PUBLICATIONS: Books
 The Transnational Studies Reader: Intersections and Innovations, edited by Peggy Levitt and Sanjeev Khagram, Routledge, 2007. In recent years, 'transnationalism' has become a key analytical concept across the social sciences. While theoretical approaches to the study of global social phenomena have traditionally focused on the nation-state as the central defining framework, transnational studies views social experience as a complex and dynamic product of multiple regional, ethnic, and institutional identities. Far from being static or bounded by national borders, social, political, and economic forces operate on supra-national, trans-regional, and trans-local scales and scopes. Transnational studies compares and contrasts these dynamics to rethink assumptions about identity, sovereignty, and citizenship. Assembling writings from some of the most important theorists in history, politics, economics, sociology, anthropology, and cultural studies, The Transnational Studies Reader explores the ways that transnational practices and processes in different domains, and at different levels of social interaction, relate to, and inform each other. It also compares the spatial organization of social life during different historical periods.
Coherent in its vision and expansive in its disciplinary, geographic, and historical coverage, The Transnationalism Reader is a field-defining collection.
 God Needs No Passport: Immigrants and the Changing American Religious Landscape, by Peggy Levitt, The New Press, 2007. Immigration is at the heart of many heated national conversations. Immigrants make up one-quarter of the American public along with their American-born children. They are not only transforming cities like Houston and Atlanta, they are remaking suburban and rural America as well. One side argues that they steal jobs, overuse services, and hold values that are antithetical to the American way. Immigrant supporters counter that they do jobs the native-born don’t want to do, stimulate the economy, and enrich our cultural heritage. My study of four immigrant communities in the U.S. and their home communities in Pakistan, Ireland, Brazil, and India revealed several very fundamental ways in which these debates are out-of-sync with our national reality. They do not reflect dramatic shifts in the social landscape that are transforming the nation. They also fail to fully grasp the strong connection between changes in immigration and changes in religious life. When we talk about how religion influences American culture and politics, we still really mean Protestantism. When we think about what religion is, where we look for it, and how it works we tend to think in national terms. Today’s immigrants, however, are remaking the religious landscape by introducing new faith traditions and Asianizing and Latinoizing old ones. By doing so, they make American religion just as global as our economy and politics and fundamentally transform what it means to be American.
 Following the Migrants: Religious Pluralism in Transnational Perspectives. Peggy Levitt, Wellesley College and Harvard University. Forthcoming in Religion in Modern Lives, edited by Nancy Ammerman, Oxford University Press, 2006. Scholars studying migration have increasingly noted the connections immigrants maintain across national boundaries, but they have often missed the role of religious organizations and practices. Religion scholars have noted the pervasiveness of pluralism, brought in part by these immigrants, but have often missed the influences of those same transnational ties on religious practice within our own borders. Understanding the lives of immigrants, no less than understanding the nature of U.S. culture, requires attention to these transnational religious stories and practices, as well as the networks and institutions that carry them.
 The Boundaries of the Republic: Migrant Rights and the Limits of Universalism
in France, 1918-1940, by Mary D. Lewis, Mary D. Palo Alto, CA: Stanford
University Press, 2007.
After the devastation of the First World War, France welcomed immigrants on an
unprecedented scale. To manage these new residents, the French government
devised Europe's first guestworker program, then encouraged family settlements
and finally cracked down on all foreigners on the eve of the Second World War.
Despite France's famous doctrine of universal rights, these policies were
egalitarian only in theory, not in reality. Mary Dewhurst Lewis uncovers the
French Republic's hidden history of inequality as she reconstructs the life
stories of immigrants—from their extraordinary successes to their sometimes
heartbreaking failures as they attempted to secure basic rights. Situating
migrants' lives within dramatic reversals in the economy, politics, and
international affairs, Lewis shows how factors large and small combined to shape
immigrant rights. At once an arresting account of European social and political
unrest in the 1920s and 1930s and an exposé of the origins of France's enduring
conflicts over immigration, The Boundaries of the Republic is an important
reflection on both the power and the fragility of rights in democratic
societies.
 Transnational Civil Society: An Introduction, co-edited by Srilatha Batliwala and Dave Brown, Kumarian Press, 2006. The book is a much-needed primer for entry-level graduate and post-graduate students taking courses on civil society and learning about the transnational and global realm of civil society networks, coalitions, and movements. The book comprises twelve chapters, focusing on the areas of globalization, transnational civil society, globalism and transnational phenomena, and the environment, human rights, women's rights, peace, labor, and economic justice movements. The book was generously supported by the Ford Foundation.
