The Role Of City Actors In Security Governance Of "One Belt One Road"

The initiative of "One Belt One Road" (OBOR) has become China’s grand strategy that intended to promote prosperity and development among all the involved states. However, it is not easy to implement OBOR initiative due to variety challenges, among which security issues puzzled all the states. Security issues are complex within OBOR initiative, including both traditional and non-traditional security threats. Moreover, such security challenges cannot be tackled by a single state, because most of these threats transcend territorial boundaries, affecting all the involved states. Thus it is important for states and other actors to cooperate to tackle security issues.Due to the characteristics of security issue along the OBOR, security governance may offer a better way to understand and deal with issues within OBOR. Among the actors, cities are given great importance here for they are regarded as the most important and active actors in OBOR, therefore they should take more responsibilities in security governance.Participating in OBOR security governance is a process of international cooperation for involved cities. From this perspective, cities need to improve their ability in security governance from both mechanism construction and idea building. In terms of mechanism, cities could improve through following aspects, including cooperation platform, permanent organizations, agenda arrangements, regional balance, cooperation with other actors, funding sources and flow of information. While from idea level, states should have a better understanding of city-state relations and improve understanding among involved cities. In addition, Chinese cities need to have a clear understanding of their leading roles in OBOR security governance and provide more public goods and thus improve China’s international images.