First Published:
17 Jun 2026, 12:32 pm
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Reviewed by
Tomasz Kamiński, Juliana Fornasier, Carlo Epifanio and Daniel Pejic
Book Review Forum: City Agency and Global Governance: A Study of Migration City Diplomacy
Edited by Daniel Pejic, City Agency and Global Governance: A Study of Migration City Diplomacy, Bristol: Bristol University Press, 2026; 156 pp.: ISBN 978-1-5292-4802-9 (hbk)
Introduction
Tomasz Kamiński – University of Łódź, Poland
In recent years, the study of global governance has increasingly moved beyond state-centric frameworks to acknowledge the growing influence of cities and other subnational actors in international affairs. This growing attention to sub-state actors reflects broader transformations associated with multi-level governance, where authority and agency are dispersed across interacting political scales. Cities are no longer merely sites of policy implementation but have become active contributors to transnational networks, norm diffusion, and policy innovation. At the same time, this evolving landscape is not limited to cities alone. Rather, it captures a wider reality of subnational engagement, encompassing regions and other territorial actors, making the study of urban agency highly relevant for scholars of paradiplomacy.
Migration governance offers a particularly compelling lens for examining these dynamics. It exemplifies what may be described as a “complex meshing of political scales,” where local, national, and global processes are deeply intertwined. As conceptualized in Daniel Pejic’s City Agency and Global Governance, this entanglement constitutes a form of “global urban governance,” requiring not only multi-level coordination but also recognition of how these levels overlap and interact. This multi-layered governance can be understood as a “political lasagna,” where focusing only on the upper layers obscures the dense interactions unfolding beneath. Analyzing migration without engaging the urban level risks overlooking precisely those arenas where policies are enacted, contested, and reshaped in practice.
Pejic’s book is situated at the intersection of urban studies, international relations, and migration studies, and represents an important contribution to ongoing debates about urban agency. While empirically grounded in migration governance, its conceptual insights extend well beyond this domain, offering a framework applicable to other issue areas such as climate change, economic development or international security. In this respect, the book speaks directly to the broader “local turn” in international relations, which calls for closer engagement with insights from urban studies.
A key theoretical contribution is the notion of a “spectrum of city agency,” ranging from entrepreneurial leadership to forms of group agency. This approach provides a valuable analytical toolkit, enabling researchers to link structural conditions with the actions of individual and collective actors within urban institutions, and thereby deepen the analysis of city diplomacy in concrete empirical settings.
This forum brings together two reviews by Juliana Fornasier and Carlo Epifanio that engage with the book from complementary perspectives, alongside a response from the author. Both reviews offer a highly positive assessment of the work, while also identifying its limitations and areas for further development. Notably, they emphasize the book’s capacity to bridge multiple strands of scholarship, including migration studies, urban studies, global governance, and international relations. At the same time, they raise important questions about the scope of urban agency, the roles of different actors in governance processes, and the need for further theoretical and empirical refinement. The author’s response reflects on these points, situates the book within ongoing scholarly debates, and outlines avenues for future research.
Taken together, the contributions in this forum highlight the importance of continued dialogue across disciplinary boundaries in the study of subnational actors in global governance. By foregrounding the role of cities and, more broadly, other subnational entities, in shaping complex policy fields such as migration, this debate advances understanding of how agency is constructed and exercised across overlapping levels of governance. At the same time, it calls for approaches that move beyond local governments to consider the wider set of actors, practices, and power relations shaping urban governance. In this sense, the forum not only engages with Pejic’s contribution but also discusses an agenda for future research on city diplomacy and global urban governance in an increasingly fragmented and reconfigured international order.
Commentary 1
Juliana Fornasier – Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Barcelona, Spain
Cities have gained prominence in global affairs over the past few decades, particularly in policy domains such as climate change and migration. In City Agency and Global Governance: A Study of Migration City Diplomacy, Daniel Pejic provides both an account of this development and a theoretically ambitious, empirically grounded analysis of how cities act internationally, using global migration governance as the principal empirical lens. The book addresses a question that has remained insufficiently theorized: what type of international actors do cities represent, and how is such agency constructed, operationalized and maintained? To answer this, Pejic proposes a heuristic tool that brings urban studies into dialogue with international relations (IR), while making a link to migration studies, where local dynamics have increasingly been recognized as central yet are less frequently integrated into broader debates on global governance. In this respect, the book’s intervention is both timely and significant.
