Sovereignty and Today´s Municipal Paradiplomacy in Brazil: Political Tensions between Nation-State and Sub-National Actors.

Based on the broader context of globalization as politics, this paper adopts the following assumption: cities through their transnational cooperation networks and economic projects are the expression of a new political actor having shifted their operation scale, and partly emancipated themselves from the monopoly of the nation-state in the deployment of transborder public action. As the world's population became increasingly urban and complex globalization-fragmentation processes advanced, cities have challenged the Westphalian imaginary and the exclusive role of the nation-state as "the" bounded political community with a capacity to frame and control a fixed and vertical national territory. In pursuance of developing this assumption, this paper approaches the discussion in two general parts: firstly, it looks into the empirical reality of 72 Brazilian municipalities and their paradiplomatic actions in the international arena; secondly, it presents a series of critical questions for analyzing cities and their transnational networks as new political actors in the global arena. Empirically authors intend to analyze the multiple ways through which these 72 municipalities across Brazil develop paradiplomatic activities, but also to better understand the soft-border approach, the economic strategies that they deploy, whether or not they build a political identity, thus questioning unconditioned national sovereignty as a fundamental tenet of the international system. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]