Aust & Rodiles: Carving Out the City from the State: Charter Cities and the Quest for New Urban Futures

Helmut Aust (Free Univ. of Berlin - Law; Max Planck Institute for Comparative Public Law and International Law) & Alejandro Rodiles (Instituto Tecnológico Autónomo de México) have posted Carving Out the City from the State: Charter Cities and the Quest for New Urban Futures (University of Toronto Law Journal, forthcoming). Here's the abstract:

The idea of building new cities from scratch is gaining new popularity. A particular form of these endeavors relates to the construction of so-called "charter cities" which would be built on the territory of a given state, but would find themselves in more or less complete independence from the legal framework of the host state. Going back to ideas propagated by former World Bank Chief Economist and Nobel laureate Paul Romer, the idea behind charter cities is a decoupling of cities from the state.

Ideally, these cities would be carved out of state jurisdiction almost entirely. This article discusses this phenomenon both in the light of a now apparently failed attempt at implementing this plan in the case of Prospéra in Honduras, but also in the light of its broader historical, conceptual and political implications. As the article demonstrates, charter cities demonstrate a considerable overlap with concepts like special economic zones. Also other attempts at decoupling territories from states like seasteading projects are based on similar ideological underpinnings.These shared conceptual undercurrents relate to techno-libertarian concepts and their growing international influence finds resonance in recent attempts of post-conflict peace-building propagated by the US administration. The article critically assesses these developments and points to the dangers that such new urban futures present.

Call for Papers: Asian Cities and the International Legal Order 2.0: Urban Challenges and International Law in Asia

A call for papers has been issued for the SMU-Max Planck Workshop "Asian Cities and the International Legal Order 2.0: Urban Challenges and International Law in Asia," which will take place November 2-3, 2026, at the Yong Pung How School of Law, Singapore Management University. The call is here.

Call for Papers: Writing Workshop on "Asian Cities and International Law"

The Indian Society of International Law has issued a call for papers for a writing workshop on "Asian Cities and International Law" for early- and mid-career international law teachers, to be held December 13, 2025, in New Delhi. Details are here.

Call for Papers: Asian Cities and the International Legal Order

A call for papers has been issued for a workshop on “Asian Cities and the International Legal Order,” to take place July 10-11, 2025, at the Yong Pung How School of Law, Singapore Management University. The call is here.

Szpak, Gawłowski, Modrzyńska, Modrzyński, & Dahl: The Role of Cities in International Relations: The Third-generation of Multi-level Governance?

Agnieszka Szpak (Nicolaus Copernicus Univ. - Political Science), Robert Gawłowski (WSB Univ. - Political Science), Joanna Modrzyńska (Nicolaus Copernicus Univ. - Political Science), Paweł Modrzyński (Bydgoszcz Univ. - Management), & Michał Dahl (Nicolaus Copernicus Univ. - Political Science) have published The Role of Cities in International Relations: The Third-generation of Multi-level Governance? (Edward Elgar Publishing 2022). The table of contents is here. Here's the abstract:

Concerns about the position and function of nation-states in the international arena have led to a growing interest in the role of cities in international relations. This timely book advances the argument that cities are becoming active and informal actors in international law-making, indicating the emergence of a ‘third generation’ of multi-level governance.

Expansive in scope, the book investigates various areas of city cooperation such as the economy, migration, security, sustainable development, ecology, and the position of cities in international law. Interviews conducted with the official representatives of several cities and international institutions, including UN-Habitat, the EU Committee of the Regions, and the Congress for Local and Regional Authorities of the Council of Europe, offer key insights into the most pressing urban issues of the 21st century. Examining the latest information on the international activities of cities, this engaging book explores the possibility that cities may soon reach the level of international subjects, capable of both implementing and creating international law.

Book Launch: Research Handbook on International Law and Cities

On November 17, 2021, the T.M.C. Asser Instituut will host a book launch for the Research Handbook on International Law and Cities. Details are here.

Aust & Nijman: Research Handbook on International Law and Cities

Helmut Philipp Aust (Freie Universität Berlin - Law) & Janne E. Nijman (Univ. of Amsterdam - Law; Graduate Institute - Law) have published Research Handbook on International Law and Cities (Edward Elgar Publishing 2021). Contents include:

