need for pragmatism in channeling change through the institutional paths of policy-making, with clear rules defining which types of knowledge are relevant to policy makers and which are likely to be shelved as irrelevant. Greenfields uses quantitative data provided by the EANRS on its membership composition to show the unmistakable underrepresentation of policy as an area of expertise among researchers dealing with Roma issues. Noting the increase—in both demand and supply—of policy reports and advice on Roma-related issues throughout Europe, she suggests that although scholars are involved in significant numbers in providing policy consultancy to various national and transnational bodies, many of them lack the training, experience, and insights into the policy-making machinery that would enhance the chances of their knowledge to be incorporated effectively into successful measures. She suggests that activist scholars should become familiar with policy environments in order to “translate their research into policy outcomes,” and that the constraints of the policy-making process should be taken into account when imparting policy advice. While she acknowledges that pertinent criticism to policy-making has been formulated both within the anthropology of policy literature and by Romani studies scholars, she advocates for a pragmatic, closer association between activist research and policy-making, specifically on the latter’s terms. Greenfields argues that there is a gap between academics and policy makers and contends that scholars can bridge this gap not only by attuning their recommendations to the requirements of policy makers in terms of theoretical models, terminology, and pragmatism, but also by attending to the “packaging” of their knowledge, for instance by refraining from expressing “too great a criticism of the administrative regime’s actions,” and also by using clear tools to showcase their recommendations, such as case studies. Greenfields makes the case for confronting policy makers with the concrete problems encountered by their “end-users,” and provides a telling example of how she involved Gypsy and Traveller activists, as well as homeless activists, in a training she organized with policy makers in the United Kingdom, in which knowledge was coproduced and policy makers were practically confronted with the issues they had to solve through policy. Finally, advocating for “practice-based approaches to critical thinking” in policy advice, Greenfields warns against the dangers of “overthinking” and complexifying beyond measure the knowledge presented to policy makers, arguing that such approaches are likely to stall intervention or reduce it to substandard practice, and that the ethical choice of activist researchers should ultimately lie in opting for what “works” in policy toward the practical improvement of the living circumstances of its “end-users.” For activist researchers to whom this is a paramount, immediate aim, Greenfields thus opens up the terrain of practical research activism through policy advice.
From Europe’s margins, Danielle V. Schoon investigates in the next chapter the case of Turkish Romanlar, whose activism stands in stark opposition to universalizing, European-based forms of identity politics activism. Schoon’s argument thus provincializes European Roma activism, questioning its universalistic assumptions and revealing the different logic at play in the formulation of collective identities and demands of Turkey’s Romanlar, analyzed in its wider historical and political context. The chapter starts from the double observation that, on the one hand, representatives of the Romanlar were absent from the mass protest movement of Gezi Park in May 2013, yet that, on the other hand, their presence was assumed. Using this example, she explicates the theoretical and political challenges that the case of activists for the rights of the Romanlar in Turkey pose to European scholars and activists. To understand the dynamics of Roman activism in contemporary Turkey, Schoon embeds her analysis in the historical genealogy of the republican conception of difference and citizenship, in which commonness based on shared Islam overrode ethnic, linguistic, or cultural differences, constructed as illegitimate and threatening to nation building. It is within this framework that the Romanlar historically claimed their right to equality. In recent times, Turkey’s republican conception of citizenship stood under tension, notably from pressures by the international community, and in particular the EU, to shift toward the framework of minority rights.
Yet Roman associations, indifferent or even hostile to international pressures for the recognition of minority rights, have opted for a different strategy, in which class, rather than cultural differences, is underscored, allowing them to formulate policy claims to address inequality in terms of poverty. Schoon argues that this strategy should compel both scholarship on Romani issues and Romani activism to rethink critically the categories upon which European Romani activism has built its identity politics, including, crucially, the category of “civil society,” which works to merely reconfigure, rather than dissolve, existing power relations. The example of the Turkish Romanlar, who practice fluid, contextual identities in the idioms available to them in a “politics of the governed” (Chatterjee 2004), underscores their agency in the process of forging political subjectivities that contrast, in many ways, the ones largely prescribed by European Romani activism. In the subtext, the argument that a conscious renewal of scholarship and activism could not come into being without the scrutiny of the margins of “mainstream” possibilities is compelling.
We end our volume appropriately with the examination of an emerging form of militancy, at once challenging and rejuvenating current trends, namely Roma youth activism. In her chapter, Anna Mirga-Kruszelnicka illustrates how the emerging Roma youth movement shares common characteristics epitomizing a renewal of Romani activism, defying its established patterns while contesting it from the margins. She begins her argument by painting with large brushstrokes a current “panorama of Romani affairs” as background against (in both senses of the word) which youth activism takes shape. She contends that the increase of interest among international organizations to develop policies for the Roma, and the booming of both Roma and non-Roma civil society organizations incorporating Romani issues on their agenda, together with the availability of funding for related interventions, led to ambiguous dynamics. The inflation of “expertise” in Roma-related policy dialogues, as well as the cooption of professionalized NGOs as deliverers of government services, have often worked to cement old hierarchies or create new ones—such as the subalternization of grassroots organizations (GRO) to professionalized organizations, and the former’s subsequent diminished access to funding. Thus, despite the increased attention to Romani issues on political agendas nationally and supranationally, nongovernmental actors did not substantially challenge existing power imbalances. To the contrary: an overpopulated domain became rife with tensions over funding, expertise, and legitimacy, and the cooption of Roma NGOs has often signified in practice that the role of these organizations in mobilizing, organizing, and engaging with Roma communities has been neglected or squarely abandoned in favor of bureaucratic compliance with donors’ demands for reports and grants applications.
Against this gridlock, Mirga-Kruszelnicka depicts the emergence of the Roma youth movement as a persuasive and energetic contender, capable to challenge existing dominant trends on a number of levels. Through the analysis of its identity discourses and practices of association, Mirga-Kruszelnicka argues that the Roma youth agenda marks a paradigm shift and a significant departure from current forms of activism. First, with regards to the particular configuration of a Romani identity uprooted from frames of stigmatization, victimhood, and subalternity, the Roma youth movement promotes a positive identity grounded in ethnic pride, and distinctly aims at constructing narratives of self-esteem and empowerment. Second, Roma youth activism engages with “the grassroots” to a significant extent, framing Roma communities as a resource and consciously challenging the gap between the established organizations and their constituencies. In the process, they forge new forms of activism away from service provision and tokenistic participation, toward robust frames of community engagement sustaining the development of political consciousness. Third, youth activism aims at broader, more inclusive coalition-building processes, in which not only Roma participate, but also non-Roma and actors with perceived common political interests, such as other minorities, thereby reconnecting and intersecting Roma activism with wider social movements in an attempt to build larger interest-based alliances. While Roma youth activism is exposed to a number of challenges, Mirga-Kruszelnicka contends that the paradigm shift signified by its emergence is paramount to understanding the future possibilities of a rejuvenation of Romani activism.
By bringing together
