Interventions and governance in our time: cities as nodes for global governance or local battlefields for social conflicts?

The effects of the on-going processes of globalization, urbanization and migration most certainly constitute one of the largest societal transformations and changes in human history. How the changes will inflict upon conditions for societal sustainability depends upon how people conceive and relate to fundamental values such as security, development and justice. The process of globalization has implied an amalgamation of the local and the global and changed the way these concepts are used. The question of security has been deepened and widened to encompass human security, individual safety and economic predictability, i.e. welfare in global times. Development has increasingly become a question of human development, health and ecological sustainability. Justice is considered a question of cultural recognition and human rights.

International summits and conferences are marked by an emerging and dominating pattern of thoughts – a global discourse – regarding conditions for societal sustainability. Even if opinions continue to diverge as regards how and to what extent, consensus prevails that the amalgamation – hybridization – of the local and the global has made the questions of security, development and justice intertwined and mutually constitutive. The "glocalized" development of society has increased the importance of coherence between different policy areas and acts of intervention. At the same time, the lack of democratic institutions and regulatory frameworks required for the global governance and political intervention makes it difficult to deal with global challenges and conflicting goals.

This paper deals with the role of cities and urban areas in future global governance. As the argument goes, through their global networks cities might be capable of reassuming their position from medieval times as important nodes in the world economy. It is on the local level that many of the global challenges are created and it is here where the effects become visible and must be dealt with. At the same time cities are confronted with an impressive rate of population growth, huge inequalities and an uneven development between different social strata and housing areas. Consequently, and as statistics as well as recent upheavals remind us, a number of cities are in danger of being torn apart, as they disintegrate and evolve into battlefields for social conflicts. How the issues of security, development and justice are dealt with and how subsequent measures and acts of intervention are designed, will be decisive for the direction in which cities are heading. Acts of intervention must be designed not only with the responsibility to protect citizens from war crimes and atrocities but also with the responsibility to protect and preserve their economic, social and cultural rights. Enlarged local democracy and strengthened popular participation are considered prerequisites for the envisaged pre-emptive security.

This working paper in progress underlines the importance of rethinking intervention and governance. It should be understood as a normative position paper with the aim to be further elaborated into a conceptual framework for use in empirical research on how to design plans of action in our time.