Where to when going local? Notes on the research agenda for “local political theory”

Abstract

In a recent programmatic contribution to this journal, Marta Wojciechowska and James Hickson have urged (normative) political theorists to systematically reflect on the local dimension of politics. Assuming that local phenomena are not simply a miniature of larger entities or forces, they emphasize the significance of examining the local to develop more nuanced accounts of the intricacies of the political world. This commentary addresses this important intervention and scrutinizes whether the concept of “the local” serves as an adequate starting point for this research agenda. It is argued that “the local” carries conceptual burdens that bear the risk of undermining the very objectives of Wojciechowska's and Hickson's proposal. The article will thus propose a spatio-theoretical alternative which allows to rearrange and advance the localization of political theory.

Introduction

In their recent article Why go local? Developing the research agenda for “local political theory,” Marta Wojciechowska and James Hickson (2025) persuasively argue for the systematic incorporation of “the local” in political theorizing. Driven by the objective of cultivating “a more nuanced and comprehensive theoretical understanding of our complex and multidimensional political world” (2), ¹ Wojciechowska and Hickson prompt the community of (normative) political theorists to reflect on the distinct character of the local dimension of politics. Their strongest argument for the need to do that is the assertion that the “local dimension represents more than a mere microcosm of the nation-state and more than a single manifestation of wider national or global dynamics” (2). Wojciechowska and Hickson substantiate this claim by drawing on different strands of research that, in one way or another, demonstrate that there are “distinct actors, power-dynamics and ways of life associated with the local dimension” (17). In order to investigate this political distinctiveness, they propose that the local be regarded “as a distinct object of analysis, a distinct object of normative concern, and a distinct object of application” (16). The main body of their article expounds on these three dimensions, providing compelling arguments for the intuition that addressing the local holds specific value for political theory.

In this commentary, I am picking up on Wojciechowska's and Hickson's “provocation towards further discussion, and further exploration, of what is possible when political theorists ‘go local.’” (17) I will do so, however, not by focusing on the three dimensions that Wojciechowska and Hickson portray as the main contribution of their article, but by stopping much early in their argument: I will raise the fundamental question where and what “the local” actually is, that is, what one encounters when going local. To be clear right from the start, I am very much inclined towards Wojciechowska's and Hickson's project, not least due to my own (collaborative) work on the urban political and a political theory of the city (Barbehön, 2023a, 2023b: 307–317; Barbehön and Haus, 2021, 2024). While I am sharing the premise that there is a specific value of a localized political theory, I will raise doubts whether the very notion of “the local” is an adequate starting point for this endeavor. Indeed, I will argue that “the local” carries (implicit) conceptual burdens that bear the risk of undermining the overarching objective of Wojciechowska's and Hickson's intervention, that is, to recognize “the local” in its own right, without reducing it to a miniature of larger entities or forces.

In what follows, I will discuss Wojciechowska's and Hickson's understanding of the local, and, in the course of that, identify two conceptual problems, scalar thinking and container modeling, that come along with it. Taken together, these problems indicate that there are still theoretical tasks to be solved before “methodological” (2, 16) questions are being raised. To do so, I will suggest to resort to a spatio-theoretical perspective and the notion of spatialization that allows to rearrange and advance Wojciechowska's and Hickson's original agenda.

The local and its problems

Wojciechowska and Hickson begin their programmatic article by witnessing a “surprising” contrast: while they observe that “Global Political Theory” is firmly established within the field, “Local Political Theory” as its “corollary” appears to be severely under-developed (2). While I have no intention of calling this observation into question, I want to highlight that there is a (implicit) conceptual consequence linked to this way of approaching the issue: when contrasting “the local” with “the global,” one is in line with scalar thinking. The notion of a “local scale” (2, 4) or a “local level” (3, 16), as compared to the global scale or level, insinuates a continuum ranging from small to large, from near to far, from here to “elsewhere” (5), and maybe also from the specific to the general, from the concrete to the abstract. This way of thinking about the spatial is well known in political science, as for instance in research on multi-level governance. The problem with this thinking is, however, that it implies a one-dimensional continuum in which entities differ only gradually. This in turn reproduces a view on the local as the “smaller” (4) variant of something else, that is, a “microcosm”-idea that Wojciechowska and Hickson actually (and for good reasons) wanted to avoid (2, 4).

