Cities claim an ever-larger role in migration governance, often by means of progressive policies that “decouple” the local from the national. The literature on this “local turn” has generally failed to recognize how this decoupling increasingly takes place within the context of Transnational Municipal Networks (TMNs). On the basis of a database of the 20 most important TMNs in refugee and migrant welcome and integration in Europe and additional empirical research, this article identifies and analyzes their main characteristics, composition, and activities in a multiscalar context, thus contributing to a better understanding of migration governance. It argues that these networks, by means of a wide variety of activities, serve a practical but also a symbolic and jurisgenerative purpose. These implicit and explicit objectives of city networking also account for the proliferation of TMNs witnessed across Europe since 2015. In “teaming up,” European cities not only share practical experiences but also develop narratives about migration that counter national, more restrictive discourses and contribute to the global legal framework, as was the case with the Global Compact on Refugees and Migrants. It is this practical, symbolic, and jurisgenerative role of TMNs, in times of increasingly restrictive national policies, that makes these networks key actors in contesting but also improving global migration governance.

Over the past decades, more and more institutions of higher learning have developed programs destined to educate students for global citizenship. Such efforts pose considerable challenges: conceptually, pedagogically and from the perspective of impact assessment. Conceptually, it is of utmost importance to pay attention to both structural inequalities and intercultural competencies, to emphasize both differences and similarities. In addition, there is the need to increase awareness of the dialectics between the global and the local. Pedagogically, this calls for transformative learning, with an emphasis on attitudes and skills, in addition to knowledge alone. Once objectives have been defined and translated pedagogically, such programs call for an assessment of the degree to which they have been met. In this light, this article describes the conceptualization and pedagogics of an innovative project, Going Glocal, designed at a Dutch liberal arts and sciences college on the basis of these premises and its impact on the university students concerned.

During the apartheid era, chiefs were maligned as puppets of bantustan rule. In ANC-related circles, it was widely assumed that chieftaincy would not survive in the post apartheid era. But the institution of traditional leadership has proved highly flexible. Rather than being phased out as relics of pre-modern times, chiefs are re-asserting themselves in the new South Mrica. Chiefs have survived throughout this century with a strategy of shifting alliances. Towards the end of the 1980s, chiefs were re-orienting themselves towards the ANC, rightly perceived as the new ruling party-in-waiting. Combining the resources of tradition with a discourse of liberation politics and development, they were able to explain constitutional and other legal guarantees for the position of traditional leaders and their representations in the local, provincial and national administration. For its part, the ANC had an interest in wooing chiefs to its side in order to prevent the emergence of a conservative alliance where traditional leaders could join forces with the bantustan elites. The article analyses these developments, discusses the main themes of debate and concludes with a brief case study of chieftaincy issues in the Northern Transvaal.

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