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AbstractThe 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 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. Adapted from the source document.

AbstractThe 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.