Cities in a world of regions – Remarks from an international law perspective
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Helmut Philipp Aust
Abstract
The role of subnational regions is ill-conceived in international law scholarship, which has come to slowly accept the important role that cities can play as international actors. Opening up the academic debate for a perspective on regions promises to develop new insights on the divide of governance functions between international organizations and states, regions and cities. At the same time, the regional focus helps to unearth some of the shortcomings of overly enthusiastic approaches to what cities can do as global actors. International law scholarship has found it difficult, however, to engage with the concept of the region. This is owed, as this Article demonstrates, to difficult definitional issues as well as the informalizing bend of a focus on regional governance, which is hard to square with traditions of formalist thinking in international law. Ultimately, the Article argues that regions can function as a useful prism through which to analyze current governance challenges.
© 2023 by Theoretical Inquiries in Law
Articles in the same Issue
- Frontmatter
- Regionalisms: Shifting Scales Between Cities and States
- Introduction
- Seeing like a region
- The political stakes of regions
- Cities in a world of regions – Remarks from an international law perspective
- Megalopolis bound?
- Can micropolitan areas bridge the urban-rural divide?
- The democratic problems with Washington as the capital
- The science of urban regions: Public-science-community partnerships as a new mode of regional governance?
- Communities of competitors: Toward leveraging the region’s contradictions
- Regionalism as a mode of inclusive citizenship in divided societies
- A typology of the localism-regionalism nexus
- Shadow regionalism in immigration enforcement during COVID-19
- National priority regions (1971–2022): Redistribution, development and settlement
- The challenge of regionalist institutions without regionalist politics
Articles in the same Issue
- Frontmatter
- Regionalisms: Shifting Scales Between Cities and States
- Introduction
- Seeing like a region
- The political stakes of regions
- Cities in a world of regions – Remarks from an international law perspective
- Megalopolis bound?
- Can micropolitan areas bridge the urban-rural divide?
- The democratic problems with Washington as the capital
- The science of urban regions: Public-science-community partnerships as a new mode of regional governance?
- Communities of competitors: Toward leveraging the region’s contradictions
- Regionalism as a mode of inclusive citizenship in divided societies
- A typology of the localism-regionalism nexus
- Shadow regionalism in immigration enforcement during COVID-19
- National priority regions (1971–2022): Redistribution, development and settlement
- The challenge of regionalist institutions without regionalist politics
