general context of the volume is spanned by the rise of antigypsyism (Stewart 2012); the increase of xenophobic sentiment and far-right ideologies across the Western world; the uncertainties related to the EU project after Brexit and to how this potentially paradigmatic shift will impact insecurities, mobilities, and processes of othering, including of Romani groups; the fallout of the financial crisis related to contemporary forms of predatory capitalism, violently pushing many into growing hardship and spurring competition on increasingly scarce public resources; and the hegemonic expansion of the discourse on “security” as the supreme goal to be pursued. Indeed, since roughly the nineties, Western societies have entered an era marked by the disquieting productivity of “risk” and “security” as enablers of repressive policies and structuring principles of a sociality marked by waning solidarity. This accompanied the demise of the welfare state, progressively replaced by a repressive state keen to defend rather the interests of powerful capital than of its most destitute citizens, increasingly precaritized and criminalized (Lorey 2015). In parallel, neoliberal governmentalities have colonized public discourse on—and state policies for—the poor, pathologizing and stigmatizing them while producing their undeservingness (Haney 2002). In the case of the Roma, this led to forms of “reasonable antigypsyism” (van Baar 2014), coalesced in increasingly frequent episodes of violence such as the ones described above.
Contemporaneous to these worrisome developments are discernible reconfigurations of the Romani movement. In part, such shifts follow the rejuvenation of its membership base, with emerging trends in a bottom-up youth movement with the power to reform its own discourses and practices (see Mirga-Kruszelnicka, this volume). But some of the reconfigurations of the Romani transnational movement espouse powerful top-down advocacy initiatives, which have recently materialized in the creation of a European Roma Institute for Arts and Culture (ERIAC), aimed at promoting a positive (self-)image of Roma by the Roma themselves, in order to tackle what is perceived to be the “root cause” of the exclusion and discrimination of Roma: ignorance, hatred, and mistrust. The establishment of the ERIAC, one of the most debated forms of activism at the moment, has spurred fierce confrontational discussions across activist and scholarly communities, spanning a range of concerns reflected in our volume. On the one hand, on the dimension of activism, the question emerged as to how this sort of identity politics can be reconciled, and possibly articulated, with a politics of redistribution beyond mere cultural(ist) frames (Magazzini 2016: 54). Critics of the initiative have argued that the neoliberal cultural(ist) framing of the root causes of exclusion as “matters of the mind” ignores wider political stakes and the materiality of structural racism resting rather on misdistribution than misrecognition, echoing earlier criticism to the particular forms of identity politics in which the Romani movement is vested (Kovats 2003). The creation of the ERIAC—which remains a contested initiative among Roma actors themselves—signals the institutionalization and solidification of a culturalist European Romani identity politics where Romani elites are given (have taken?) a space to produce forms of cultural “authenticity,” deemed a valid tool for combating socioeconomic and political exclusion. Yet, given the politically and financially powerful support invested in the initiative by the Council of Europe and George Soros’s Open Society Foundation, coinciding with the discontinuation of European funding to the European Roma and Travellers Forum (ERTF), it can be predicted that the establishment of such an institution is likely to foreclose alternative paths for an activism grounded in a politics of redistribution, rather than recognition.
On the other hand, on the dimension of knowledge production, the prominent place of Romani intellectuals in the ERIAC spurred another set of debates. There is a discernible shift in what some scholars call the “Roma Awakening”: the increasing strength of Romani actors’ voices in multiplying debates concerning Roma lives, including on practices within academia itself (Acton and Ryder 2015). Institutionally, this veritable critical turn was marked, in the summer of 2017, by the launch of the Romani Studies Program at Central European University, led by two prominent Romani scholars, and by the establishment of its journal, Critical Romani Studies. The growing numbers of Romani scholars and the way they disrupt, with increasing visibility, the narratives produced by the established core of Romani studies scholars have already started to influence academic debates by eliciting reactions (see, for instance, Stewart 2017). Partly, the current volume speaks to this shift, identifying those dynamics through which Romani academics contribute to renewing scholarship by unsettling not only discourses, but also the power mechanisms and structures underlying them. This move echoes the critique of epistemic privilege and the paramount emphasis on decolonizing anthropology (Harrison 1991), or methodologies of research with subaltern peoples more generally (Tuhiwai-Smith 1999).
The project of the ERIAC has received criticism from scholars pertaining to the EANRS, too, on basis of concerns related to the lack of legitimacy of knowledge produced outside established university and research structures, which derive their legitimacy from quality control protocols defined as scientific. The opponents of these arguments have deemed this position conservative and scientist, critiquing it for being oblivious to issues of power and epistemic privilege. Yet their arguments have often resorted to ethnic essentialism or “epistemological insiderism” (Brubaker 2016): the belief that one’s perceived identity may function as to (dis)qualify the production of knowledge on particular topics from external positions. In the subtext of claims that Roma scholars are uniquely legitimate producers of knowledge on the Roma looms large the contestable idea that non-Roma scholars are less able—and in any case less legitimized—to do so, because of their “outsider” status (see also Stewart 2017). Both views construct and reify borders and the things they separate: the first between various forms and institutions of knowledge production (scientific versus nonscientific), and the second between particular identity formations seen as rigid and essential ethnic units (Roma versus non-Roma). A missing stance in this rather chunky, unsophisticated debate is what Rogers Brubaker (2016: 10) coins “a trans of beyond”: “positioning oneself in a space that is not defined with reference to established categories. Such a move is characterized by the claim to transcend existing categories—or to transcend categorization altogether.” The question of whether, and how, such a “trans” moment is possible in Romani-related scholarship and activism seems a timely one.
If “Romani studies” as a general topic area has been known to vest forms of scientific racism in the Gypsy Lore Society (Acton 2016), more recently, many scholars have taken up an active role in combating, through their knowledge, stereotypes against Romani groups (Tremlett 2009). But the growing interest in “the Roma” from outside Romani studies has subsequently delocalized knowledge production toward research institutions that do not necessarily have an ethnic focus. As a result, there has been an explosion of analyses of various facets of Romani lived experiences. Stewart (2013) renders an account of contemporary tendencies in Roma-related anthropological research, but the ever-increasing corpus of literature stemming from political science, cultural studies, geography, sociology, or international relations has not been structured in a similar account, and would be a near-impossible task to undertake, given the current prolific production of Roma-related research. The last decade in particular has seen the massive expansion of policy-oriented and applied research on the Roma, with major stakeholders such as the World Bank, the European Commission, or the United Nations Development Program commissioning research aimed at understanding the challenges Roma face in different contexts in order to justify various policy responses. Smaller organizations have also profited from the funds thus made available for applied, policy-oriented research. Often, the authors of these reports pendulate between institutions carrying out research—be they purely academic, looser networks of advocacy think-tanks, or smaller but “professionalized” NGOs. Some of them declare themselves activists, while others claim a more neutral stance; but the knowledge they produce is shaped in crucial ways—to our sense not fully explored yet—by their position at the crossroads between academic, activist, and policy trajectories. Importantly, the knowledge thus generated is molded by the ways in which funds are made available for the production of specific types of discourses grounded in particular visions of the Roma as a population in need of intervention (Timmer 2010; Schneeweis 2014; see also Ivasiuc, this volume).
With funds made available for Roma-related research from the policy sector, there has
