RENEWING RESEARCH AND ROMANI ACTIVISM

       Ana Ivasiuc

      Unlearned Lessons

      On 31 March 2017, the small Transylvanian town of Gheorgheni (in Hungarian, Gyergyószentmiklós) in county Harghita was the stage of a bitterly familiar scene: a mob of twenty to thirty men attacked Roma settlements, burned one house, and set ablaze straw bales in five different locations.¹ Those present inside the houses at the moment of the attack were dragged outside, and, in the middle of bystanders’ applause, the women and children were beaten, while the men were forced to kneel in a line. The event, at first announced on online platforms by local journalists in Hungarian, appeared over the course of the next few days on several German-language blogs (Ecoleusti 2017; Parászka 2017; Pester Lloyd 2017), and only made its appearance in the Romanian news three days later (Ivașcu 2017).² The Romanian news site HotNews reported that, according to a trusted source, “several Hungarian citizens of the town wanted to teach the Roma a lesson,” to put a halt to their alleged misdemeanors (Ivașcu 2017). The English-speaking community of (pro-) Roma activists learned about the events nearly one week after the facts, through an article published on the blog of the European Roma Rights Centre (ERRC) (Lee 2017). The next day, the article was circulated on the European Academic Network of Romani Studies (EANRS), where it seemed to pass unnoticed: there were no reactions to it. The event, fortunately, did not result in the loss of lives, and perhaps was therefore deemed too prosaic to wrest a reaction from the academic community. And yet, this silence signals the passing of such events in the sphere of the ordinary, the tacit acknowledgment of the normalization of violence against the Roma: nothing out of the ordinary, just another attack on Roma.The “lesson” is a persistent and recurrent trope in justifying anti-Roma violence, and a claim of moral and epistemological superiority, postulated from particular positions of power. It posits the non-Roma as invested with a pedagogical “white man’s burden” aimed at civilizing the Roma, while infantilizing them as unruly and in need of punishment. Yet, many of those advocating for “teaching the Roma a lesson” would also, undoubtedly, in the same neoracist breath, claim that the Roma cannot be “civilized” due to their unalterable otherness (Čada 2012: 76). In turn, on the ERRC’s blog written in reaction to the event, Jonathan Lee (2017) claims that “the lessons of Harghita’s history of pogroms against Roma have been conveniently forgotten,” reversing the blame onto lax authorities, the tacit condoning of such acts by the police, and institutionalized racism writ large.

      We felt it necessary to start our volume by recounting this episode of violence to make the point that in the context of increasing violence against the Roma across Europe, the pursuit of knowledge only for the sake of knowledge seems at best indecent. However, acting on such developments without reflecting on the wider politics of activism, its own blind spots and fallouts, is at best irresponsible. Two other violent events, running on very similar scripts, are closely and critically analyzed in this volume, together with the activist responses articulated at the time (see the chapters by Chirițoiu and Fosztó). They span a period of a quarter century, which has seen antigypsyism erupt at numerous locations and following various events, but always according to the same script, involving, invariably, arson, humiliation, violence, and the leitmotif of “teaching them a lesson.” Yet, as Lee (2017) underlines, but also as the chapters in this volume claim in many different ways, Roma-related research and activism seem to have their own “unlearned lessons.”

      This volume focuses on blind spots in Roma-related research and activism and is a search for spaces for dialogue, past the unilateral sense of “teaching” each other from positions of epistemic—or moral—superiority. Indeed, framing past missteps and yet unattained goals of activism in terms of “learning experiences” enables a space in which plural voices may articulate their views building on previous attempts by critical founders of Romani activism such as Nicolae Gheorghe (Acton and Ryder 2015: 5), whose lessons we attempt to explore in this volume. Thus, the volume is not merely about Romani activism, and does not seek to offer a comprehensive view of its historical development or of all of its contemporary forms and their varied locations; this, in itself, would be an enormous task requiring years of research.³ Rather, the reader will discover forms of Romani activism in a piecemeal fashion, through several of the volume’s chapters that offer contextualized analyses of Romani activism embedded in particular social and political dynamics. The volume is also not only about Roma-related research, or about research on activism. Rather, it is situated precisely at the confluence between research and activism, seeking to create a space for reflexivity in both.

      Far from being specific to the Roma, the reflections cultivated by this collection of essays can be productively applied to the problematic of many other subaltern groups involved in forms of activism, and which, simultaneously, have been the focus of social research and policy interventions. Our volume speaks to the need to defamiliarize known forms of research and activism by embedding a recurrent practice of reflexivity in both, incessantly questioning and renewing intellectual and political commitments. Our volume is an exercise in questioning the knowledge thus far yielded and the ways in which it was produced, as well as renewing familiar forms of activism and exploring future possibilities opened by reflection.

      The general context of the volume is spanned by the rise of antigypsyism (Stewart 2012); the increase of xenophobic sentiment and far-right ideologies across the Western world; the uncertainties related to the EU project after Brexit and to how this potentially paradigmatic shift will impact insecurities, mobilities, and processes of othering, including of Romani groups; the fallout of the financial crisis related to contemporary forms of predatory capitalism, violently pushing many into growing hardship and spurring competition on increasingly scarce public resources; and the hegemonic expansion of the discourse on “security” as the supreme goal to be pursued. Indeed, since roughly the nineties, Western societies have entered an era marked by the disquieting productivity of “risk” and “security” as enablers of repressive policies and structuring principles of a sociality marked by waning solidarity. This accompanied the demise of the welfare state, progressively replaced by a repressive state keen to defend rather the interests of powerful capital than of its most destitute citizens, increasingly precaritized and criminalized (Lorey 2015). In parallel, neoliberal governmentalities have colonized public discourse on—and state policies for—the poor, pathologizing and stigmatizing them while producing their undeservingness (Haney 2002). In the case of the Roma, this led to forms of “reasonable antigypsyism” (van Baar 2014), coalesced in increasingly frequent episodes of violence such as the ones described above.

      Contemporaneous to these worrisome developments are discernible reconfigurations of the Romani movement. In part, such shifts follow the rejuvenation of its membership base, with emerging trends in a bottom-up youth movement with the power to reform its own discourses and practices (see Mirga-Kruszelnicka, this volume). But some of the reconfigurations of the Romani transnational movement espouse powerful top-down advocacy initiatives, which have recently materialized in the creation of a European Roma Institute for Arts and Culture (ERIAC), aimed at promoting a positive (self-)image of Roma by the Roma themselves, in order to tackle what is perceived to be the “root