In this commentary, I first outline the book’s main structure and arguments before turning to some critical reflections that may help advance academic debates on migration city diplomacy.
The book begins by tracing the evolution from the “global cities” literature—primarily concerned with cities as economic nodes—to a more expansive conception of “global urban governance.” Rather than treating cities merely as sites where global processes unfold, the author situates them within an increasingly urbanized and multiscalar governance architecture in which they operate as purposeful agents. Crucially, the book underscores that city agency cannot be reduced to the actions of mayors or municipal governments alone; rather, it emerges through complex coalitions that include philanthropic foundations, international organizations, civil society actors and transnational city networks. By mapping these debates across disciplines, Pejic offers a concise yet rich overview of the literature, which will be particularly valuable for scholars interested in the intersections between urban studies and IR. These opening chapters therefore establish the conceptual groundwork for analyzing cities not simply as implementers of global norms but as actors capable of shaping the evolution of global governance arrangements themselves.
Building on this foundation, chapter 3 introduces the book’s core theoretical contribution through its engagement with “group agency” theory by List and Pettit (2011). Rather than simply importing their framework, the author adapts it to the context of multiscalar urban governance, arguing that cities can—under specific institutional and relational conditions—meet the criteria of collective agency. While this discussion can at times appear dense in the book—particularly for readers less familiar with debates in political theory, IR and urban studies—it becomes considerably clearer when the framework is applied to the empirical cases. By moving from the notion of “collective agency” to that of “group agency,” Pejic highlights the multisectoral foundations of city diplomacy and the wide range of actors involved in shaping it. This perspective resonates strongly with migration scholarship, which has increasingly emphasized the role of diverse stakeholders in local migration governance.
The author then turns to global migration governance as the empirical terrain for the study. Migration provides a particularly compelling lens because it exposes the increasingly localized realities of migrants’ and refugees’ reception and integration. It also connects directly with the “local turn” in migration studies (Zapata-Barrero et al., 2017). Here, the book illustrates how cities have attempted to influence global migration governance through initiatives such as participating in consultations for the Global Compact for Migration, endorsing the UCLG Lampedusa Charter and contributing to the creation of the Mayors Migration Council. Together, these examples illustrate the multiple channels through which cities seek to shape international debates and policy frameworks, ranging from advocacy within transnational city networks to participation in multilateral policy processes.
Next, the heuristic tool is applied to two empirical case studies: Bristol and Montreal between 2017 and 2022. Through these in-depth cases, the author traces how city agency is constructed (through input processes), operationalized (through feedback processes) and sustained over time (through the maintenance of a city’s engagement with global migration issues). This chapter is methodologically robust, drawing on extensive high-level interviews and documentary sources. Although the author presents the case selection as a potential limitation, the choice of Bristol and Montreal appears analytically coherent. The analysis highlights the role of political leadership, “boundary-spanning” individuals (professionals who move between local government, civil society and international organizations) and the construction of a shared collective identity that legitimizes international action. Taken together, these elements illustrate how different urban actors contribute to creating the institutional and social conditions that enable city diplomacy.
The book’s principal strength lies in its theoretical contribution to the study of city agency in the fields of urban studies and IR. By building on the concept of group agency, it offers a way for understanding city agency more thoroughly—thereby addressing an important gap in the literature. At the same time, one aspect that could have been elaborated further is the justification for the elements included in what the author describes as the spectrum of city agency in global affairs—namely entrepreneurial leadership, boundary-spanning individuals, collective identity and group agency. While these dimensions convincingly explain many of the mechanisms that enable cities to act internationally, the discussion leaves open the question of whether additional factors might also shape urban agency. For instance, the influence of epistemic communities or transnational policy networks could further complement the framework by illuminating how ideas, resources and strategies circulate between actors involved in city diplomacy.
