Global Cities, International Relations and the Fabrication of the World

Kangas, Anni

doi:10.1080/13600826.2017.1322939

Cited by 18 publications

(13 citation statements)

References 17 publications

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“…In recent years, the concept of the global city has been picked up by a number of IR theorists (Acuto, 2013; Curtis, 2016; Kangas, 2017; Ljungkvist, 2015). For most of these thinkers, the rise of the global city entails a challenge to existing geographies of power, yet there exists substantial disagreement as to precisely what this entails.…”

Section: Global Cities Neoliberal Urbanism and The Elision Of Racementioning

confidence: 99%

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The fire this time: Grenfell, racial capitalism and the urbanisation of empire

Danewid

2019

European Journal of International Relations

105

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Over the last few years, an emergent body of International Relations scholarship has taken an interest in the rise of global cities and the challenges they bring to existing geographies of power. In this article, I argue that a focus on race and empire should be central to this literature. Using the Grenfell Tower fire in London as a starting point, the article shows that global cities are part of a historical and ongoing imperial terrain. From London to New York, São Paulo to Cape Town, Singapore to Cairo, the ‘making’ of global cities has typically gone hand in hand with racialized forms of displacement, dispossession and police violence. Drawing on the literature on racial capitalism, as well as Aimé Césaire’s image of the ‘boomerang’, I show that these strategies build on practices of urban planning, slum administration and law-and-order policing long experimented with in the (post)colonies. By examining the colonial dimensions of what many assume to be a strictly national problem for the welfare state, the article thus reveals global cities as part of a much wider cartography of imperial and racial violence. This not only calls into question the presentism of scholarship that highlights the ‘newness’ of neoliberal urbanism. In demonstrating how global cities and colonial borderlands are bound together through racial capitalism, it also exposes the positionality of scholars and policymakers that seek to counter the violence of neoliberalism with a nostalgic return to the post-1945 welfare state. As the Grenfell fire revealed, the global city is less a new type of international actor or governance structure than an extension and reconfiguration of the domestic space of empire.

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Section: Global Cities Neoliberal Urbanism and The Elision Of Racementioning

confidence: 99%

“…In recent years the concept of the global city has been picked up by a number of IR theorists (Acuto, 2013;Curtis, 2016;Kangas, 2017;Ljungkvist, 2015). For most of these thinkers the rise of system is being rapidly transformed.…”

Section: Introduction/ghosts Of Grenfellmentioning

confidence: 99%

The fire this time: Grenfell, racial capitalism and the urbanisation of empire

Danewid

2019

European Journal of International Relations

105

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“…The conceptual gap exists partly because theorising the political role of the city in relation to global policy fields entails a range of conceptual challenges (Kangas 2017). Should the city be understood as a national or a transnational actor?…”

Section: Theoretical Frameworkmentioning

confidence: 99%

What Difference do Mayors Make? The Role of Municipal Authorities in Turkey and Lebanon’s Response to Syrian Refugees

Betts¹,

Memişoğlu

Ali

2020

Journal of Refugee Studies

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With the majority of refugees now in urban areas, mayors and municipal authorities have been recognized as increasingly important policy actors in the global refugee regime. This trend is acknowledged in the policy literature. However, there has been little systematic academic research exploring the conditions under which mayors make a difference to refugee-policy outcomes. Theoretically, we outline a heuristic framework aimed at disaggregating key variables, including the independent influence of mayors, in shaping municipal-level outcomes. Empirically, the article assesses the role of municipal authorities and mayors in the two most numerically significant host countries for Syrian refugees: Turkey and Lebanon. It comparatively examines variation across six metropolitan municipalities, three from each country: Izmir, Adana and Gaziantep (Turkey), and Qalamoun, Anjar and Zahle (Lebanon). We show that mayors matter because they may mediate the implementation of national policies and because they sometimes adopt supplementary refugee policies and practices at the municipal level, which may be more or less proactive or more or less restrictive than central-government policy.

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“…Such rehabilitation would recognize that a city, while a 'function of circulation and circuits' , and as such 'fundamentally in contact with elsewhere' (Mbembe and Nuttall 2004, 351), is not only a string of infrastructures, technology and legal entities-although some renditions of the city through the global city concept may seem to suggest so (e.g. Kangas 2017).…”

Section: Escaping (In) a Migrant Metropolismentioning

confidence: 99%