Post-modern migration studies are expressed in the transnationalism project. This provides a point of entry for rethinking our understanding of globalization. This is important for at least three reasons. The first is simply that there is an urgent need to counterbalance a radical-left tradition that has stressed the migration experience as largely one of victim-hood. The second is the need to question the re-emphasis of this tendency as it has appeared in one of two ways: One emphasis considers the new pattern of migration as weakening people's association with a particular nation-state, sometimes encapsulated in the notion of cultural de-territorialization, which serves to diminish the authority of the state and thus compound the eroding effects of globalization. A contrasting radical perspective has drawn attention to the increasingly draconian restrictions on the movement of people as one of the few ways in which the modern state, and especially states in the advanced industrial economies, are able to exercise authority in the face of the pressures presented by globalization. Finally, and counterposed to radical-left formulations, some critics have argued that the transnationalism research project, by capturing the diversity of the migrant experiences, provides a more meaningful alternative to the grand narrative. Indeed, the post-modernist transnational research project posits that human agency can only be introduced by jettisoning a radical-left perspective which emasculates any sense of the import of the political will and agency of the subject.

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national identity migration globalization