Simon Curtis

A new form of city emerged alongside contemporary globalization: the Global City. Global cities have become a central component of a political project to create a global market. Such cities have, after decades of growth and transformation, now begun to develop their own political capabilities. It may be possible that we are witnessing a recalibration of the relationship between the city and the state, and the emergence of a novel form of global political order.

... But their methods bear a scientific stamp: ... patterns of states or focuses on interpreting individual state actors' intentions is required in theories of the international as well.52 This has also been the argument in post-positivist international theory, which, as Milja Kurki argues, has ...

International society, so long the resolution to problems of collective political order, now appears to be failing in its capacity to deal with transnational challenges such as climate change, global security and financial instability. Indeed, the structure of international society itself has become a significant obstacle to such pressing issues of global governance. One striking response has been the reemergence of cities as important actors on the international stage. This article will show how these two issues are intrinsically linked. Cities have taken on new governance roles in the gaps left by hamstrung nation-states, and their contribution to an emerging global governance architecture will be a significant feature of the international relations of the 21st century. But do the new governance activities of cities represent a failure on the part of states, as some scholars have argued? Or are they a part of an emerging form of global order, in which the relationship between stat...

The global city has been both a product and driver of contemporary globalization. But today the global city is under threat from at least two directions. Firstly, despite their astonishing economic growth over the last four decades, they have become deeply divided and polarized in ways that threaten the integrity of the urban fabric. The second source of threat comes from the weakening of liberal world order. This article argues that global cities are at a point of crisis, because they embody an unstable form of global market society. In order to survive in a ‘global’ form, they will need to evolve by repurposing some of the political, economic and governance capacities that they have been developing over the last four decades. The article asks: what capacities and capabilities have global cities generated, and how might they be reoriented in the creation of alternative global city futures?

The 'second debate' in the historiography of the field of International Relations (IR)1 took place in the 1960s and focussed upon the relative merits of scientific and historical methods for understanding international politics. Science and history were taken to be two separate approaches, and ...

The global city has been both a product and driver of contemporary globalization. But today the global city is under threat from at least two directions. Firstly, despite their astonishing economic growth over the last four decades, they have become deeply divided and polarized in ways that threaten the integrity of the urban fabric. The second source of threat comes from the weakening of liberal world order. This article argues that global cities are at a point of crisis, because they embody an unstable form of global market society. In order to survive in a ‘global’ form, they will need to evolve by repurposing some of the political, economic and governance capacities that they have been developing over the last four decades. The article asks: what capacities and capabilities have global cities generated, and how might they be reoriented in the creation of alternative global city futures?

International society, so long the resolution to problems of collective political order, now appears to be failing in its capacity to deal with transnational challenges such as climate change, global security and financial instability. Indeed, the structure of international society itself has become a significant obstacle to such pressing issues of global governance. One striking response has been the reemergence of cities as important actors on the international stage. This article will show how these two issues are intrinsically linked. Cities have taken on new governance roles in the gaps left by hamstrung nation-states, and their contribution to an emerging global governance architecture will be a significant feature of the international relations of the 21st century. But do the new governance activities of cities represent a failure on the part of states, as some scholars have argued? Or are they a part of an emerging form of global order, in which the relationship between states, cities and other actors is being recalibrated? This article argues that the remarkable renaissance of cities in recent decades has been a result of a shift in the structure of international society, and assesses the causal drivers of this shift. It goes on to draw out some of the implications of the recalibration of the relationship between the city and the state for how we understand the emerging form of global order.

The remarkable transformation of the world’s major cities over recent decades has been widely noted as being driven by a restructuring of the global economy. What is less often remarked upon is that the relative empowerment of cities is rooted in a wider transformation of international political order. This article argues that as components of a nascent global order, cities have been endowed with new capacities, and are taking on new governance roles. These developments point to the crucial role that cities will play in the future of global politics.

The concepts, language and methods of complexity theory have been slowly making their way into international relations (IR), as scholars explore their potential for extending our understanding of the dynamics of international politics. In this article we examine the progress made so far and map the existing debates within IR that are liable to being significantly reconfigured by the conceptual resources of complexity. We consider the various ontological, epistemological and methodological questions raised by complexity theory and its attendant worldview. The article concludes that, beyond metaphor and computational models, the greatest promise of complexity is a reinvigoration of systems thinking that eschews the flaws and limitations of previous instantiations of systems theory and offers an array of conceptual tools apposite to analysing international politics in the twenty-first century.

The emergence of a new urban form, the global city, has attracted little attention from International Relations (IR) scholars, despite the fact that much progress has been made in conceptualising and mapping global cities and their networks in other fields. This article argues that global cities pose fundamental questions for IR theorists about the nature of their subject matter, and shows how consideration of the historical relationship between cities and states can illuminate the changing nature of the international system. It highlights how global cities are essential to processes of globalisation, providing a material and infrastructural backbone for global flows, and a set of physical sites that facilitate command and control functions for a decentralised global economy. It goes on to argue that the rise of the global city challenges IR scholars to consider how many of the assumptions that the discipline makes about the modern international system are being destabilised, as important processes deterritorialise at the national level and are reconstituted at different scales.

This article examines the contemporary disciplinary claims that the ‘Second Debate’ in international theory was partial and incomplete. Developing the view that the debate exclusively concerned positivist methods, not the status and merits of social scientific inquiry in international relations theory (IR) more broadly, the article advances an understanding of how contemporary ‘social scientific’ IR has begun to integrate historicist and generalising claims in a single theoretical framework. Moreover, the article seeks to transcend the assumption of incommensurability between scientific and historical frames of inquiry that characterised the idea of scientific inquiry in the Second Debate, and does this through an intellectual history of arguments for a ‘science of society’. The article shows how the emergence of non-positivist alternatives entails the development of abstractions and limited generalisations based on ‘mechanismic explanation’, particularly suitable for the development of middle-range theorising in IR. Overall, we argue that one important implication of the named methodological discussion is the reinforcing of the place of historical sociological analysis at the centre stage of international theory.

The re-emergence of the city from the long shadow of the state in the late-twentieth century was facilitated by the state itself. The unprecedented size and scale of today's global cities and mega cities owe their conditions of possibility to a fundamental shift in the character of political order at the level of the international system. This book argues that we must understand the rise of the global city as part of a wider process of the transformation of international political order, and of the character of international society.

Global cities are an inscription of the ideals of a market society in space, constructed and defended at the level of international society. They embody the ascendance of a set of liberal principles at a certain moment in history - a moment related to the hegemonic status of leading states in the second half of the twentieth century, and the ability of those states to shape international norms. But the evolution of these urban forms has also reflected the tendency for deregulated markets to generate inequality and polarisation: these features are also inscribed in the spaces of global cities. Global cities focus and amplify the tensions and contradictions within the contemporary international system, and become key strategic sites for struggles over social justice and the character of political life in the twenty-first century.

Global Cities and Global Order demonstrates the significance of the re-emergence of cities from the long shadow of the nation-state is far-reaching. Only by examining the mechanisms by which cities have become empowered in the last few decades can we understand their new functions and capabilities in global politics.