activities formulated by governments and IGOs. Since the requirements of these contracts have often been rigid and demanding, smaller and less influential CSOs can frequently not easily meet these terms. Consequently, the more professionalized CSOs have often been the only ones that have had a serious chance to make such contracts with governments and IGOs. The latter two actors have also been in a more powerful position to manage the boundaries between the sectors in the three-sector model. Under these circumstances, the difficulty of continuing CSO work has particularly affected smaller, less “professional,” less mainstream, and more “ideological” CSOs. As a result, this development has also led to less diversity among the CSOs that have succeeded continuing their activities in the field of Roma-related activism, service delivery, and development or community work.
On the other hand, the governmentalization of civil society has required CSOs to become more active and more inventive in advocacy work and lobbying in relation to what they consider as their key objectives. Particularly the stronger CSOs, such as those that are unified in the transnational activist network of the European Roma Policy Coalition, have mobilized the growing links with IGOs—and also with governments—to become more active in seeking to generate more attention to what they consider as crucial to making a change at international, domestic, and local levels, in relation to issues such as empowerment, participation, litigation regarding human and minority rights, the combating of antigypsyism and Romaphobia, gender, participatory action research, and “community” or “grassroots” development.
The tensions between CSOs on the one hand and IGOs and governments on the other, as well as the ambiguous impact of the governmentalization of civil society on CSOs, have become more visible and more explicit since the ethnic turn in EU policies regarding the Roma. To a large extent, the launch of the EU Roma Framework can be considered the outcome of years of lobbying and the perpetual call of some, particularly international, CSOs for the development of more effective, more specific, and less generic policy instruments to improve the situation of the Roma throughout Europe, and to make EU countries more directly and more effectively responsible for this improvement and the combating of all kinds of phenomena that have hitherto impeded this process.
Yet, one of the conclusions that has been drawn (European Roma Policy Coalition 2012; European Roma Rights Centre 2013), is that, in the majority of EU countries, CSOs have been excluded from the development, implementation, and official evaluation of the National Roma Integration Strategies (NRIS), even while the active inclusion of Roma and civil society actors in these processes has been one of the Framework’s requirements.3 Even in those cases in which Roma and civil society actors were consulted, their consultations have had almost no effect on the content of the NRIS documents and their policy articulation and implementation (if the latter has taken place at all). Equally importantly, topics that CSOs consider crucial to making a significant change—such as Roma participation in the development, implementation, and monitoring of policies, the combating of antigypsyism, gender equality, empowerment, a human rights-based approach, adequate budget allocation, and the adoption of effective accountability, coordination, and monitoring tools—are missing or inadequately incorporated in the NRIS (European Roma Policy Coalition 2012). Moreover, the strong focus on domestic affairs regarding education, health care, housing, and employment—which is already part of the EU Roma Framework itself—has led to a neglect of the transnational dimension of migration or to addressing migration one-sidedly with regard to particular priority areas, such as social security, public order, and crime (van Baar 2014a; 2014b; van Baar, Ivasiuc, and Kreide 2019). Last but not least, the development of the NRIS has revealed more explicitly the ambiguity of how state actors involved in Roma policy-making have defined and demarcated the identity category “Roma,” seemingly to dovetail the desired policies and their target groups (Matras 2013; van Baar 2014b). Thus, as a result of the ambiguous ways in which the EU Roma Framework has been incorporated in the present-day Roma-related political and policy landscapes, we are facing a period in which Roma-related CSOs have increasingly less to say about how Roma policies are (to be) envisioned, designed, implemented, and assessed.
Scholarly Assessments of Roma-Related Nongovernmental Engagements
More than a decade ago, the anthropologist Paloma Gay y Blasco (2002: 174) suggested that, based on her fieldwork among Gitanos in Spain, we could distinguish between three main Roma/Gypsy diasporic modalities, each of which would involve “a particular way of conceiving ‘the Gitanos/Gypsies/Roma’ . . . as a community as well as a distinctive pattern of sociopolitical relations.” Her three modalities involve “a non-convert, non-activist and kin-oriented; a convert and communitarian; and an activist and universalizing” modality (Gay y Blasco 2002: 174). She largely bases the delineation of each of these modalities on the portrayal of the latter two. While the activist modality would be “premised on non-Gypsy models of personhood—by which all persons become entitled to the same human rights, effectively working as equally valuable units of humanity,” the convert, communitarian (Pentecostal) modality would fully maintain “the Gitano belief in two kinds of persons, Gitanos and others, who are endowed with incommensurable moral differences and who are therefore differently positioned in the world” (Gay y Blasco 2002: 181).4 At the beginning of Gay y Blasco’s (2002: 173) article, where she introduces and puts into context her three modalities, she states that “even today, when Roma activists are increasingly drawing on the political discourses of the dominant society to call for the full extension of human rights to Gypsies everywhere, there is little grassroots support for [their] appeals.”
Gay y Blasco’s general, and in many respects also generalized portrayal of the diverse ways in which Roma approach the “world” could be considered as characteristic of how several scholars have assessed phenomena of Roma-related activism and nongovernmentalism. Gay y Blasco’s distinction between the three diasporic modalities does not necessarily imply a rejection of one of these modalities. Yet, her uniformized account of activism and its distance from grassroots support clearly hints at a normative critique of what she describes as the “activist and universalizing” modality. This combination of a generalized idea of activism with a normative or even moral, rejectionist critique of some kinds of activist activities and organizations has become a recurrent element in several scholarly analyses of Roma-related engagements with the nongovernmental.
Nidhi Trehan (2001: 138–41: 2009a: 163–75) and Zoltan Barany (2002: 279–81), for instance, have been among the first who warned against the rise of what they call the “Gypsy industry.” This industry would have turned more professionally organized activism into an “ethnobusiness” in which some—primarily pro-Roma and Romani elites as well as human rights and development experts—would make money and careers while they leave the situation of the poor Roma largely unaffected. This “industry” would also cover, or overlap with, several other phenomena, such as the increased managerialism in the Roma-related third sector, the co-option of Romani activists by more professionalized CSOs (“NGOization”), the lack of democratic or grassroots constituencies of CSOs, a growing gap between Romani “elites” and “grassroots,” and the neglect of “local knowledge” (Trehan 2009b: 65). More recently, several scholars have joined Trehan and Barany in their critique of these trends (e.g., Nirenberg 2009; Rostas 2009; Sigona and Trehan 2009; Voiculescu 2013). Additionally, Elena Marushiakova and Veselin Popov (2011) have critiqued what they call “NGO science”—that is, the dissemination and policy implementation of what they consider “biased knowledge” that has been produced within and by some influential NGOs.
Elsewhere, I have argued that the phenomena and mechanisms that these scholars have described and analyzed—and that some of them have attributed to neoliberalism writ large—could be considered as the ambiguous consequences of the governmentalization of civil society (van Baar 2011a: 153–74, 233–47). Yet, if we take seriously the rather radical blurring of state–civil society relations central to this governmentalization, we should also be critical of the implicit or explicit suggestion in the narratives of many of these scholars that we deal with clear and clearly distinguishable oppositions between elites and grassroots, the represented Roma and the Roma’s representatives, top-down