Moreover, the discussion would benefit from further clarification of whether the different elements involved in the process of city agency are deliberately orchestrated by local governments or instead emerge more organically through broader governance dynamics. Distinguishing more clearly between intentional political strategies and emergent forms of collective action—such as advocacy work from civil society or crisis-induced initiatives—could offer additional insight into the degree to which city agency depends on deliberate initiatives by local governments.
From a migration studies perspective, the book makes an important contribution by connecting local migration governance to broader debates in IR and urban studies. Migration scholarship has increasingly documented the growing role of municipalities in migrant and refugee reception and integration (Caponio and Borkert, 2010; Scholten and Penninx, 2016). However, the relationship between local initiatives and global governance arrangements has remained comparatively under-theorized. By situating city diplomacy within global migration governance, Pejic helps bridge this gap and demonstrates how urban actors can contribute to shaping international policy debates.
Two issues are worth keeping in mind when reflecting on migration governance at the local level—both of which could have been more explicitly acknowledged in the book. First is the growing recognition of the role played by small and medium-sized towns, and even rural localities, in migration governance, particularly in the European context (OECD, 2018). Second, and perhaps more importantly, is the role of migrants and refugees themselves in governance processes and in the construction of collective agency. Although the book convincingly broadens the unit of analysis beyond local governments to include a wider constellation of actors, migrants appear primarily through the activities of civil society organizations rather than as direct participants in shaping urban diplomatic agendas. Given ongoing debates in migration studies around participation, co-design, and migrant representation (Triviño-Salazar and Climent-Ferrando, 2023), a more explicit engagement with migrant agency would have further strengthened the book’s conceptual ambition. If cities are understood as group agents constituted through internal processes of coordination and representation, then the inclusion—or exclusion—of migrants within these processes becomes analytically significant.
Overall, City Agency and Global Governance: A Study of Migration City Diplomacy constitutes a major intervention in debates on the role of cities in global affairs. By theorizing the mechanisms through which city agency emerges and operates, the book provides an original and rigorous framework for analyzing city diplomacy—in the field of migration and beyond. Its combination of theoretical ambition and detailed empirical research makes it a valuable contribution to several fields simultaneously. The book will be particularly relevant for scholars working at the intersection of urban studies, international relations and migration studies. Practitioners involved in city networks or municipal international relations may also find its conceptual insights useful for reflecting on the conditions that enable cities to act collectively on the global stage. By demonstrating how cities can move from being sites of governance to agents shaping global agendas, Pejic opens promising avenues for future interdisciplinary research and firmly establishes migration city diplomacy as an important field of scholarly inquiry.
References
Caponio T, Borkert M (eds) (2010) The Local Dimension of Migration Policymaking. Amsterdam University Press.
List C, Pettit P (2011) Group Agency: The Possibility, Design, and Status of Corporate Agents. Oxford University Press.
OECD (2018) Working Together for Local Integration of Migrants and Refugees. OECD Publishing.
Scholten P, Penninx R (2016) The multilevel governance of migration and integration. In: Garcés-Mascareñas B, Penninx R (eds) Integration Processes and Policies in Europe. Springer, pp. 91–108.
Triviño-Salazar JC, Climent-Ferrando V (2023) Including immigrant voices in local mechanisms of citizen participation? Insights from the crucial case of Barcelona. Governance 36(1): 123–142.
Zapata-Barrero R, Caponio T, Scholten P (2017) Theorizing the “local turn” in a multi-level governance framework of analysis: A case study in immigrant policies. International Review of Administrative Sciences 83(2): 241–246.
Crossref Web of Science Google Scholar
Commentary 2
Carlo Epifanio – University of Lausanne, Switzerland
A growing body of scholarship has examined the role of cities in global governance, particularly through the lenses of city diplomacy and transnational municipal networks. Yet, much of this literature reduces cities to coherent or unitary actors that act internationally. But where do decisions to engage internationally come from? Who, within the city, performs this agency, and how? Pejic’s book offers a novel response to these important questions, providing new insights into how urban agency is constructed and sustained. Daniel Pejic’s City Agency and Global Governance unpacks the “black box” of urban governance to study the international action of cities. This book thus responds to a rising call from debates in urban studies and city diplomacy to consider urban governance when dealing with cities’ international action (Davidson et al., 2019). Pejic’s contribution extends beyond academia. As a growing number of cities engage in foreign affairs (Pejic, 2026), and hundreds of city networks address urban affairs internationally (Acuto and Leffel, 2021), the book also speaks to practitioners working on cities in international settings.