Wojciechowska and Hickson seem to be aware of this problem when they stress “the socially constructed nature of spatial scale” (8), and therefore that neither “the local” nor “the global,” or anything “in between,” is objectively given (I will come back to this argument below). Moreover, they acknowledge that “neither of these terms [neither the local nor locality] can be sufficiently defined by their size or their sub-ordinate character to the sovereignty of the nation-state” (4), since they are “entangled” (5) with larger scales. This is why, I suppose, they also speak of the “local dimension” of politics. Despite these assertations, however, the very notion of a local “scale” or “level” is irresolvable linked to an imaginary of hierarchically layered or nested elements, even if one accepts that they come into existence through social processes and constitute complex relationships. It is this conceptual implication that led Engin Isin (2007) to fundamentally criticize scalar thinking, which for him is a specifically modern way of (mis-)understanding the spatial order of politics and society (see also Webb, 2017: 26–31).

When we look at what Wojciechowska and Hickson define as being local, a second issue arises. Wojciechowska and Hickson apply the term “local” to get into view “phenomena or concerns that, generally, appear at the level of cities, villages, neighborhoods, and streets” (4). Additionally, they use the term “locality” to refer to “specific, identifiable places, for example the city of Manchester, the village of Beddgelert in Wales, the Lower Manhattan neighborhood in New York City, or the street La Rambla in Barcelona” (4). Local and locality, then, are umbrella terms that capture, in line with scalar thinking, everything “smaller than, and often administratively nested within, the nation-state or region” (4). “The local” thus functions as a spatial container for quite different entities that are assumed to share a common identity due to the fact that they are “small.” However, if we think, for example, of the differences between a village and a global city, between Beddgelert and New York, it seems questionable whether these two entities are similar only because they are “smaller” than the nation-state or region. We might even question whether a global city is “smaller” at all, given that it also transcends the national territory it is “nested within” (Sassen, 2001).

The intuition that “the local” contains rather different entities also surfaces in the argument of Wojciechowska and Hickson when they state that the research they discuss as instances of an emerging Local Political Theory “reflects the dominance of the urban within contemporary political theory” (6). They conclude from this observation that “theorists ought to give due consideration to the politics of non-urban as well as urban contexts” (6). While there is nothing to be said against also investigating “non-urban contexts,” the existing imbalance in favor of cities might also indicate that there is something specific to the urban political (Barbehön and Haus, 2021; Beveridge and Koch, 2024; Dikeç and Swyngedouw, 2017; Magnusson, 2011). The question then is whether categorizing cities along with other (presumably) “small” entities as local entities brings us conceptually further in capturing these specificities.

A further implication of the container-model is that the idea of the local as that which is small implies that “regional,” “national,” or “global” entities are united by the fact that they are not small. The problem here is that it is hard to think of how, for instance, the global could exist without local manifestations. As the anthropologist Clifford Geertz (1996: 262) has put it bluntly, “no one lives in the world in general.” Think, again, of the global city which is, as indicated by its very name, just as much a constitutive nodal point for the global flow of goods, people, and information as it is a local reality of neighborhoods and streets, and a locality in the sense of an identifiable place. The neologism “glocalization” (Swyngedouw, 2004) attempts to capture exactly that. The same holds true for the “intermediate level” of the nation-state which is also experienced locally, as for instance Bernardo Zacka (2017) has shown in his analysis of how “the state” comes into existence in everyday bureaucratic encounters on the streets. The point of all that is that the notion of the local does not seem able to capture these spatial intricacies, and, above that, it might even stand in the way of developing a more “nuanced and comprehensive theoretical understanding of our complex and multidimensional political world” (2).

Finally, when the research agenda Wojciechowska and Hickson have in mind is defined on the basis of the notion of the local, there is a risk that its analytical distinctiveness becomes blurred. As regards this concern, it is telling that Wojciechowska and Hickson characterize their article as a “methodological” intervention (2, 16). Consequently, they spent most of their attention to sort and discuss the “growing body of literature [on the local], in order to demonstrate three different ways that political theorists can fruitfully engage with the local dimension of politics” (3). As important and insightful as this is, it draws a picture of Local Political Theory that comes quite close to the agenda for “political theory with an ethnographic sensibility” (Longo and Zacka, 2019; Zacka et al., 2021). In this recent debate, (normative) political theorists have been urged to make use of interpretive methodologies and ethnographic methods in order to confront their abstract or general claims with specific phenomena and experiences on the ground. By working ethnographically, political theorists are supposed to produce “accounts of political phenomena that destabilize the lens through which we traditionally study them, engendering novel questions and exposing new avenues of moral concern” (Longo and Zacka, 2019: 1066).

