The Securitization of Roma Mobilities and the Re-bordering of Europe

Abstract

Contemporary state and extra-state coercive practices dedicated to both the encampment and ghettoization of the Roma, as well as their eviction and displacement, are inextricable from long-standing processes of Roma racial subordination. Inasmuch as many Roma people have been juridically re-inscribed over recent years as ostensible EU-ropean citizens, however, the securitization of their mobility within and across the space of EU-rope supplies a premier instance of their precisely abject relation to EU-ropean citizenship. The abjection of the mobility of the Roma thus contributes to a more wide-ranging process of `neo-nomadization'. Simultaneously `citizens', `migrants', and `refugees', Roma people emerge repeatedly as a kind of limit figure, and their mobilities therefore provide a particularly revealing site for the interrogation of the re-bordering of `Europe' as such.