Reflections on Urban Sovereignty in a Time of Crisis: The Territoriality of Governance and the Ethics of Care

Diane E. Davis - Harvard University

In my remarks I will argue that the Covid-19 pandemic has contributed to a crisis of modern governance because it has exposed questions about the willingness and capacities of national authorities to address health-related disruptions in livelihoods that are primarily experienced locally. Although economic globalization has already started to chip away at the hegemony of Westphalian national state sovereignty, the current pandemic --understood as a health crisis spread through global flows of viruses that know no national boundaries -- has accelerated a potential crisis of governance by creating new tensions between local, sub-national, national, and even international authorities about how best to respond. Concerns about which scale of authority should lead the battle against the pandemic expose long-standing conflicts between proponents of state versus market solutions, even as they reveal societal fissures over individual versus collective rights and responsibilities. These developments not only generate new questions about the ethics of care and who should be responsible for human security; they also call for a rethinking of the most appropriate territorial scale for accommodating modern enlightenment ideals of responsive governance in an ever more globalizing world. I will argue that one way to move forward in the context of the pandemic is to consider urban sovereignty as a model. Cities are better positioned than nations to identify the uneven distribution of health impacts and thus to provide more equitable responses; they also hold unique capacities to address many of the ideological tensions that have been exposed by the crisis. The talk concludes with a reflection on the viability of a strengthened urban sovereignty in a post-pandemic world.