The book’s central aim is explicit, that of establishing a link between local urban governance and international city agency. Pejic writes:
what is missing is a greater appreciation of how city agency might be constructed and sustained in a ‘bottom-up’ manner. The current book aims to advance understanding of the mechanisms through which this local coalition building relates to city diplomacy. (Pejic, 2026: 15)
As Pejic argues, existing research from IR and urban studies has demonstrated that cities are increasingly active in global affairs, yet has rarely interrogated how this agency is produced in practice. By shifting the analytical focus to the intra-urban level, the book moves beyond state-centric and institutionalist accounts of global governance and instead examines the mechanisms through which local actors generate and sustain international engagement.
Although migration is the key domain of global governance studied in the book, Pejic develops an original analytical framework that goes beyond this area. The book proposes a new theorization of collective agency in chapter 3. The author draws on the concept of group agents from analytical philosophy (List and Pettit, 2011) to reconceptualize the linkage between individual actors and institutions referred to as functional aggregations. Cities are therefore understood in the book as collective entities shaped by the interactions of multiple individual stakeholders whose common intentions “supervene” into collective agency. This theorization is innovative in that it results in a concrete spectrum of city actors that engage in international relations, an idea that is coherently operationalized and presented in chapter 4. This approach is useful to other researchers of city diplomacy because it gives concrete tools to deepen the analysis of specific case studies thereby linking an understanding of city agency to both structures and individual actions within urban institutions.
Beyond its theoretical contribution, the book brings new empirical evidence on cities’ bottom-up international action, something rarely addressed in a literature that often focuses either on city networks or on local governments. In chapter 6 Pejic presents the case studies of Bristol and Montreal. Both cases demonstrate the presence of different forms of agency within the cases. Beyond entrepreneurial mayors, there is a plethora of individuals, with formal and informal roles from civil society or city administration, that contribute to maintaining international engagement over time with input and feedback for the migration governance process. For example, in the case of Bristol, the city links international activities with local stakeholders and communities with a communication loop that connects international engagement back to the city level (Pejic, 2026: 2). This and other evidence show concrete urban governance practices that allow the two cities’ international engagement to transcend changes in political leadership.
One of the key strengths of the book lies in its ability to bridge urban studies and international relations. Pejic is able to show the city as a multilevel group agent while analyzing urban governance. The concept of global urban governance provides a useful lens to understand how cities operate within an increasingly fragmented and hybrid global system. More broadly, the book contributes to ongoing debates on the transformation of global governance. By demonstrating how cities can act as collective agents and influence international processes, Pejic challenges traditional state-centric perspectives and highlights the emergence of new forms of political agency. In doing so, the book aligns with and extends recent scholarship on city diplomacy, while also addressing some of its limitations, particularly the tendency to focus on city leaders or formal institutions.
At the same time, some aspects of the analysis could be further developed. First, the role of politics remains somewhat underexplored. While the book convincingly shows how city agency can be sustained over time, it pays limited attention to the political dynamics that shape urban governance. In particular, the influence of political leadership and ideological orientations could have been examined more explicitly and systematically. Differences in the political color of municipal governments, for instance, may play a significant role in shaping the priorities and intensity of international engagement, especially in a highly politicized field such as migration governance, where mayors have a strong role in multi-level governance (Bazurli et al., 2022). This raises the question: how would the urban governance patterns observed in Bristol and Montreal persist or evolve under different or conflictual political configurations?
Second and relatedly, the empirical analysis, while rich in qualitative insights, well organized and easy to follow, remains at times illustrative rather than systematic. The framework of group agency offers significant potential for a more structured analysis of the conditions under which collective agency emerges, yet it presents limitations.
The concept of group agency provides a valuable theoretical contribution, yet its integration with existing urban governance literature could further its analytical power. The book engages several times with the concept of urban governance (Pierre, 2011) without developing it further, which limits the analysis of the results. Pejic’s approach would benefit from a more developed integration with different urban governance configurations. The book’s promising conceptual framework could link the city actor’s spectrum presented in chapter 4 with different models of urban governance. This would allow the analysis to specify the city agency in terms of not only what actors are present but how their relations result in specific types of international engagement.
