Transnational Method and the State

Transnational method emerges in part from a desire to critique the nation form as a frame for historical scholarship.  Historical phenomena do not unfold neatly within national territories, proponents of this method argue; they overflow or disregard national borders, aligning themselves regionally, or in spatial pockets, archipelagos of shared conditions.  The critique of nation as frame emerges in a particularly useful way in work interested in the state.  States are less amorphous than nations; they take material form, while nations lie closer to the realm of imagination (though states are not entirely removed from that land either, as critics such as political sociologist David Abrams have pointed out).  So a focus on the state can avoid the reification of nation, and if it is also alert to transnational flows of people and ideas, can be an agile approach.  This paper considers the potential of state-focused transnational method, considering the contours of U.S. policing during the Cold War.  Policing, not only the quintessential state activity but in some views the functional expression of the very state itself, overflowed all of the boundaries supposed to contain it, including the boundaries of the continental United States.  Isolating the methodological piece of a larger project, a book on Cold War policing, this paper considers the advantages and challenges of a state-focused transnational method.