is to mediate and “broker” the relationship between their disparate everyday work practices on the one hand, and the organizing ideas of policy on the other, in the pursuit of stability, coherent meaning, and order. This process of brokerage simultaneously subverts and destabilizes the three sector model [of state, economy, and the third sector], because the process makes apparent many of the relationships and activities that operate across sector “boundaries”—including the boundary separating government and non-government—and, in so doing, blurs and complicates policy assumptions about these boundaries.
Analyzing practices of traveling activism, or processes of brokerage, requires the developing of careful, in-depth, and thus time-consuming ethnographies of how everyday practices of activism and CSOs function and of how their main actors, and those with whom they interact in their professional lives, frame and perform their activism. Recently, some have developed vital examples of such ethnographies, which show and confirm the complexities, opportunities, and ambiguities of the everyday realities of Roma-related activism (Chu 2008; Ivasiuc 2014; Ryder et al. 2014). Moreover, Cerasela Voiculescu (2013) has argued that we can extend this debate to everyday sceneries of Romani life and communities. She has clarified that both practices of activism and those of neo-Protestantism, patronage, and clientelism could be seen in the wider context of diverse and interacting webs of power relations that reveal that mechanisms of brokerage are also, and powerfully, implicated in allegedly “marginal” religious, economic, and political practices of everyday Romani life.
I have reserved the term “traveling activism” for those practices of brokerage that are particularly related to the emergence and, seen from a historicizing perspective, revitalization of nongovernmentalism and activism (without suggesting that these practices are not situated in a more complex constellation of power relations). Moreover, the attribution of “traveling” to activism relates not only to mobility within the discursive and nondiscursive contexts of the contested sphere of the “nongovernmental,” but also to activists’ practices of “boundary crossings” (van Baar 2011a: 264–67). Indeed, in the course of their life histories, many activists who have initially associated or aligned themselves with the “nongovernmental” have crossed the contested boundaries of the third and public sectors. While some activists have started to work for governments, others have left professionalized CSOs to commit themselves to forms of grassroots engagements or (radical) public action. Understanding these practices of boundary-crossings and their impact requires a more extensive examination of “the types of relationships and forms of power that link structures and processes across the sectors. How are these constructed, both by individual agency and by broader contextual aspects of politics, history, or culture?” (Lewis 2008: 564). Using life histories in social policy research is a relatively new phenomenon, while it has been a common commitment of anthropologists. Analyzing “anthroposociologically” the life histories and careers of activists who have crossed, or maybe even shifted and blurred sector boundaries can teach us more about the ways in which CSOs and state institutions “are linked through hidden personal relationships, resource flows and transactions, which become more visible at particular historical junctures” (Lewis 2010: 342).
Huub van Baar is an assistant professor of political theory at the University of Giessen in Germany where he coordinates the research project “Between Minority Protection and Securitization,” funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG) within the program Dynamics of Security: Forms of Securitization in Historical Perspective (2014–21). He is also senior research fellow of the Amsterdam Centre for Globalisation Studies at the University of Amsterdam. He is the author of The European Roma: Minority Representation, Memory and the Limits of Transnational Governmentality (2011) and, together with Ana Ivasiuc and Regina Kreide, the coeditor of The Securitization of the Roma in Europe (2019).
Notes
1. In the history of the Romani movement, nongovernmentalism is no new phenomenon, but goes back to, at least, the nineteenth century (Mayall 2004).
2. According to the principle of subsidiarity, the EU may only act “where member states agree that action of individual countries is insufficient. The principle serves the functions of, on the one hand, setting up a division of competence between the EU and member states and on the other, endorsing the primacy of the member states in some domains, one of which is social policy” (Daly and Silver 2008: 551).
3. Allen et al. (2015) have shown that this trend is also relevant regarding Roma-related CSOs in EU candidate member states.
4. In equally overgeneralized terms, Gay y Blasco (2002: 184) claims that “Roma activists . . . draw on non-Gypsy academic theories and take up the notion that Gypsies come from India. In claiming for all Roma a land of origin and also a shared history of persecution and nomadism, Roma activists begin to move away from the performative model of identity to the same emphasis on historical and biological continuity that lies at the core of dominant Euro-American ethnotheories.”
References
Allen, Richard, Steven O’Connor, Melita Petanovic, and Nicoleta Bițu. 2015. Thematic Evaluation of IPA Support to Roma Communities. Brussels: European Commission.
Barany, Zoltan. 2002. The East European Gypsies. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Bockman, Johanna. 2011. Markets in the Name of Socialism. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
Chu, Margalit. 2008. Integration, Erasure and Underdevelopment: The Everyday Politics and Geographies of Gitano NGOization. Ph.D. dissertation. University of Minnesota, Minneapolis.
Comaroff, Jean. 2012. “Pentecostalism, Populism and the New Politics of Affect.” In Pentecostalism and Development: Churches, NGOs and Social Change in Africa, edited by Dena Freeman, 41–66. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
Corbridge, Stuart. 2007. “The (Im)Possibility of Development Studies.” Economy and Society 36 (2): 179–211.
Council of the European Union. 1992. “Birmingham Declaration: A Community Close to Its Citizens.” Brussels: Council of the European Union.
Dagnino, Evelyn. 2008. “Participation, Citizenship and Democracy.” In Can NGOs Make a Difference? The Challenge of Development Alternatives, edited by Anthony J. Bebbington, Samuel Hickey, and Diana Mitlin, 55–70. London: Zed Books.
Daly, Mary, and Hilary Silver. 2008. “Social Exclusion and Social Capital: A Comparison and Critique.” Theory and Society 37 (5): 537–66.
Davoudi, Simin, and Ali Madanipour, eds. 2015. Reconsidering Localism. London: Routledge.
Dillon, Michael. 2013. “Politics of Truth and Pious Economies.” In The Biopolitics of Development: Reading Michel Foucault in the Postcolonial Present, edited by Sandro Mezzadra, Julian Reid, and Ranabir Samaddar, 165–89. New York: Springer.
European Commission. 2007. Handbook on Integration for Policy-Makers and Practitioners. 2nd ed. Brussels: European Commission.
———. 2011. An EU Framework for National Roma Integration Strategies up to 2020. Brussels: European Commission.
European Roma Rights Centre. 2013. National Roma Integration Strategies: What Next? Special issue, Roma Rights: Journal of the European Roma Rights Centre, 1–61.
European Roma Policy Coalition. 2012. Analysis of the National Roma Integration Strategies. Brussels: European Roma Policy Coalition.
Fosztó, László, and Marian V. Anăstăsoaie. 2001. “Romania: Representations, Public Policies and Political Projects.” In Between Past and Future: The Roma of Central and Eastern Europe, edited by Will Guy, 351–69. Hatfield: University of Hertfordshire Press.
Freeman, Dena, ed.