As inspiring as this perspective is, it is not (for understandable reasons) interested in the local per se; it is a methodological debate on how normative theorizing and empirical observations, which are necessarily “local” in one way or another, relate to each other. If there is a need for something like a Local Political Theory, and I think there is, although I would approach it differently, it would have to be different from this already existing methodological debate. Certainly, Wojciechowska and Hickson go beyond it, particularly by discerning three roles the local can play in political theorizing. And yet, the local itself remains “undertheorized,” as Wojciechowska and Hickson also assert (3). Local Political Theory would need to engage in a thorough theorization of the “objects” one encounters when “going local” in order to differentiate itself from the discourse on ethnography in political theory. And for this crucial task, the very notion of the local seems rather hindering.

From the local to spatialization

Up to this point, I have raised doubts whether “the local” really is “a distinct analytical lens” (5) capable to perform the research agenda that Wojciechowska and Hickson have in mind. To be sure, I also think that there is a distinct analytical and normative value of “going local” in political theorizing, and my critical remarks are not supposed to reject this agenda altogether. Rather, I would like to suggest a different theoretical point of departure for this journey, namely the notion of spatialization as it can be derived from spatial theory. This is not simply an alternative project, but deeply committed to what Wojciechowska and Hickson have depicted as the main driving force of Local Political Theory, that is, to recognize political phenomena and logics “below” or “within” the nation-state (although these prepositions are conceptually misleading, as I have argued above) in their own rights, and not simply as miniatures.

Spatialization is to be understood, at its most general level, as a complex of socio-political processes and practices through which spatial structures come into existence. The concept builds on the premise that in the social world, space cannot be reduced to the Newtonian idea of an absolute and objectively existing space, but is to be seen as an emergent and relational reality (Lefebvre, 1991; Löw, 2016). At this general level, the notion of spatialization directly speaks to Wojciechowska's and Hickson's already mentioned premise of “the socially constructed nature of spatial scale” (8) and their view on “the local as a socially constructed focus of analysis” (5), as it stresses the processual and generative character of space and the performativity of spatial ordering.

As regards specific modes of spatialization, we can, in line with research on the spatial configuration of (Western) modernity, discern two overarching logics: statism and urbanism (Held, 2005; Magnusson, 2011). Statism refers to the historical development of the modern nation-state which builds on, and produces, a specific spatial form, namely the territory. As James Scott (1998) has argued in his seminal study, among the central tasks of emerging modern statecraft was to sort and simplify social complexity for the purpose of gaining sovereign control over an essentially incomprehensible area. This task led to a particular way of “seeing” that, in turn, brought into existence a conception of space as a neutral and homogeneous container in which entities are located and events “take place” (as symbolized by the cadastral map, for instance). This “administrative simplification […] of space” (Scott, 1998: 65) contrasts with a medieval form of spatial organization characterized by “the absence of exclusive territorial authority, the existence of multiple crisscrossing jurisdictions, and the embedding of rights in classes of people rather than in territorially exclusive units” (Sassen, 2008: 32). In this sense, the spatial form of the territory does not precede socio-political reality, but emerges from a specifically statist mode of spatialization which, by way of the border, demarcates, unifies, and distinguishes between an inside and an outside.

This conception corresponds with a mundane understanding of space; and yet, “the space of the state,” Warren Magnusson (2011: 4) maintains, “is only one of many.” It contrasts, and historically co-evolved, with the spatial logic of urbanism (Barbehön and Haus, 2021; Held, 2005). As compared to medieval cities that featured town walls and, as a result, constituted territorial units, modern urbanity cannot be adequately grasped based on a territorial imaginary. Modern cities are agglomerations with variable boundaries that fade into each other and the countryside. Certainly, cities are also communal districts, and as such they have an official boundary that defines where one city ends and another city begins. However, for the realities of urban life, this official boundary is not very important, to say the least, and moreover is it an instance of the statist logic of spatial ordering by which sovereignty determines administrative jurisdictions to establish central governing capacities (Scott, 1998: 57). The sociopolitical significance of the difference between statism and urbanism is that while the former tends to homogenize by way of (potentially) exclusive and excluding borders, the latter increases heterogeneity and density by including evermore elements (Wirth, 1938). ² As Ash Amin and Nigel Thrift (2002: 30) have put it, urban spaces “are best thought of not so much as enduring sites but as moments of encounter, not so much as ‘presents’, fixed in space and time, but as variable events.”

