A Space for Kinship in City Diplomacy: Re-imagining Sister Cities amid Global Migration

Abstract

In an era of escalating urbanisation and global migration, this research investigates the potential of sister city relationships in forging long-term and community-driven international ties. Are these city-to-city agreements outdated, or do they still offer contemporary benefits? The study is grounded in eight months of field research on relationships between US cities and the Ecuadorian cities of Cuenca and Quito during Ecuador’s 2024 state of emergency. A sequential mixed-methods approach includes semi-structured interviews with cultural, diplomatic and economic stakeholders, and quantitative survey data, to identify broader trends in perceptions of sister city relations. Ethnographic observations in municipal offices in Cuenca and Quito anchor the research in practical governance challenges. The study contributes to international relations and paradiplomacy discourse by proposing an interdisciplinary theoretical framework that blends ideas of social power, kinship and peripheral realism to analyse sister city partnerships as tools of agency and identity in the context of global diplomacy and displacement.