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es on the proliferation of transnational NGOs, social movements and networks concerned with these and other issues, such as the environment, labour conditions, human rights and women (Cohen and Rai 2000). Bridget Anderson, for example, reviews the struggles of the transnational social movement Kalayaan to establish certain rights for undocumented migrants in the UK (Anderson 2001). In contrast, Elisabeth Friedman, focusing on the transnational women’s movement, demonstrates that the actual impact of such movements is strongly mediated by national contexts (Friedman 1999). This tension surrounding the impact of transnational processes on the state remains largely unresolved. It is most obviously contested in the significant literature on so-called ‘transnational migration’. Drawing on the ‘analytical triad’ of Albert et al. (2001), Steven Vertovec, for example, has recently argued that migrant practices ‘assail essential components of national ‘‘identities borders orders’’ by compounding identities, ignoring borders and overruling orders’ (Vertovec 2003: 642). In contrast, Michael P. Smith insists on the ‘continuing significance of borders, state policies and national identities even as these are often transgressed by transnational communication circuits and social practices’ (Smith 2001: 3). Similarly, Aihwa Ong (1999) argues that the nation-state, ‘along with its juridical legislative systems, bureaucratic apparatuses, economic entities, modes of governmentality,
Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies 237 and war-making capacities*continues to define, discipline, control and regulate all kinds of populations, whether in movement or in residence’ (Ong 1999: 15). For many commentators, then, whatever the impact of global economic flows and interstate pacts, states firmly retain the right to maintain jurisdiction over their own territories, and to control immigration and membership (Fitzgerald 2000). A similar lack of consensus exists over the impacts of transnational migration on sending states. For some an outcome has been a reconfiguration of conventional understandings of sovereignty, citizenship and membership (Glick Schiller 1999). Yet for others, far from being somehow threatened by transnational migration, sending states can benefit by creating and sustaining transnational processes.

Refugees and Transnationalism 难民和跨国主义

If ‘transnationalism’ can provide a fresh lens on the relationship between refugees and the state, it is also true that a focus on refugees can provide a fresh insight into the unresolved theoretical debate about the impact of transnationalism on the state. In some ways this is simply because it provides the opportunity to study transnationalism in a new and comparative empirical context. But, as emphasised in the previous sections, the special relevance of asylum-seekers and refugees is that this is one domain where states have been absolutely determined to reassert complete control. If there are signs that transnational processes are undermining or challenging these efforts, and changing the balance of power between refugees and the state, then there really might be said to be support for the assertion that states may be ‘under threat’ from transnationalism. Why, in that case, have studies of transnationalism *and even of transnational migration*largely ignored asylum-seekers and refugees? A number of reasons can be suggested. One is that the vast majority