ABSTRACT
Transnational approaches certainly do not form a coherent theory or set of theories. They can be more adequately described as a perspective, which has found entry into the study of manifold crossborder phenomena. We can delineate several generations of transnational scholarship but focus mostly on those which are relevant for migration research. A first precursor to the use of the concept in migration research, flourishing in the late 1960s and 1970s, asked about the emergence, role, and impact of large-scale, cross-border organizations. This literature, steeped in the field of International Relations, focused its attention on interdependence between states, resulting from the existence and operations of powerful non-state actors, such asmultinational companies (Keohane and Nye 1977). Curiously, the interest in this transnational approach quickly disappeared with the onset of debates on globalization from the late 1970s onwards. Perhaps this demise was related to the fact that globalization studies re-centered the interest to how national political economies were reshaped by ever-growing capital flows across borders. Almost two decades later, transnational ideas took root again in a very specific field-international or cross-border migrationand with a decided focus on the agency of a particular type of agent, migrants. It was in social anthropology and later sociology that this lens took hold. This gaze dealt with dense and continuous ties across the borders of nation-states, which concatenate into social formations. The initial phase ran from the early 1990s until the dawn of the new century. While a
number of scholars contributed to this development, cultural anthropologist Nina Glick Schiller and her colleagues Linda Basch and Christina Szanton Blanc have provided the pioneering impetus (Basch et al. 1994). Based on this foundation, a number of scholars have contributed to a further elaboration of types of transnational practices, and provided typologies of transnational practices and spaces.
