Local Turn Through International Networking: Istanbul's Migration City Diplomacy

Abstract

This paper explores how the local turn in migration governance is facilitated through city diplomacy and international networks within highly centralized political systems. Drawing on interviews with municipal representatives, NGOs, and experts in Istanbul, Turkey, it focuses on the drivers behind the city's increasing international engagement in urban migration governance. This article shows that municipalities and local NGOs are increasingly turning to external networks in response to administrative, financial, and political challenges at the domestic level. It introduces the concept of “maneuvering practicality” as a dual-purpose city diplomacy approach that explains how international networking enables city-level actors to balance immediate pragmatic needs with strategic autonomy-building within centralized governance structures. While the recognition of “cities as international actors” has been growing, its implications for urban migration governance, especially in highly centralized contexts, have received relatively less attention both theoretically and empirically. By framing international city diplomacy as both a counterbalancing tool and a resilience mechanism in migration governance, this paper contributes to the emerging scholarship on migration city diplomacy within international relations, urban studies, and migration studies. © The Author(s) 2025. This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/) which permits non-commercial use, reproduction and distribution of the work without further permission provided the original work is attributed as specified on the SAGE and Open Access page (https://us.sagepub.com/en-us/nam/open-access-at-sage).