Second, this analysis suggests that a vibrant set of new actors need to be added to international affairs, once again questioning the state-centrism that has for so long dominated thought and action. Many of these are informal organizations which have escaped the gaze of international relations until recently, partly because they are not formally represented in the polity. But, as Harvard University political scientist Pippa Norris and others have shown, the lack of formal structure does not necessarily make them any less effective. Indeed, one might argue that what they lose in formality they make up for in flexibility and tenacity. In particular, many of these movements are not so much based around formal goals as they are around developing agendas which are often aimed at releasing and mobilizing affect, such as ridicule of some of the more grotesque manifestations of power, or inciting anger both towards specific targets and for its own sake.

Third, the new urban condition suggests that international relations needs to think about what is meant by both international and relation in much more specifically urban terms. Cities have too often been seen as the medium when they are in fact the message: cities are not simply passive players in a global game played out among and between national and international actors, nor are cities simply another set of actors to be added in. Instead, they are sites that help to forge the international. They are, simultaneously, sites of both issue and response, influencing what happens around the world. They add a further dimension to international relations’ many critiques of politics as simply an inter-state system.

Finally, cities also point to the difficulty of trying to prejudge what constitutes the political in any era. All kinds of new political issues are constantly being born. These influences are not necessarily always of a minor register: one obvious example is how the international war on terror has been shaped by strategies of surveillance and combat developed in difficult and dark urban circumstances.

All these examples speak against the long-held assumption that the natural spatial politics of international relations is a politics of scale. There is no reason to believe that political influences and agencies are necessarily larger or smaller than each other, or that they are necessarily formed in a hierarchy of urban, national, international, and global organization. Rather, the urban condition takes in a series of spaces of different shape, topology, and consequence which work sometimes in tandem, sometimes against each other, but rarely in any easily additive manner, and which are likely to remain ambiguous.

We conclude, then, that a powerful dimension of international politics has been largely ignored for want of a vocabulary of space which can illustrate its peculiar powers. The political arsenal that modern citizens might have at their disposal has, therefore, been diminished. To see and use the whole of the political field is surely one of the primary goals of modern democracies. We must understand where that field is. And so, the affairs of the city have to become the habits of international politics.