This study began with my observation of an apparent disjuncture between the
theory and practice of the sister cities movement. While optimistic and even
extravagant claims are made in popular, institutional and academic discourses
as to its seemingly limitless peace building capacity, there exists almost no
empirical evidence to support such claims. In practice, as indicated by the
broad overview provided in the previous chapter, there are clear obstacles to
the capacity of this movement to build bridges of understanding across
meaningful difference. Very often, cities most in need of international
symbolic and material support are bypassed or rejected as sister city partners.
When disagreements arise, particularly when they concern moral issues,
relationships can be unilaterally suspended or terminated, effectively
dismantling a communicative structure by means of which such differences
might be discussed and accommodated. Like the practice of ‘unfriending’ on
popular social networking sites such as Facebook, suspensions and
terminations of sister city relationships send a clear and public message to
partnered cities that they are no longer wanted or acceptable – surely a more
potent and alienating statement than if they had never been friends at all.
Compromising the legitimacy of framing sister cities as peace vehicles
are two further anomalies. The first is that the ideology behind urban-based
peace movements – that it is possible for coalitions between local authorities
and citizen volunteers to ‘bypass’ and even ‘undo’ the global scale conflict
caused in part by belligerent nation states – directs responsibility for peace
building under current conditions of global insecurity and disorder away from
under-resourced local governments that are, in many cases, struggling to cope
with the everyday management of local affairs. The sister cities movement was
developed in a spirit of optimism that human endeavour could bring about a
more peaceful, just and prosperous world. In this respect, it can be seen as an
expression of the project of early modernity, in which “the understanding of
self and world, the progress of morality, justice in social institutions, and even
human happiness” was held to be within the range of human achievement
(Habermas, 1997:45). However, since the mid twentieth century when the
sister cities movement was consolidated, the political structures supporting that
vision, in particular those of the welfare state and class-based politics, have
declined or vanished, and the impersonal logic of the open market is seen to
pervade all aspects of human existence. Nowhere, as suggested in the previous
chapter, is the outcome of economic reform more apparent than in the field of
local government. In the light of these contextual transformations, it is both
pertinent and necessary to question the appropriateness of burdening local
authorities with such high additional expectations.
Secondly, sister city relationships are a highly indeterminate and
ambiguous object of study. As Bell-Souder and Bredel (2005) discovered in
their explorations of U.S.-Japanese sister city relationships, and, as my own
experience confirmed, it is not easy to define what a sister city means, as each
person interviewed is likely to have a different understanding of what is going
on. This conceptual confusion can also occur at the international scale, as
O’Toole (2001) demonstrates in his study of Australian-Japanese sister city
on the subject, is pressed to commit to any stable aspect of the phenomenon he
is struggling to define.
Certain characteristics set the twinning of sister cities apart from other forms of long-distance social interaction. The formal agreements, usually made by local officials but occasionally by ad hoc citizen groups, are intended to last indefinitely (although, of course, some may be canceled, suspended, or allowed to wither away for lack of lasting interest). Consequently, the relationship does not limit itself to carrying out a single project, but rather opens the way for a variety of shared activities, all presumably serving the overall objective of advancing mutual understanding and friendship … The formula for interaction is that there is no set formula. Each pair of sister cities must experiment constantly to realize whatever ensemble of activities ideally suits their particular resources and objectives (1991:3).
“Anything that goes on in a community can become the subject of a sister city
project, including health care, environment, arts, education, economic and
business development, public safety, municipal training, youth, and much
more”, reflects de Leon (2002). The term encompasses “every type of
municipal, business, professional, educational and cultural exchange or
project” (Sister Cities International, n/d) and “(t)he program possibilities are as
extensive and diverse as the sister city network itself” (Honey, n/d). Dawley
(1996) notes that “(s)ister city programs are developed out of mutual desires
and interest. There is no standard pattern. Projects are limited only by the
imagination and resources of the communities”. While Zelinsky (1991)
understands sister city relationships as “a cheerful subject’, this is far from a
universal framing, as is demonstrated by the range of contestations outlined in
activities are analytically amorphous entities, saturated with ambiguity and
ambivalence.
