Beyond Binaries
Diane Davis (Harvard University)
Although I regret never having had the pleasure of personally meeting Warren Magnusson, his paradigm-shifting conceptual provocations and widely-cited academic contributions have given voice to much of my own scholarly aspirations over the past several decades, even as they also have clearly impacted dialogue over the role of the urban in political theory and the ways that cities and states are understood across a variety of disciplines. His ideas have long been an inspiration, and in ways far beyond the routine assignment of his writings in several of my courses. Along with Warren’s rejection of the haughty and self-serving academic distinction between high and low politics, built on claims for disciplinary hegemony among political scientists (that still prevail in far too many circles), his admonition that politics unfolding at the scale of the city should not be seen as inferior or less impactful than the politics of nation-states – particularly when it comes to foreshadowing the types of social worlds to which we all aspire – may in fact be more critical than ever in this historical moment. When Warren proposed that a deeper understanding of urbanism as a way of life would provide the basis for more freedom and equality, because by focusing on the city we could see that politics might be built on “persuasion not coercion,” he was doing much more than making a statement about the dangers of national states or even criticizing the obsession with national politics and the unchecked power of sovereigns. He also was highlighting the important role that citizen engagement, face-to-face relationality, and the material grounding of what it means to live, work, and inhabit space can and should play in making better futures based on a meaningful social contract. With these and other contributions, Warren moved political theory away from general abstractions about national state power and about which scale of politics is most ontologically meaningful even as he heralded a call for mobilizing and making claims in and on the city if emancipation is to be the desired socio-political project at hand.
Warren Magnusson’s writings and arguments will and must continue to inspire us all. Seen from the present, I would also make a plea for the urgency of the agenda that he established. In a world that has become even more rapidly urbanized since Magnusson first made these claims, it would appear almost impossible to understand humanity’s political future without seeing or thinking through an urban lens. Having said this, one must also acknowledge that the contemporary era brings us much more than accelerated urbanization. It also has ushered in a resurgence of extremist nationalism and an all-out battle for national state control of territory, whether expressed in efforts to impose national mandates on cities and on the movement of bodies within a single nation-state, or whether expressed in efforts of a given country to destroy or occupy cities of rival nations. Think Kyiv, Gaza, and now Tehran. Bringing this message close to my current home, one need only look at the ways that nationalist backlash in a country like the United States not only comes with calls to annex Canada and Greenland. This particular form of nationalism both emerges from and reinforces a new political divide between “blue” cities and the ostensible aspirations of “red” backed nation-state, with support for the latter partially built upon growing distinctions between urban and rural ways of life. Combined with ongoing global warmaking, these and other recent developments are precisely why we need to keep Magnusson’s work alive.
But might we also take it in new directions to address the contemporary era? Indeed, seeing like a city remains a priority because it will continue to keep us connected to everyday lifeworlds in an era where inequality, precarity, and fear hover over cities and their residents. When federal authorities send in the national guard and marines to Los Angeles to quell urban protest against autocratic presidential overreach and violations of constitutional law, the connection between city and nation loom large. Even if we care deeply about cities and their sovereignty, we cannot put our heads in the sand about the continued – if not resurgent – power of nation-states in their efforts to stop cities from imposing their visions on the nation let alone to advance their own urban priorities through local politics. So how should or can we see like a city while also focusing our attention on the national state? One way is to rethink these binaries.
