The twinning of the Global East: Notes from South Korea-Vietnam sister cities

For nearly a century, the practice of city twinning has expanded across every inhabited continent, yet it remains largely undertheorized in geography and urban studies. Questions surrounding its global proliferation and implications become more urgent as twinning expands into new geographies, such as within Asia. This study seeks to advance understanding of city diplomacy by offering insights from emerging intra-Asian twinning. Drawing on qualitative research on two sister city pairs between South Korea and Vietnam, this article traces the politics of sister city establishment and the urban spaces that are configured and reconfigured through these partnerships. Here, sister city placemaking includes the remaking of memorial places, the making of welfare places, and the (un)making of commercial places. This examination of sister city placemaking demonstrates how intra-Asian twinning is embedded within intraregional interconnections shaped by historical ties, contemporary flows of investment and human mobility, and domestic and transnational geoeconomics and politics. This study introduces a radiant interurban constellation of the “Global East,” in which cities are continuously intertwined and oriented toward one another. Through this, it offers a reimagined perspective on the global urban knowledgescape, including emerging sub-imperial concerns in non-Western contexts.