• Helmut Philipp Aust & Janne E. Nijman, The emerging roles of cities in international law – introductory remarks on practice, scholarship and the Handbook
• Valerie Hansen, Silk Road cities and their co-existing legal traditions
• Tobias Boestad, Legitimizing interurban cooperation in the Middle Ages: the legal system of the Hanse
• Susanne Lepsius, The legal system among Italian city republics
• Luigi Nuzzo, Cities and international law: an imperial perspective
• Mirko Sossai, Invisibility of cities in classical international law
• Luis Eslava & George Hill, Cities, post-coloniality and international law
• Boris Vormann, Global city networks and the nation-state: rethinking a false tradeoff
• Yishai Blank, International legal personality/subjectivity of cities
• Yukiko Takashiba, Sources and law-making
• Katja Creutz, Responsibility
• Moritz Baumgärtel, Dispute settlement
• Jacob Katz Cogan, International organizations and cities
• Anouche Beaudouin, Sovereignty
• Anél du Plessis, Climate change law and sustainable development
• Jolene Lin, The role of transnational city networks in environmental governance
• Alejandro Rodiles, The global insecure counterterrorism city
• Martha F. Davis, Finding international law ‘close to home’: the case of human rights cities
• Barbara Oomen, Cities, refugees and migration
• Michael Riegner, Development cooperation and the city
• Christian Iaione & Elena de Nictolis, The role of cities in the global governance of health
• Jorge E. Viñuales & Lucy Lu Reimers, The law of economic globalization and cities
• Antoine Duval, From global city to Olympic city: the transnational legal journey of London 2012
• Mauricio Rodas, City diplomacy: experience from the ground
• Simon Curtis, An international relations perspective
• Nir Barak & Avner de Shalit, Urbanizing political concepts for analyzing politics in the city
• Samantha Besson & José Luis Martí, Cities as democratic representatives in international law-making
• Louis J. Kotzé, Cities, the Anthropocene and earth system law
• Sheila R. Foster & Chrystie Swiney, City networks and the glocalization of urban governance
• Geneviève Cartier, The relationship between the state and the city from a comparative (constitutional) perspective
• Carlo M. Colombo & Martijn L.P. Groenleer, How domestic legal systems respond to international local government law: between accommodation, resistance and transformation
• Edouard Fromageau, Global administrative law and cities: the perfect couple that never was
• Jan Klabbers, Inter-legality, cities and the changing nature of authority
• Daniel Litwin, International lawyers and the city
• Karen Knop, The hidden city in international legal thought

Pavoni: Sustainable Development as a Cornerstone of Cities' Engagement with International Law

Riccardo Pavoni (Univ. of Siena - Law) has posted Sustainable Development as a Cornerstone of Cities' Engagement with International Law (Italian Yearbook of International Law, forthcoming). Here's the abstract:

Sustainable development may safely be regarded as a cornerstone of cities’ engagement with international law, an engagement which is certainly bound to increase in the time of COVID-19. This article revisits the historical trajectory of cities’ and local governments’ participation in sustainable development processes. It particularly focuses on the contemporary involvement of cities and their transnational networks in the United Nations 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development and associated Sustainable Development Goals. Subsidiarity and public participation are fully discussed as conceptual underpinnings of cities’ growing role in the pursuit of sustainability. The article concludes that, as long as cities continue to demonstrate leadership and innovation in advancing cutting-edge solutions to problems of sustainability as a result of mechanisms that secure the meaningful participation of the communities of people concerned, their place in the global partnership for sustainable development will inevitably become ever more prominent.

Beaudouin: Droit international des villes

Anouche Beaudouin (Université Côte d’Azur - Law) has published Droit international des villes (Mare et Martin 2021). Here's the abstract:

Quel les sont les manifestations juridiques internationales de l’urbanisation du monde ? L’ouvrage a pour but de proposer des points de repère dans ce vaste paysage et de créer des catégories (d’acteurs, d’instruments juridiques, de relations, de normes...) permettant d’intégrer et de comprendre au mieux ces dimensions juridiques qui, prises ensemble, constituent un véritable droit international des villes. De la construction des villes à leur gouvernance, en passant par leurs relations internationales et les services publics qu’elles assument, de nombreux instruments internationaux façonnent en effet le milieu physique et politique à la fois le plus universel et le plus proche de nos vies. Droit international des villes est le premier ouvrage qui propose un cadre permettant d’appréhender, penser, et enseigner cette matière nouvelle.

Nijman & Aust: The Emerging Roles of Cities in International Law - Introductory Remarks on Practice, Scholarship and the Handbook

Janne Elisabeth Nijman (T.M.C. Asser Instituut; Univ. of Amsterdam - Law) & Helmut Philipp Aust (Freie Universität Berlin - Law) have posted The Emerging Roles of Cities in International Law - Introductory Remarks on Practice, Scholarship and the Handbook (in Research Handbook on International Law and Cities, Helmut Philipp Aust & Janne Elisabeth Nijman eds., forthcoming). Here's the abstract:

This introductory chapter sets the scene for the Research Handbook. It retraces how cities gradually develop into internationally relevant actors, how this development has been first traced in other disciplines and how slow the scholarship of international law has been catching up with this development. This picture has changed in the last ten to fifteen years and the chapter contains a state of the art overview of the extant literature in the growing field of international law research on cities as actors in international law, forming transnational networks and being impacted for example by normative expectations of good urban governance. It articulates how the turn of the city to the international also finds its limits in international law and institutions. The chapter argues that it is time to take a further step in the production of international law scholarship towards better understanding how international law is transformed through the growing role of cities. It combines this call with an introduction to the themes of individual sections and contributions of the Handbook.