 “I Feel I Am a Citizen of the World and of a Church without Borders:” The Latino Religious Experience. Peggy Levitt, Wellesley College and Harvard University. In eds. Rudolfo de la Garza, Louis De Sipio, and Harry Pachon, Becoming Latinos, Latinos Becoming. New York: Simon and Schuster, 2005. Religion introduces a different set of questions about Latinos and American life than those raised by economics or politics. Answering such questions requires different types of data. Religion provides followers with symbols, rituals, and narratives with which to create alternative landscapes that fit within, transcend, or supercede national boundaries. These can facilitate host-country assimilation, encourage enduring homeland ties, or render such orientations meaningless because what matters most to the individual is that they belong to a religious space. Furthermore, since so many aspects of Latino religious life take place in informal private settings, using data which only capture the institutional aspects of religious experience creates a portrait that is incomplete. As a result, religion expands the boundaries of questions about assimilation, and in some cases, makes them superfluous. It is not enough to ask about religion’s role in incorporating newcomers and their offspring into America. Rather, we must ask how individuals use religion to become part of the United States, to stay connected to their countries of origin, or to imagine themselves as part of other kinds of spatial and temporal geographies and groups that overlap with or take precedence over political collectivities. The relationship between religion and social mobility is neither simple nor straightforward. Indeed, I will argue that religion is both empowering and constraining, a space of creativity and agency as well as conformity and marginalization. It allows individuals to extricate themselves from some communities, reinsert themselves in others, or to imagine alternative social groups, all the while redistributing access and power in ways that are both liberating and constraining and lead to conflict and cohesion.
 Dams and Development: Transnational Struggles for Water and Power, by Sanjeev Khagram. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press and Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2004. In this book, Khagram presents a study of how what constitutes appropriate development has changed over time through the shifting transnational dynamics of big dam construction. In part, it is a richly detailed ethnographic account of the struggles of transnational coalitions led by nongovernmental groups around the Narmada River Valley Dam Projects, a huge complex of thirty large and more than three thousand small dams. It also offers a comparative historical analysis of the political economy of big dam projects in India, Brazil, South Africa, and China as well as the changing behavior of international agencies and global companies. It includes a discussion of the World Commission on Dams, an innovative attempt in the late 1990s to generate new norms among conflicting stakeholders.
 The Strangeness of Foreigners: Policing Migration and Nation in Interwar Marseille, by Mary Lewis. In Race in France, eds. Herrick Chapman and Laura Frader (New York and London: Berghahn Books, 2004) This article explores the relationship between foreigners’ social and legal status by considering the case of Marseille during the interwar years. The author uses expulsion files to elucidate this relationship and its changing dynamics. Social factors worked to mark immigrants as desirable and undesirable and thus affected the rights that they legally could claim; yet the contours of this relationship changed over time as the policing of immigrants increasingly became a national security priority. During the 1920s and early 1930s, police discriminated between transient—and perhaps racialized—port-area residents and the more settled denizens of Marseille’s outer districts, then used this distinction to adjudicate expulsion cases. Over the course of the 1930s, police objectives shifted from achieving local stability to defending national security. As this occurred, police attacked foreigners more broadly and indiscriminately.
Regional Integration and Free Trade in the Americas: The Labour Challenge in NAFTA, by Tamara Kay. International Labour Organization, 2003. During the last twenty years, the processes of regional economic integration have intensified worldwide. In North America particularly with the passage of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) in 1994 the process of integration presents new challenges for social partners and their organizations as capital mobility and competition increase. But the promulgation of labor standards and new venues for invoking labor protections suggests that these processes also provide new opportunities for workers and employers, and their organizations. This study seeks to contribute to the implementation of the Ottawa Plan of Action by providing an in-depth analysis of the labor commitments made in the context of NAFTA and the ILO Declaration. Specifically it examines to what extent processes of regional economic integration, as embodied in NAFTA, further or constrain the implementation of the ILO Declaration of Fundamental Principles and Rights at Work in North America.
 The Changing Face of Home: The Transnational Lives of the Second Generation, co-edited by Peggy Levitt and Mary Waters. New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 2002. The children of immigrants account for the fastest growing segment of the U.S. population under eighteen years of age – one out of every five children in the United States. Will this generation of immigrant children follow the path of earlier waves of immigrants and gradually assimilate into mainstream American life, or does the global nature of the contemporary world mean that the trajectory of today’s immigrants will be fundamentally different? What does the fact that so many migrants remain active in their homelands mean for the future of their children. The Changing Face at Home takes a first step toward understanding the relationship between second generation mobility and transnational migration.