This development would have two benefits. On the one hand, it would allow for a more systematic comparative approach of the cases. On the other, it would also strengthen the causal claims of the book.
Despite these limitations, City Agency and Global Governance represents a significant and timely contribution to the study of cities in global politics. By opening the “black box” of urban governance, Pejic provides a much-needed framework to understand how cities act internationally and how this agency is constructed from the bottom-up. The book successfully demonstrates that city diplomacy is not merely the product of individual leaders or formal institutions, but emerges from the interactions of multiple actors within complex urban systems.
More broadly, the book invites scholars to rethink the role of cities in global governance. As global challenges become increasingly urbanized, understanding the mechanisms through which cities engage internationally becomes ever more important. In this context, Pejic’s framework offers a promising avenue for future research, not only in the field of migration but across a wide range of policy domains.
For scholars of urban studies, international relations and public policy, this book provides a concrete tool for research and both a compelling theoretical contribution and a rich empirical account of city agency in practice. It will be of particular interest to those working on city diplomacy, transnational municipal networks and the multilevel dynamics of governance. By bridging disciplinary boundaries and offering a novel conceptual lens, City Agency and Global Governance is likely to become a key reference for scholars seeking to study city diplomacy from a bottom-up perspective.
References
Acuto M, Leffel B (2021) Understanding the global ecosystem of city networks. Urban Studies 58(9): 1758–1774.
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Bazurli R, Caponio T, De Graauw E (2022) Between a rock and a hard place: Mayors, migration challenges and multilevel political dynamics. Territory, Politics, Governance 10(3): 297–305.
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Davidson K, Coenen L, Acuto M, et al. (2019) Reconfiguring urban governance in an age of rising city networks: A research agenda. Urban Studies 56(16): 3540–3555.
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List C, Pettit P (2011) Group Agency: The Possibility, Design, and Status of Corporate Agents. Oxford University Press.
Pierre J (2011) The Politics of Urban Governance. Palgrave Macmillan.
Pejic D (2026) City Agency and Global Governance: A Study of Migration City Diplomacy. Bristol University Press.
Author response
Daniel Pejic – University of Melbourne, VIC, Australia
Firstly, I would like to earnestly thank the reviewers, Juliana Fornasier and Carlo Epifanio for their deep and generous engagement with the book. Their reviews provide rich context, confirmations, and most importantly, new directions and warranted critique of City Agency and Global Governance. Fornasier’s expertise in migration studies and Epifanio’s knowledge of urban politics and city networking provide essential interdisciplinary perspectives on a book which aims to bridge (sometimes a little ambitiously) scholarship from urban studies, international relations and migration studies. I would also like to thank Tomasz Kamiński, whose research and leadership in paradiplomacy studies I greatly respect, for his kind introduction to the book review forum.
As both reviewers highlight, the book is a response to the significant advancement and growing prominence of local governments in the international arena. While migration governance is the primary empirical topic explored, the theorization of city agency aims to apply across policy domains. Epifanio writes “the book’s central aim is explicit, that of establishing a link between local urban governance and international city agency,” while Fornasier contends that “migration provides a particularly compelling lens because it exposes the increasingly localized realities of migrants and refugees reception and integration.” Both reviewers kindly promote the value of the book in bridging scholarship from urban studies and international relations, which was a key focus and was inspired by antecedent work on this theme (Ljungkvist, 2015; Oosterlynck et al., 2018; Stürner-Siovitz, 2023). Both also recognize the need for a better theoretical understanding of the processes which link urban governance and city diplomacy—and more refined methods for studying this intersection—which is at the heart of City Agency and Global Governance.