My own reading of Magnusson suggests that he doth protest too much about the dangers of analytically embracing the politics of (national) states as the stand-in for sovereignty, and that a more nuanced reading of the territorialities of sovereign power might produce a pathway for understanding that states and sovereigns operate at various scales simultaneously, for good and for bad, including at the urban scale. To be sure, Warren has taken this city-centric posture almost as a rhetorical device in order to refocus attention on the urban as the site of politics and emancipatory practice. I am all for that. Yet as a scholar of the global south, whose original writings on Mexico focused on the inter-relationality between Mexican national state sovereignty and the growth and political influence of its capital city, I believe it would be a mistake to analytically separate the political evolution of that city from its nation and vice-versa (Davis 1994). In Mexico at least, the city and the nation were deeply intertwined over the long sweep of history, in no small part because of the political projects of colonialism, independence, and Revolution linked urbanization to political struggles and national economic development trajectories. To the extent that the historical embeddedness of urban and national politics may be less common in the global north, it might explain why Magnusson, writing with an eye to global north scholarship to a great degree, wanted to put his provocation on our collective intellectual map. Even so, we should be careful to always situate these and any other larger theoretical claims in historical and geographical contexts. What makes sense for Canada might not for Cameroon. In my current work on corruption, impunity, and drug-trafficking in Mexico, for example, I have found that coercive tactics and the political power to “grant exceptions” vis-à-vis the law occurs at the city level as much as the national level. I have also argued that drug-traffickers themselves are frequently considered active sovereigns – by citizens and state authorities alike – despite having no formal claim to national state power (Davis 2010). To the extent that in almost all parts of the world there are both local states and national states with jurisdictional authority, and to the extent that in certain places and times sovereignty is as likely to be formal as informal and may also materialize in multiple locations and manifest itself in plural forms (Davis and Mueller 2025), we must think about Magnusson’s distinction between the city and the state with a huge dose of caution.
Although thinking about and “like a city” remains on the agenda, and I would like to suggest that Warren’s legacy can be best advanced by offering an assemblage line of questioning built on critical analysis of the relations between cities and sovereignty. Should treatment of the city and state sovereignty as inseparable hold in all time and all places, why or why not? Is there something about the contemporary era that might lead to a new way of framing the relations between cities, states, and sovereignty? I am confident that if Warren were still with us he would be the first to take this provocation and run with it. Despite the fact that he spent much of his time privileging the urban by arguing that scholars and activists alike need to see like a city, Warren regularly acknowledged that (national) states were not likely to disappear. That is, he was not working under the assumption that sovereignty – or state power – was or could ever be permanently rescaled from the nation to the city. Rather, his desire to see like a city was as much a normative and analytical project as a theoretical abstraction. And that is precisely why his provocation remains so important and powerful in these dark times.
As urban and political scholars we can honor Warren’s legacies by embracing the normative project behind the call to see like a city while also recognizing that states and coercive powers will continue to operate both nationally and locally. In light of this, I would like to suggest that we try to understand the nature of the conflicts that are produced when those who want to “see like a city” – that is, who seek to embrace the urban scale on its own terms – find themselves in tension with those who choose to “see the city like a state.” When is there a clash between these distinctive ways of knowing, seeing, and politically acting in the city; and how might recognition that both are possible change our practical and theoretical understandings of sovereignty? This is an empirical question as much as a plea for urbanists to accept different ways of seeing and knowing how political power operates in cities. I have already made tentative steps in this direction through preliminary writings on competing and overlapping sovereignties and the ways that politics and coercive practices unfold within and between the urban, national, and global scales simultaneously (Davis 2020). In carrying this research agenda forward I have Warren Magnusson to thank, and I know his writings will continue to be an inspiration and a guide for me and for any other urbanists who would care to join me on this scholarly journey.
References
Davis, Diane. 1994. Urban Leviathan: Mexico City in the Twentieth Century. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. [Translated as Leviatán urbano: La ciudad de Mexico en el siglo XX. Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1999].
Davis, Diane. 2010. “Irregular Armed Forces, Shifting Patterns of Commitment, and Fragmented Sovereignty in the Developing World,” Theory and Society 39(3): 397–413.
Davis, Diane. 2020. “City, Nation, Network: Shifting Territorialities of Sovereignty and Urban Violence in the Global South.” Urban Planning 5(30): 1–12.
Davis, Diane. 2025. “Deconstructing sovereignty: (Non-)life, territorial power, and the everyday ecologies of hybrid governance (co-edited with Frank Mueller), Special Issue of Territory, Politics, Governance titled, (Il)liberal Governance Arrangements and the Material Foundations of Sovereignty.
Diane Davis is Charles Dyer Norton Professor of Regional Planning and Urbanism, Graduate School of Design at Harvard University