Networking for Relevance? Examining the Agency of International City Networks in Global Politics

As current research in urban studies shows, cities increasingly establish international networks to develop agency in international affairs, often supported by international organisations. However, International Relations and Political Science have neither comprehensively examined international city networks as new actors, nor has research systemically identified the conditions for the significance of these networks. In this paper, we examine the question how city networks can generate agency and what facilitates their international activities. For this purpose, the paper introduces a new analytical framework for analysing international city networks by bringing three strands of literature together, namely urban studies, IR norm research, and social network analysis. Based on the existing research and its gaps in urban studies, we show how norm research elucidates the broad variance of city networks’ activities in global affairs. At the same time, social network analysis can be used to explain this variance by focusing on the processes, relations, and structures within these international city networks. The analytical benefit of this new framework is illustrated by two case studies, namely on city networks in international security and international health policy.