 Restructuring World Politics: Transnational Social Movements, Networks and Norms, co-edited by Sanjeev Khagram, James V. Riker, and Kathryn Sikkink. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002. From the earliest campaign against Augusto Pinochet's repressive practices to the recent massive demonstrations against the World Trade Organization, transnational collective action involving nongovernmental organizations has been restructuring politics and changing the world. Ranging from Santiago to Seattle and covering more than twenty-five years of transnational advocacy, the essays in Restructuring World Politics offer a clear, richly nuanced picture of this process and its far-reaching implications in an increasingly globalized political economy. The book brings together scholars, activists, and policy makers to show how such advocacy addresses-and reshapes-key issues in the areas of labor, human rights, gender justice, democratization, and sustainable development throughout the world.
Practice Research Engagement and Civil Society in a Globalizing World, edited by Dave Brown. Hauser Center for Nonprofit Organizations and CIVICUS: World Alliance for Citizen Participation, 2001. This book grew out of a series of engagements between action-oriented researchers and reflective practitioners concerned with the growing roles of civil society organizations in a rapidly-changing and every-shrinking world. It provides overviews of the current “state of the art” on several topics of interests to researchers and practitioners who seek to solve social problems, promote sustainable development, protect human rights and support economic justice. This book explores the importance of practice-research engagement for civil society organizations--particularly for civil society actors in transnational problem-solving and governance--and provides an overview of the concept of practice-research engagement, including some initial ideas about how to carry it out effectively. In addition, it offers the initial fruits of some practice research engagement on two issues: perspectives and strategies about the rise of TCS (Transnational Civil Society), and building legitimacy for civil society advocacy. Finally, it explores some of the next steps relevant to practice-research engagement in the service of strengthening transnational civil society in the future. [Download pdf file - 1.9 MB]
 The Transnational Villagers, by Peggy Levitt. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2001. The Transnational Villagers explores the powerful social, religious, and political connections produced by migration between two locations--Miraflores, a town in the Dominican Republic, and Jamaica Plain, a neighborhood in Boston-- and the transformation of both places that results. The book argues that increasing numbers of individuals will live their lives in multiple social and cultural contexts and identify with several communities at the same time, challenging basic assumptions about how things like politics, gender dynamics, and community development actually work. In fact, in this era of increasing globalization, living transnationally may become the rule rather than the exception.
 The Struggle for Accountability: The World Bank, NGOs, and Grassroots Movements, co-edited by Dave Brown and Jonathan Fox. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1998. After a history of funding environmentally costly megaprojects, the World Bank now claims that it is trying to become a leading force for sustainable development. For more than a decade, nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) and grassroots movements have formed transnational coalitions to reform the World Bank and the governments that it funds. The Struggle for Accountability assesses the efforts of these groups to make the World Bank more publicly accountable. Part I describes the NGOs and grassroots movements that are the book's central focus. Part II presents case studies of four projects that provoked the emergence of transnational advocacy coalitions: Indonesia's Kedung Ombo dam, the Mt. Apo geothermal plant in the Philippines, Brazil's Planaforo Amazon development project, and the remarkable campaign of Ecuador's indigenous people to influence national economic policy that led to their participation in the design of a development loan. Part III looks at the origins and politics of reform in four areas of broader World Bank policy: the rights of indigenous peoples, involuntary resettlement, water resources, and the World Bank's institutional reforms that are supposed to encourage public accountability. In the last section, the editors discuss issues of accountability within transnational coalitions and assess the impact of advocacy campaigns on World Bank projects and policies.
PUBLICATIONS: Articles/Papers
FORTHCOMING
Towards A Field of Transnational Studies and a Sociological Transnationalism Research Program, Sanjeev Khagram and Peggy Levitt , October 2005. Transnational phenomena and dynamics are the focus of a blossoming yet fragmented body of scholarship across virtually all sub-fields of sociology and closely related social science disciplines. In this paper, we identify five intellectual foundations for a field of Transnational Studies (TS) that offer a heuristically rich and compelling set of empirical, methodological, theoretical, philosophical, and practical ideas and options. We further propose a specific Sociological Transnationalism (ST) research program that organizes these intellectual foundations in a unique and generative way. We argue that this ST research program, and the TS field more broadly, will continue to innovatively shed new light on a range of core sociological and social scientific concerns including power, inequality, culture, identity, movements, citizenship, institutions and organizations among others. [Download pdf file - 536K]
Haven't We Heard This Somewhere Before?: A Reply to Waldinger and Fitzgerald, Peggy Levitt and Nina Glick Schiller. In their article entitled "Transnationalism in Question", Roger Waldinger and David Fitzgerald endorse transnational migration studies. However,ignoring fifteen years of scholarship, they offer a narrow understanding of "transnationalism" that privileges the interaction between immigrants and nation-states. We argue that their scholarship reflects their continuing identification with the outlook of the "host society." This form of methodological nationalism precludes the project of reformulating a concept of society, a central aspect of transnational migration studies. In contrast, we recognize the continuing role of nation-states in cross-border processes but look to the many different ways that migrants organize social relations across borders. [Download pdf file - 388K]
Possible Future Architectures of Global Governance: A Transnational Perspective/Prospective, Sanjeev Khagram, December 2004. [Download pdf file - 116K]
The Contested Transnational Field of Corporate Citizenship, Sanjeev Khagram and Suzanne Shanahan, April 2004. [Download pdf file - 52K]
Ethnic Identities, Territorial Boundaries, Citizenship and Regime Change, Sanjeev Khagram. [Download pdf file - 60K]
Beyond Temples and Tombs: Towards Effective Governance for Sustainable Development Through The World Commission on Dams. Sanjeev Khagram.