Cogan: Cities and International Organizations

Jacob Katz Cogan (Univ. of Cincinnati - Law) has posted Cities and International Organizations (in Research Handbook on International Law and Cities, Helmut Philipp Aust & Janne Nijman eds., forthcoming). Here's the abstract:

As their work has embraced the most critical challenges confronting the contemporary international world, such as climate change, migration, poverty, global health, human rights, and counterterrorism, international organizations (IOs), and particularly the secretariats that are tasked with operationalizing IO mandates and decisions, have resorted more and more to local authorities as part of their strategy to solve global problems. And as local governments have confronted those same problems, they have sought assistance and influence at the international level, including through the work of international organizations. Though these global challenges have existed for decades, and international organizations have worked on them for just as long, international institutions are increasingly recognizing that cities, as cities, serve an important role in solving transnational problems and that cities and international organizations need to work more together to achieve that end. Cities, empowered by their perceived importance and democratic legitimacy, are asserting themselves more and more internationally, individually and collectively, pushing their policy preferences and demanding a seat at the table. The moves toward promoting localized solutions and implementing urban-IO collaboration are growing, but the state-centered structure of the international system, which does not contemplate interactions between cities and IOs unmediated by states, has impeded, though not prevented, such efforts. This chapter will explore the trends that have led international organizations to focus on cities and those that have led cities to look to international organizations. It will then examine the type of city-centric work that international organizations engage in and the types of contingent connections and alliances that exist between organizations and cities. Finally, it will suggest that a shadow system has emerged that allows cities and international organizations to interact and cooperate, albeit unevenly and circumspectly, within an international framework that was not designed for such relations. Established to solve the conundrum produced by the misalignment of functional need and institutional design, the informal system itself presents challenges and provokes questions that require further research.

Eslava & Hill: Cities, Post-Coloniality and International Law

Luis Eslava (Univ. of Kent - Law) & George Hill (Univ. of Cambridge) have posted Cities, Post-Coloniality and International Law (in Elgar Research Handbook on International Law and Cities, Helmut Aust & Janne Nijman eds., forthcoming). Here's the abstract:

In recent decades, the local, the municipal and the city have emerged as virtuous spaces where development and global integration can finally be achieved in the postcolony. In this chapter, we locate this emergence within a broader history of international attempts to organise and regularise urban life through multi-scalar governance structures. We identify these structures as having developed from a paradigm of direct imperial control over colonial cities, to a moment in which local life came to be organised through national logics, to the present resurgence of the local and municipal in more decentralised and indirect ordering processes. These transformations, which remind us that global governance has always been a hands-on project, have been fuelled by the intensification of the global economic order and the concomitant need to discipline lands, peoples and their fellow non-humans accordingly. The resurgence of the city as a locus of international discourse has created a dynamic interaction between international and local urban laws and development policies, which we identify in this chapter as ‘international urban law’. Our analysis points, however, not only to hegemonic forces in this interaction between the international and the local but also to the counter-hegemonic voices of resistance that have always punctuated debates about colonialism, decolonisation and cities in international law. As we demonstrate through a series of case studies, from Bogotá to Rio de Janeiro, and from Ulaanbaatar to Nairobi, today’s development programmes revive the colonial typology of cities as key nodes in global governance networks through euphemistically diverse yet still quite standardised patterns of disciplining. These case studies illuminate the socio-political (dis)arrangements underlying the present impetus towards making urban life legible and amenable to international prescriptions and the global economic order. Here we show how this reinvented brand of localised disciplining, and the resistance to it, are part and parcel of a post-colonial normative order that struggles to leave its imperial origins behind.

Call for Submissions: Urban Politics of Human Rights

The T.M.C. Asser Instituut project "The Global City" and the University College Roosevelt project "Cities of Refuge" have issued a call for submissions for an edited volume on the "Urban Politics of Human Rights." The call is here.

Call for Contributions: City Reports on International Law (Reminder)

The International Law Association study group on "The Role of Cities in International Law," the T.M.C. Asser Institute, and the Freie Universität Berlin invite researchers to submit abstracts for reports on city practices in relation to international law. The call is here.

Workshop: The Role of Cities in International Law

I'm delighted to be in Berlin today for a workshop on "The Role of Cities in International Law" at Freie Universität Berlin. The program is here.

Call for Contributions: City Reports on International Law

The International Law Association study group on "the Role of Cities in International Law," the T.M.C. Asser Institute, and the Freie Universität Berlin invite researchers to submit abstracts for reports on city practices in relation to international law. The call is here.