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 all the various strands of debates both within research on Roma issues and within Romani activism, the volume lays bare the cracks and tensions of their intersection, pointing toward spaces of moderate renewal or radical ruptures in both. And to formulate our intent in the familiar language of the gift, the volume’s impulse is to return the gift to the people and the institutional nodes in the Romani movement that have allowed or encouraged the contributors to examine current developments through research, in the hope that activists and researchers will find it useful to reflect upon the legacies of Roma-related research and activism explored in the volume, and, by developing critical reflexivity, to be part of a meaningful renewal of both. Ultimately, the volume speaks of activism as a mode of research (Juris and Khasnabish 2013: 8), but also of research as a vital posture of engagement.
Ana Ivasiuc is an anthropologist affiliated with the Centre for Conflict Studies at the Philipps University in Marburg, Germany. Through her past activity as a research coordinator within a Romani NGO in Romania, she has conducted research at the confluence between Romani activism and academia. After obtaining her Ph.D. in 2014 from the National School of Political Science and Public Administration in Bucharest, she joined a Roma-related postdoctoral research project at the Justus Liebig University in Giessen. She is the winner of the 2017 Herder–Council for European Studies Fellowship.
Notes
1. A note on terminology is in order when writing about “the Roma” as if the label denoted a coherent and self-evident whole. Some of the contributions of the volume approach “the Roma” in their many identitary manifestations: Hungarian Roma, or Romungre from Transylvania; Turkish Muslim Romanlar; Gypsies, Roma, and Travellers from the United Kingdom, etc. Some others speak of “the Roma” as a more vague and general umbrella term. The editors’ choice has been to let the authors use the term that they saw fit, in a bid to reflect the heterogeneity of “the Roma” under this single label. Whereas many scholarly works include a discussion on the preferred terminology and opt for various strategies of labeling, often concurring with political views on the (in)correctness of particular terms, we have preferred to leave out such discussions, treated more in detail in other works (among many others, Vermeersch 2005; Tremlett 2009; Agarin 2014; Law and Kovats 2018). Within the volume, Fosztó’s chapter deals with the naming battles in the Romanian context, offering insights into the political stakes of such controversies. While being aware both of the heterogeneity of groups artificially brought under the label “Roma,” and of the politics of labeling, on the one hand, and identity production, on the other hand, this discussion is beyond the scope of the volume. For linguistic