I would like to spend most of my space in this response engaging with the valuable and thoughtful critique of the book, beginning with its core theoretical contribution. Epifanio sees value in the articulation of group agency and related forms of individual and collective agency explored in the book but encourages these approaches to engage more explicitly with urban politics and existing urban governance frameworks. This comment around the inattention to the politics and ideologies of leaders and groups is particularly astute and speaks to one of the central critiques of city diplomacy and city networking research—that cases are often selected normatively and present a model of international city agency which is synonymous with political progressivism. Indeed, the cases of Bristol and Montreal in the book, chosen explicitly for their leadership in migration politics, are examples of this, and broader application of the research methods and political analysis of diverse cases would greatly strengthen the explanatory value of the book’s theoretical framework. While Fornasier supports the book’s case selection, she also highlights the growing recognition of the role of small and medium-sized towns in migration governance. These cities have increased their prominence within networking initiatives and programs such as Cities Alliance but remain understudied in the realm of migration city diplomacy, an imbalance even more prevalent in the Global South (Stürner-Siovitz and Morthorst, 2024).
Fornasier offers some nuanced critique from the perspective of migration studies, which I think overall is the weaker dimension of this interdisciplinary book. In particular, the commentary around the agency of migrants and refugees themselves within these governance processes is worthy of further reflection. As Fornasier highlights, while the study engaged with a range of organizations and groups who represent or work closely with migrant communities, the avenues for direct action and shaping of international municipal agendas are less explored which is a both a deficiency of the study, and an important area for further research.
The reviews also allowed me to reflect on the centering of local government activity within the ecosystem of local migration governance and city diplomacy, and the extent to which this is empirically justified. There is resonance between Fornasier’s suggestion to think more broadly around the range of urban actors that may shape city diplomacy, including epistemic communities and transnational policy networks and movements (McFarlane, 2009), and Epifanio’s encouragement to further explore the relationship between the “spectrum of city agency” and existing frameworks on urban governance. Deepening this interdisciplinary dialogue between urban studies and international relations will assist future research in this area to avoid both an “essentialism of units” (Curtis, 2011), which prioritizes local government action over other explanations of agency and provide a yet more holistic understanding of group agency construction.
Finally, it is worth reflecting on the significant changes that have impacted the multilateral system over the previous two years. Most fieldwork for this book was conducted in 2020 and 2021, during the peak of the COVID-19 crisis, when multilateral agencies were mobilizing to assist national and local level responses to the health emergency. During the second Trump administration we have seen large-scale budget cuts across the multilateral system, the withdrawal of the US from key international agencies and a severe budgetary crisis across the UN. If we look at the International Organization for Migration specifically, budget cuts have resulted in thousands of job losses. Last year in a piece for the Barcelona Center for International Affairs, I reflected on what fractured multilateralism means for cities that have invested significant time and effort in gaining recognition and influence in multilateral systems (Pejic, 2025). This chapter concluded with some optimism that regardless of the form multilateral cooperation takes, the flexibility, pragmatism and increased professionalism that cities have demonstrated through their international work positions them well to respond to this landscape and to utilize city diplomacy as a mechanism to enhance cooperation and improve the lives of urban dwellers. While I hope that regardless of the state of the UN and broader multilateral system, insights from the book remain useful, future work in this area may to need to contend even more with multilevel politics and national-local dimensions, as a resurgence of state power may limit cities’ avenues for direct intervention at the international scale.
ORCID iDs
Tomasz Kamiński https://orcid.org/0000-0003-2389-4038
Juliana Fornasier https://orcid.org/0009-0001-9779-2213
Carlo Epifanio https://orcid.org/0009-0000-9844-3819
Daniel Pejic https://orcid.org/0000-0001-7304-5996
References
Curtis S (2011) Global cities and the transformation of the international system. Review of International Studies 37(4): 1923–1947.
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McFarlane C (2009) Translocal assemblages: Space, power and social movements. Geoforum 40(4): 561–567.
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Pejic D (2025) City networks in the UN system: The crisis of multilateralism as an opportunity? In: Galceran-Vercher M, Martinez R (eds) City Diplomacy in a Fragmented World: Geopolitical Tensions, the Crisis of Multilateralism, and the Rising Global South. Barcelona Centre for International Affairs (CIDOB), pp. 47–56.
Stürner-Siovitz J (2023) Curtain up: City Diplomacy in Global Migration Governance. Springer VS Wiesbaden.
Stürner-Siovitz J, Morthorst LJ (2024) African city diplomacy in global climate mobility debates. Global Networks 24(4): e12476.