A focus on modes of spatialization thus specifies and transcends the notion of the local by highlighting crucial differences among the entities “on the ground.” One may object here that distinguishing between statism and urbanism basically resembles scalar thinking that I have criticized above. But this is not the case for at least three reasons. Firstly, the modes of urbanism and statism do not coincide with small and large. In fact, there are cities that are larger, both in terms of area and population, than small nation-states. Secondly, and more importantly, the “space of circulation” (Foucault, 2007: 13) that started to unfold when medieval cities gave up on their town walls to become “modern” also encompasses elements that transcend national borders and constitute global flows of forces. Urbanism has therefore been described as a “global condition” (Brenner and Schmid, 2014: 747). And conversely, when one is granted or denied access to a certain territory, a statist border becomes a very local reality of here and now. Thirdly, the two logics of spatialization do not match actually existing cities and nation-states. Cities, as “localities” in the sense of Wojciechowska and Hickson (4), are complex configurations of both the urban and the statist logic of spatialization, as exemplified by the already mentioned communal districts. Similarly, nation-states represent and enforce their sovereignty not least through (capital) cities: “the state and its sovereignty,” Isin (2007: 222) has put it in his critique of scalar thought, “are enacted through the city and […] no state, nation or empire can come into being without forming itself through the city via various symbolic and material practices.”

Among those entities that Wojciechowska and Hickson classify as local, the city is, then, granted a distinct status. This is not meant to suggest transforming Local Political Theory into Urban Political Theory, as this would be against the intention of Wojciechowska's and Hickson's contribution (6). However, it is to suggest accounting for the spatial heterogeneity of “local” realities, and to recognize that urbanity is a specific spatial form with specific political implications and a specific need for political theorizing. This is exactly what Iris Marion Young has done, to relate these considerations to a work that Wojciechowska and Hickson also discuss (7). According to Young (1990: 238), a reflection on the “normative ideal of city life” has to begin “with our given experience of cities, and look there for the virtues of this form of social relations.” Among the politically significant urban experiences and virtues are, Young (1990: 238–241) argues, social differentiation, the variety and variability of urban spaces, eroticism in the sense of a desire for the unknown, and publicity through which plurality becomes an ubiquitous experiential reality. These aspects are certainly “local,” but they are also more than that: they emerge from the distinct spatiality of the urban, that is, from a deterritorialized mode of spatialization that increases and densifies heterogeneity (Wirth, 1938) and constantly produces moments of encounter (Amin and Thrift, 2002). This is of course not to say that non-urban settings are “pre-political”; a problematic assumption that Wojciechowska and Hickson convincingly reject (6). And yet, the “dominance of the urban within contemporary political theory” (6) is more than a curiosity, as it reflects that the city is both a central and a specific form of modern spatialization. A Local Political Theory that takes seriously the “distinctiveness” (11) of its objects needs (spatio-)theoretical resources to capture that.

Conclusion

The aim of this commentary was to take up Wojciechowska's and Hickson's stimulating “provocation” and to further reflect on what is needed to “codify” (17) Local Political Theory. My central claim was that, as regards the theoretical basis, the notion of the local is not very helpful in this regard, as it invokes an imaginary of scales, levels, and containers that leads to conceptual ambiguities and inconsistencies. A turn towards the local has to be conducted in conjunction with a thorough theorization of what there is to find when going local. After all, if the “rationale” for Wojciechowska's and Hickson's research agenda “is, in part, empirical” (2), where else could one go than to the local? For further conceptualizing what one encounters when doing so, I have suggested to resort to spatial theory, the concept of spatialization, and the distinction between statism and urbanism as specifically modern modes of spatialization. I understand this conceptual reorientation leading away from the local and towards space and spatialization as an “interdisciplinary” extension of political theory that Wojciechowska and Hickson have explicitly called for (9).

An interdisciplinary move like this may well be unsettling if it results in a problematization of taken-for-granted concepts. This is the case, as Wojciechowska and Hickson maintain, with regard to concepts central to political theory, as these are typically based on “statist and universalistic understandings of politics” (17). And it is also the case, I have suggested in this commentary, as regards “the local” and the idea of a “local dimension” of politics. While this idea is firmly established and forcefully cultivated in local government studies and research on multi-level governance, it is itself an instance of a statist perspective, a mode and result of “seeing like a state” (Magnusson, 2011: 113–116; Scott, 1998) that reduces everything “below” itself to “particular,” “small,” or “subordinate” concerns. While I agree that there is a need for political theory to go local in order to “fully comprehend the complex tapestry of political life” (6), I would add that there is also theoretical work to be done to clarify where this journey actually brings us.