Global cities and the transformation of the International System SIMON CURTIS* Abstract. 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. Simon Curtis is Lecturer in Politics at the University of East Anglia. He specialises in international theory and international history and has recently published articles in the journals International Relations and the Cambridge Review of International Aﬀairs. He is currently working on a monograph provisionally entitled Global Cities and Global Order. Introduction The rise of global cities, whether viewed as transnational global city regions, or as global networks of fragments of urban space, poses important questions about a discipline conditioned to examine a world of territorial nation-states. It signals a fundamental challenge to some of the core logics of the modern international system, and, I will argue, oﬀers a way to analyse indications of immanent transformation within that system. Despite a signiﬁcant research programme having developed around the concept of the global city over the last four decades in urban sociology and political geography, International Relations (IR) scholars have been slow to engage with this challenge. 1 This is a great loss, as IR has much to oﬀer these debates. Scholars * I would like to oﬀer my acknowledgement and thanks to Barry Buzan, Richard Little and Chris Brown for their critical engagement with some of the ideas outlined in this article. I would also like to acknowledge the generosity of the Department of International Relations at the London School of Economics, and of the Institute of International Relations in Prague, for oﬀering material support for this project. 1 In February 2009 there was a signiﬁcant presence, for the ﬁrst time, of global cities theorists at the annual International Studies Association conference in New York. The panellists noted that this Review of International Studies page 1 of 25  2010 British International Studies Association doi:10.1017/S0260210510001099 1