Further inconsistencies can be seen in sister city relationships that focus
specifically on peace building under challenging conditions of existing macro-
political conflict. The ongoing violence in the Middle East may well be the
most pressing obstacle to a peaceful world order in the twenty-first century,
and thus the area most in need of bridging peace building structures, yet some
Middle Eastern cities are consistently avoided as sister city partners, while
others are uncritically embraced. Cities in Iraq that are, by objective criteria,
among the most dangerous in the world (Gerges, 2010) are not only regularly accepted as sister city partners in the United States, but are represented in sister
city discourses as spaces of relative normality. Cities in Palestine, by contrast,
are frequently discursively constituted as harmful and polluting, and
consequently rejected as sister city partners.
Clearly, there are important historical and political differences between the two
regions. Iraq has been invaded and is still occupied by U.S. led forces, while
the Palestinian Territories are locked into violent confrontation with the state of
Israel, which is a U.S. ally. However there are also salient similarities between
the two areas. Both are predominantly Muslim and sites of ongoing violence
and bloodshed, terrorist activity and anti-Western sentiment – a challenging
context indeed for peace building through sister city projects, given the high
levels of suspicion and fear of the violent Muslim ‘other’ in the Western world
(Fetzer and Soper, 2003, Manning, 2004, Werbner, 2005, Sheridan, 2006).
Furthermore, while internal discrepancies in both cities are glossed over in
referent is symbolically taken to stand for the whole), this process works
positively for Iraqi sister city candidates and negatively for Palestinian ones.
As will be seen in chapter six of this study, complex ethnic and political
differences within Iraqi populations are generally ignored, and ‘the Iraqi
people’ are discussed as though they were an orderly and unified nation. When
considered as sister city partners, Iraqis who are already open to Western
perspectives, and in particular, their children, stand discursively for the entire
population of that devastated country, thereby sidelining dissenting and hostile
Iraqi perspectives. In sister city discourses involving Palestinian cities,
however, the ambiguous status of Hamas as both a local authority and a
proscribed terrorist organisation is typically reacted to defensively, but not
explored in any analytical depth, with the result that the residents of Palestinian
cities are discursively homogenised as terrorist sympathisers. In this scenario, it
is moderate and peace loving Palestinians and their children whose
perspectives and needs are often marginalised.
Symbolic boundaries (Lamont and Molnár, 2002) or ‘mental fences’
(Beck and Cronin, 2006:5) thus exclude ‘Palestinians’ from the structured
international spaces of hospitality provided by sister city relationships, while
freely admitting ‘Iraqis’ who are understood to be open to the American
government’s definition of their own situation. This disparate and unequal
positioning of Iraqi and Palestinian cities as sister city partners calls for
sociological explanation. Why and how do Palestinian cities come to be
constituted as ‘out of bounds’ for sister city peace relationships? Why and how
do Iraqi cities come to be so easily accepted? Within the context of the global
singling out of Palestinians for rejection as sister city partners. These include
the ‘malignant positioning’ (Sabat, 2003) of Muslims in Western cultural
traditions and the fear of importing terrorist violence from conflict zones into
peaceful Western cities. However, such explanations do not explain the
apparent immunity of Iraqis to such obstacles. As socially constructed realities
with global consequences, sister city peace relationships and proposals
involving Palestinian and Iraqi cities offer the sociological researcher an
opportunity to uncover the personal and collective meanings behind these
discrepancies, and the processes through which they are translated into
structures of social inclusion and exclusion at the local/international interface.
The data acquisition and analysis for the present study were accordingly guided
by five research questions.
1 Why are sister city relationships with objectively dangerous Iraqi cities accepted uncritically at the local scale, while proposed partnerships with similarly dangerous Palestinian cities are vehemently opposed?
2 Through what processes are the meanings given to these cities, and to the people who live in them, translated into the structural inequality of formal acceptance or rejection?
3 What do the answers to these questions reveal as to the capacity of sister city relationships to facilitate peace building under conditions of severe, ongoing geopolitical conflict?
4 How do these findings relate to broader sister city practices?
5 What implications do they have for policy and practice in local governance?