GLOBAL C DIASPORIC NETWORKS M GLOBAL CIVIL SOCIETY

1 217 Globalisation and the international humanrights regime have contributed to the creationof operational and legal openings for non-state actors to enter international arenas that wereonce the exclusive domain of national states. Various,often as yet very minor, developments signal thatthe state is no longer the exclusive subject ofinternational law or the only actor in internationalrelations. Other actors from NGOs and indigenouspeoples to immigrants and refugees who becomesubjects of adjudication in human rights decisions are increasingly emerging as subjects of internationallaw and actors in international relations.

2 That is to say,these non-state actors can gain visibility ininternational fora as individuals and as collectivities,emerging from the invisibility of aggregatemembership in a nation-state exclusively representedby the way of interpreting this is in terms of anincipient unbundling of the exclusive authority overterritory and people that we have long associatedwith the national state. The most strategicinstantiation of this unbundling is probably the globalcity, which operates as a partly denationalisedplatform for GLOBAL capital and, at the same time, isemerging as a key site for the most astounding mixof people from all over the world.

3 The growingintensity of transactions among major cities iscreating a strategic cross-border geography thatpartly bypasses national states. The new networktechnologies further strengthen these transactions,whether they are electronic transfers of specialisedservices among firms or Internet-based communica-tions among the members of diasporas and these developments contribute to theexpansion of a GLOBAL CIVIL SOCIETY ? These cities andthe new strategic geographies that connect themand bypass national states can be seen as constitutingpart of the infrastructure for GLOBAL CIVIL SOCIETY .

4 Theydo so from the ground up, through multiplemicrosites and microtransactions. Among them are avariety of organisations focused on trans-boundaryissues concerning immigration, asylum, internationalwomen s agendas, anti-globalisation struggles, andmany others. While these are not necessarily urbanin their orientation or genesis, they tend to convergein cities. The new network technologies, especially theInternet, ironically have strengthened the urban mapof these trans-boundary NETWORKS . It does not haveto be that way, but at this time cities and thenetworks that bind them function as an anchor andan enabler of cross-border struggles.

5 These samedevelopments and conditions also facilitate theinternationalising of terrorist and traffickingnetworks; it is not clear how these fit into globalcivil cities are, then, thick enabling environ-ments for these types of activities, even though thenetworks themselves are not urban per se. In thisregard, these cities help people experience themselvesas part of GLOBAL non-state NETWORKS as they livetheir daily lives. They enact GLOBAL CIVIL SOCIETY in themicro-spaces of daily life rather than on someputative GLOBAL Ascendancy of Sub- andTransnational Spaces and ActorsThe key nexus in this configuration is that theweakening of the exclusive formal authority ofstates over national territory facilitates theascendancy of sub- and transnational spaces andactors in politico-civic processes.

6 These are spacesthat tended to be confined to the national domainor that have evolved as novel types in the context ofglobalisation and digitisation. This loss of power at thenational level produces the possibility of new formsof power and politics at the sub-national level andat the supra-national level. The national as containerof social process and power is cracked (P. Taylor 2000;Sachar 1990). This cracked casing opens up ageography of politics and civics that links subnationalspaces. Cities are foremost in this new CITIES AND DIASPORIC NETWORKS Saskia SassenChapter 9 GLOBALCITIES ANDDIASPORICNETWORKS:MICROSITES INGLOBALCIVILSOCIETYS askia SassenGCS2002 pages [09] 2/04 19/6/02 3:40 pm Page 217 Copyright 2002 Saskia SassenOriginally published in " GLOBAL CIVIL SOCIETY 2002.

7 "Edited by Helmut Anheier et. University PressThe density of political and civic cultures in largecities localises GLOBAL CIVIL SOCIETY in people s lives. Wecan think of these as multiple localisations of civilsociety that are GLOBAL in that they are part of globalcircuits and trans-boundary NETWORKS .The organisational side of the GLOBAL economymaterialises in a worldwide grid of strategic places,uppermost among which are major internationalbusiness and financial centres. We can think of thisglobal grid as constituting a new economic geographyof centrality, one that cuts across national boundariesand increasingly across the old North-South divide.

8 It has emerged as atransnational space for the formationof new claims by GLOBAL capital butalso by other types of actors. The mostpowerful of these new geographies ofcentrality at the inter-urban level bindthe major international financial andbusiness centres: New York, London,Tokyo, Paris, Frankfurt, Zurich,Amsterdam, Los Angeles, Sydney, HongKong, among others. But this geo-graphy now also includes cities such asSao Paulo, Shanghai, Bangkok, Taipei,and Mexico City. The intensity oftransactions among these cities,particularly through the financialmarkets, transactions in services, and investment, hasincreased sharply, and so have the orders of globalisation and telecommunicationshave contributed to produce a space for the urbanwhich pivots on de-territorialised cross-bordernetworks and territorial locations with massiveconcentrations of resources.

9 This is not a completelynew feature. Over the centuries cities have been atthe intersection of processes with supra-urban andeven intercontinental scaling. Ancient Athens andRome, the cities of the Hanseatic League, Genoa,Venice, Baghdad, Cairo, Istanbul, each has been at thecrossroads of major dynamics in their time (Braudel1984). What is different today is the coexistence ofmultiple NETWORKS and the intensity, complexity, andglobal span of these NETWORKS . Another markingfeature of the contemporary period, especially whenit comes to the economy, is the extent to whichsignificant portions of economies are now de-materialised and digitised and hence can travel atgreat speeds through these NETWORKS .

10 Also new isthe growing use of digital NETWORKS by a broad rangeof often resource-poor organisations to pursue avariety of cross-border initiatives. All of this hasincreased the number of cities that are part of cross-border NETWORKS operating on often vast geographicscales. Under these conditions, much of what weexperience and represent as the local level turns outto be a micro-environment with GLOBAL new urban spatiality thus produced is partial ina double sense: it accounts for only part of whathappens in cities and what cities are about, and itinhabits only part of what we might think of as thespace of the city, whether this beunderstood in terms as diverse as thoseof a city s administrative boundaries orin the sense of the public life of a city speople.