This special issue of the International Mipation Review on transnational migration represents both a victory and a challenge. For those who have advocated for the recognition of transnational migration, this publication is a victory in that it attests to the importance and growing acceptance of a transnational perspective among migration scholars. It is also a challenge because many of the criticisms raised initially by detractors have been quite valid. Making sense of transnational practices and placing them in proper perspective still requires much conceptual, methodological and empirical work.The recognition that some migrants maintain strong, enduring ties to their homelands even as they are incorporated into countries of resettlement calls into question conventional assumptions about the direction and impacts of international migration. At the same time, the significance of such "transmigrants" for migration studies is strongly debated. Some critics doubt that transnational practices are widespread or very influential. Others contend that migrants' transnational practices are not new and that, as in the past, they will diminish over time among migrants and be of little significance for their children. Still others charge that the findings from the primarily casestudy-based research on transnational migration are often exaggerated or skewed. Resolving these debates is made even more difficult because what is meant by "transnationalism" and what should and should not be included under its rubric are not always clear. The contributors to this volume each address these challenges in a variety of ways.The articles presented here grew out of two encounters between European and U.S. scholars that were held at Oxford and Princeton Universities in 2000 and 2001, respectively. These meetings were sponsored by the International Migration Program of the Social Science Research Council, the

The articles included in this issue were originally presented at a conference on Conceptual and Methodological Developments in the Study of International Migration held at Princeton University in May 2003. The conference was jointly sponsored by the Committee on International Migration of the Social Science Research Council (SSRC), the Center for Migration and Development (CMD) at Princeton, and this journal. Its purpose was to review recent innovations in this field, both in theory and empirical research, across both sides of the Atlantic. The conference was deliberately organized as a sequel to a similar event convened by the SSRC on Sanibel Island in January 1996 in order to assess the state of international migration studies within the United States from an inter‐disciplinary perspective. A selection of articles from that conference was published as a special issue of International Migration Review (Vol. 31, No. 4, Winter), and the full set of articles was published as the Handbook of International Migration: The American Experience (Hirschman, Kasinitz and DeWind, 1999).

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This introduction describes the evolution of the conceptual framework that guided the research and analysis of findings from an international research project bringing a multi‐sited and transnational perspective to the study of the religious lives of migrant minorities. The project began by identifying potential contributions that studies of religion, migration and diversity offered one another. To research these issues, the project members investigated the lives of migrants who identify themselves as Christians, Muslims, Hindus and Buddhists, who live as minorities within three urban contexts, and whose different national regimes for governing migrant and religious diversity have been shaped historically by the British Empire (London, Johannesburg, Kajang‐Kuala Lumpur). The researchers employed a biographic method of investigation in order to examine how migrants organized their religious lives within individual, familial, communal, urban, national and transnational spheres. To understand the intertwining between migratory and religious aspects of the migrants' lives on each of these levels, the project members focused their analysis of the research findings in relation to three themes: migratory and spiritual journeys, sacred and secular place‐making, and the circulation of people, objects, practices, and faiths. The introduction highlights how each of the articles in this collection both reflect and contribute to this intellectual framing in order to understand the interplay between religion, migration, and diversity.