The European Roma and Their Securitization: Contexts, Junctures, Challenges

Abstract

Constructed and represented as a threat, whether in the context of their intra-EU migration or their over-representation as beneficiaries of welfare and development programmes in times of neoliberalization, the Roma are increasingly governed through security policies in Europe. After a brief incursion into the theorization of securitization in critical security studies, Van Baar, Ivasiuc, and Kreide chart the theoretical and empirical intersections between securitization and mobility, marketization, development, and visuality, to depict the complex situation of Roma minorities in Europe and the challenges they face in the current socio-political landscape. As the chapters of this volume demonstrate, the Roma are increasingly excluded through particular border, citizenship, market, development, and visual regimes, yet they increasingly seek ways to exert their agency and challenge their securitization. Terrorist attacks, the movements of migrants and refugees, violent conflicts in Ukraine, Syria and elsewhere, climate change, and a changing world order beyond the bipolarity of the Cold War: all these events and transformations in and of the world are, in one way or another, framed in terms of security and insecurity these days. We live in a world where threats to security are constant-at least, this is what the prevalent public and political discourses on security seem to want us to believe. But, as the diversity of the examples indicates, the question of whose security needs to be defended and guaranteed is not unambiguous. For some groups-minorities and migrants in particular-security discourses and practices have themselves turned into a kind of threat, as they have often become the targets and the objects of measures which-allegedly-are designed to bring about 'more security'. Security and its impact on minorities and migrants, and on the Roma in Europe in particular, are the central focus of this volume.