By now, discussions about transnationalism have been on the social sciences’ research agenda for almost two decades. In their path-breaking work Nations Unbound: Transnational Projects, Postcolonial Predicaments and De-territorialized Nation States Linda Basch, Nina Glick Schiller and Cristina Szanton Blanc (1994) have challenged the long-time belief that migration is a linear project of emigration from a particular country to in-migration into another one, in which membership to one nation is superseded by belonging and acculturation to a new one. In their intervention the authors have criticized this view as short sighted and in denial of a range of processes that occur in the interstices between emigration and immigration, of the cultural, economic and material movements, exchange practices and mutual interferences that challenge the traditional conception of a nationstate as container. Since then new work on transnationalism has been published at frequent intervals. The term ‘methodological nationalism’, first introduced by Andreas Wimmer and Nina Glick Schiller (2002), underlined the critique of social sciences’ use of the nation state as a primary and often implicit, unexplained frame of reference and launched the concept of transnationalism as a new way of theorizing processes of mutual permeation, changing perceptions of space, territory, states, goods and notions of belonging and citizenship. Over the last 20 years, the question whether transnationalism is just a fashionable proxy for globalization or internationalization, camouflaging the ongoing power relations between social groupings and struggles within or between nation-states or whether it is a new phenomenon of the 21st century which derives its significance from the rise of mobility and migration movements and accessibility of new forms of networks and technologies has been the subject of heated discussions (e.g. Faist, 1998; Vertovec, 2009). While the dispute about the significance of transnationalism to understand changes of social life on a global scale is in full swing, gender studies scholars have been using the term widely, both as a theoretical and analytical tool (e.g. Mahler and Pessar, 2006; Pessar and Mahler, 2003; Salih, 2003). From a European perspective, the notion of transnationalism requires attention to both national contexts within Europe, as well as the countries of emigration, and the level of European governance which affects the constitution of gender relations in legal practice, in social movements, as well as through migration regimes which are regulated by both European and national aspects. The articles in this special issue show that the transnational is a category of analysis which is relevant for the understanding of gendered processes in various sites and on various levels. This reaches from supra-national and national as well as civic and educational institutions, to social movements, and to the level of family relationships and 461466 EJW19410.1177/1350506812461466European Journal of Women’s StudiesEditorial 2012