Abstract
Contemporary state and extra-state coercive practices dedicated to both the encampment and ghettoization of the Roma, as well as their eviction and displacement, are inextricable from long-standing processes of Roma racial subordination. Inasmuch as many Roma people have been juridically re-inscribed over recent years as ostensible EU-ropean citizens, however, the securitization of their mobility within and across the space of EU-rope supplies a premier instance of their precisely abject relation to EU-ropean citizenship. The abjection of the mobility of the Roma thus contributes to a more wide-ranging process of ‘neo-nomadization’. Simultaneously ‘citizens’, ‘migrants’, and ‘refugees’, Roma people emerge repeatedly as a kind of limit figure, and their mobilities therefore provide a particularly revealing site for the interrogation of the re-bordering of ‘Europe’ as such.
Acknowledgments: I am grateful to Can Yıldız for her perseverance in familiarizing me with many of the defining disputes and key debates in scholarship concerning Roma communities, as well as to Huub van Baar for his gracious invitation to participate in this project and his careful and incisive engagement with earlier iterations of this text.
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Notes
- 1.
A note on terminology: I have opted here to use the term ‘Roma’ as both a noun (as is customary) and as an adjective, and I am thus deliberately choosing not to resort to the term ‘Romani’ as an adjective. This usage admittedly reflects the increasingly established normativity and ubiquity of the label ‘Roma’—as a generic name for the heterogeneous (multi-lingual, pluri-national, and culturally diverse) minoritized communities which variously call themselves Rom, Roma, Vlach Roma, Romany, Sinti, Ashkali, Bayash, Kalé, ‘Egyptian’, Gypsies, and so on—which has itself arguably been an effect of the larger processes of EU institutionalization (cf. Guild and Carrera 2013; Sigona and Trehan 2009; Simhandl 2006; van Baar 2011a). Consequently, my use of the phrase ‘Roma people’ entails what may seem to some readers to be an awkward redundancy. Nonetheless, inasmuch as the term ‘Roma’ has already acquired a thoroughly racialized salience, my usage intends to simultaneously acknowledge the saturation of the term with racial significance—without euphemizing it or retreating from it—while also seeking to emphatically re-humanize the people so described.
- 2.
Elaborating the concept of ‘frontier zones’, Leanne Weber and Sharon Pickering (2011) have discerned analogous processes underway in the contemporary global regime dedicated to the ‘management’ of refugee and migrant mobilities, whereby states (such as Australia in their research) willfully produce a gap between international law and national sovereignty, as a result of which human mobility may be subjected to repressive violence and coercion but is deprived of any legal protection (see also Heller and Pezzani 2017 and, more generally, Agier 2011).
- 3.
Furthermore, the more vexed the predicament of such ‘undesirables’ and the states which did not desire them became, the more the internment camp emerged as ‘the routine solution for the problem of domicile of the “displaced persons’” (Arendt 1968: 279); ‘the only practical substitute for a nonexistent homeland… the only “country” the world had to offer’ them (284).
- 4.
It seems indisputable that this transformation of deportation from the exception to a presumptive norm, across the intervening decades with which Arendt was concerned, owes a great deal to the general degradation of the global status of ‘aliens’ in light of the mass deportations and forced population movements of the era she describes (see De Genova 2013; De Genova and Peutz 2010; Fekete 2005; Hing 2006; Kanstroom 2007, 2012).
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De Genova, N. (2019). The Securitization of Roma Mobilities and the Re-bordering of Europe. In: van Baar, H., Ivasiuc, A., Kreide, R. (eds) The Securitization of the Roma in Europe. Human Rights Interventions. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-77035-2_2
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