The production of irregular citizenship through mobile governmentalities: racism against roma at the security-mobility nexus

Abstract

This article uses the case study of the European Roma to demonstrate the importance of mobile governmentalities in regulating mobility and citizenship. These are political technologies in which mobility itself is turned into a strategy to govern mobility, particularly through keeping people on the move. Whereas most studies about mobility and migration focus on the governing of mobilities and on interrelated biopolitical mechanisms, I extend these investigations to mobile governmentalities, which include what I call governing and securitizing through ‘nomadization’, as well as through what William Walters calls ‘viapolitics’. The latter is a form of governing that considers vehicles, routes and journeys as mobile sites of power and contestation in their own right. Through an examination of a historical case study about Dutch Roma and a contemporary one about Roma in France, I show that not only camps and halting sites, but also routes, vehicles and mobility itself are to be understood as technologies of securitizing and racializing minorities such as Roma, thereby turning them into irregular citizens.