city diplomacy finds city governments intervening in nearly all foreign policy arenas traditionally managed by nation-states. These trends are explicable by the same factors shaping the “municipal foreign policy” movement during the Cold War, while also growing more complex. In this study, I discuss four factors as they shape current city diplomacy trends. I also discuss their theoretical and policy implications. First, cities intervene to enforce universal norms when the national government violates or fails to enforce them, as seen in global cities recommitting to the Paris Accord in response to the Donald Trump administration’s withdrawal. Second, democratic regimes enable local defiance of national foreign policy, while non-democratic regimes such as China harness a more restricted sort of city diplomacy as an extension of national diplomacy. Third, social movement conditions whereby local officials’ views align with constituents on foreign policy issues enable and constrain city diplomacy activity, as seen in U.S. cities declaring themselves sanctuaries in response to the Trump administration’s immigration policies. Fourth, cities often follow economic growth–seeking interests when overlapping with governance issues, as seen in international urban climate change cooperation aimed at foreign market entry, export promotion, and investment attraction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Cities are formalising collaborations across borders at an unprecedented rate: 'city networks' now form a wide ecosystem of global partnerships between local authorities that is often underestimated. It might be time to think of city networks more explicitly as institutionalised and presenting a challenging form of more-than-local urban governance. To do so, our essay mixes a review of the overall global landscape (beyond the environmental sector where most of the literature is to be found), with both a network analysis of how these institutions work as a web of connections, as well as an 'inside out' view of how they are managed and what the challenges of that are. We do this by analysing a database of 202 of these networks, both statistically as well as via social network analysis. We find that: international initiatives are on the rise, but this context of partnerships has a well-established history, producing a wealth of information and outputs and offering a complex organisational landscape for cities to reach out beyond their local confines. We measure the relationship this has to the integration of cities into the global economy, the pathways it opens for further internationalisation of city leadership and the patterns of partnership with business and international organisations that it implies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]