Power, mobility and diaspora in the global city

Saskia Sassen is widely recognised as one of the leading theorists on globalisation, and is perhaps best known for her comprehensive work on the ‘global city’. She has written 12 books that deal with a vast range of issues relating to globalisation, from immigration, state sovereignty, and the movement of people and capital to digitisation and global networks and most recently cities and urban warfare. While she is regarded for her extensive body of work on globalisation and its implications for place, scale, nations, and individuals, she is most renowned for coining the term ‘global city’ to describe the ascendance of a new type of cities and regions which serve as the strategic spaces for global capitalism. For Sassen, global cities – such as New York, Paris, London, and Tokyo – are not only the command centres where much of the global economy is organised, managed, and controlled, but they also embody the local places where the effects of globalisation become most visible and ‘assume concrete, localised forms’. A central thread that runs through Sassen’s work is her argument that globalisation and the national are not distinct, separate realms but remain firmly embedded in one another. While globalisation has given rise to the global financial market, cross-border activities, digital networks with global span, and international organisations such as the UN and WTO that operate independent of nation-states, these remain materially embedded at the local, national level: the headquarters of financial firms, or the physical infrastructure (servers, cables, computers) which serves as the backbone for the internet