PUBLISHED
Transnational Perspectives on Migration: Conceptualizing Simultaneity
Peggy Levitt (Wellesley College and Harvard University) and Nina
Glick Schiller
(University of new Hampshire and Max Planck Institute of Social Anthropology)
Published in International Migration Review, 2004. This paper explores the social theory and consequent methodology that underpins
studies of transnational migration. First, we propose a social field approach
to the study of migration, and distinguish between ways of being and ways of
belonging in that field. Second, we argue that assimilation and enduring transnational
ties are neither incompatible nor binary opposites. Third, we highlight social
processes and institutions that are routinely obscured by traditional migration
scholarship but become opened up to analytical scrutiny by using a transnational
lens. Finally, we locate our approach to migration research within a larger
intellectual project, undertaken by scholars of transnational processes
in many fields, to
rethink and reformulate the concept of society such that it is no longer automatically
equated with the boundaries of a single nation-state.
Constructing Transnational Studies, Sanjeev Khagram
(Harvard University - John F. Kennedy School of Government) and Peggy Levitt (Wellesley
College and Harvard University), Hauser Center
Working Paper Series, April 2004. Each day, our newspapers are filled with examples of the
ways in which aspects of contemporary social, economic, and political
life transcends national borders. The identities, institutions,
and values that emerge in response to these dynamics are not well understood.
Although they are the subjects of an increasing body of scholarship,
more often than not, this research treats transnational economic,
political, and social processes as if they were unconnected to
each
other. It is
no longer enough, if it ever was, to analyze and compare experiences
only within or across presumably bounded social groups. To grasp
the complexities of social experience, the empirical connections
and interactions
between different types of transnational dynamics and with non-transnational
phenomena must be made across time and space. In this paper, we
lay out the seven intellectual foundations for a new field of Transnational
Studies. The field offers a set of empirical, theoretical, methodological,
philosophical, and normative shifts and options for rethinking
fundamental
assumptions about scholarship and about social processes such as
power, identity, citizenship, and governance. [Download pdf file - 88K]
Building Bridges: What Migration Scholarship and Cultural Sociology Have to Say to Each Other. Peggy Levitt, Wellesley College and Harvard University. Poetics. Special Volume edited by Lyn Spillman and Marc Jacobs, 33(2005):49-62. This article illustrates how more intensive exchanges between migration
scholars and cultural sociologists yields greater analytical purchase in
both fields. Cultural sociology asks migration scholars to take culture
seriously and to pay more explicit attention to the dynamics of
meaning-making and boundary construction. It asks them to look not only
at the process of adaptation from one culture to another but at what is
inside that cultural „black box‰ and how it changes over time. On the
other hand, transnational migration studies complicate cultural sociology
by encouraging researchers to move beyond the expectation that the nation
is the natural container for social life. Instead, transnational
migration scholarship foregrounds how boundary creation and meaning-making
involves multiple cultural repertoires that transcend national contexts
and are available at multiple levels. Transnational migrants combine
local, regional, and national cultural elements from both their sending
and receiving countries and they do so within the context of global
cultural norms and institutions.
Global Migration Perspectives: The Transnational Turn in Migration Studies. Peggy Levitt and Ninna Nyberg Sorenson. Global Migration Perspectives, No. 6. Global Commission on International Migration, October 2004. This article is concerned with the policy implications of transnationalism or how migrants’ transnational practices can be utilized to further development. The first section outlines a conceptual approach to transnational migration. The section that follows describes selective policy responses designed to harness the benefits of transnational migration. Current policy regimes and standard policy repertoires, however, do not take the migration-development nexus sufficiently into account. The concluding section, therefore, raises questions for policymakers to consider in the future. [Download pdf - 480K]
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