Bringing Nationalism into Global Urban Studies

This critical commentary investigates the resurgence of nationalist politics through a global urban studies lens, arguing that cities are critical arenas in which contemporary nationalist projects are enacted, negotiated, and contested. While scholarship on nationalism, geopolitics, and international relations remains largely state-centric, global urban studies has tended to treat cities as denationalised nodes embedded in transnational networks of global capital. Our intervention is situated within a broader global context of democratic backsliding and autocratisation, that have accelerated over the past two decades and are increasingly visible across both authoritarian regimes and constitutional democracies. These developments are closely tied to the rise of populism and ethno-religious nationalism, which have mobilised anxieties surrounding inequality, migration, ethnic and racial identity to advance exclusionary political agendas. We argue that cities function simultaneously as infrastructures of nationalist governance and as spaces of political resistance. Urban actors from municipal authorities to grassroots movements reproduce, adapt, and contest nationalist projects through everyday political practices. Attending to the situated and uneven ways these dynamics unfold reveals cities not merely as passive sites of national politics but as key arenas where the boundaries of citizenship, migration, belonging, and state power are actively reconfigured.