Bulletin of Municipal Foreign Policy

The Bulletin was a quarterly (sometimes more frequent) compilation of stories and commentary of the involvement of cities and local elected officials in foreign policy. Among the topics frequently covered were nuclear freeze votes, nuclear free zones, anti-apartheid divestment campaigns, sister cities, and local ordinances to control and eliminate CFCs (chlorofluorocarbons) and other ozone-depleting compounds.

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Animus of the Underling: Theorizing City Diplomacy in a World Society

Leffel, Benjamin

(2018)

This article explores the nature of city diplomacy using newly available archives chronicling the ‘municipal foreign policy movement’ of the 1980s, in which US city governments intervened directly in late Cold War foreign affairs issues. Cases covered include US city governments’ involvement in the nuclear free zone movement, the Central American crisis and the anti-Apartheid movement throughout the 1980s. A theoretical synthesis of literature in world society theory, diplomatic studies and social movement theory is used to explain the normative, macro-sociological, legal, demo-cratic and sociopolitical dynamics of contentious city-government intervention in foreign affairs. Emphasizing the normative processes at play, this article argues through a world society theoretical interpretation that ‘municipal foreign policy’ efforts repre-sent local-level codification of universal norms that the US federal government either neglected to enforce or directly violated.