Ivasiuc 2015 BASEES Provincialising Citizenship

Paper presented at the 2015 BASEES conference, Cambridge
March 29th, 2015

Ana Nichita Ivasiuc
Justus Liebig University, Giessen, Germany
ana.ivasiuc@sowi.uni-giessen.de
Provincialising Citizenship: critical anthropological notes on the uses

and usefulness of citizenship in the context of the Roma political
subject
Abstract
The aim of the paper is to explore and critically interrogate the uses and usefulness of the concept of
citizenship in construing the Roma as political subject. Drawing on a wide spectrum of multidisciplinary literature on citizenship, and deconstructing the theories which contributed, in the last
two decades, to the emergence of a political science literature on the Roma as political subjects, the
paper brings in anthropological insights to question the productivity of citizenship with regards to
the Roma political subject. While traditional concepts of citizenship risk to be inappropriate for the
Roma case, mirroring gadjo1-centric conceptions of being political, critical anthropology can
contribute to provincialise these conceptions in favour of more flexible, culturally appropriate and
productive readings of what it means for Roma to be a political subject.
Introduction
The argument proposed here draws upon several lines of reasoning stemming from a
multidisciplinary approach of the current reflexions on citizenship, both on the conceptual and the
empirical levels. It has been motivated not only by the on-going theoretical discussions on the
(re)definitions, transformations, applications and normative presuppositions of the concept in recent
literature, but also by anthropological reflections stimulated by my years of research among the
Roma of Romania and the multiple occasions of field work conducted in various communities.
Prior to the start, I wish to argue for the plus-value which anthropology, with its epistemological
principles and its research methods, can bring into political science debates. Anthropological
research is founded on the principle of perpetually questioning pre-constructed categories from
above for the groups and phenomena to which it devotes attention (Neveu 2012). The research
endeavour commences by allowing the emic perspective2 to emerge (Harris 1976), in a bottom-up
movement in which the concepts and categories of the researcher should efface themselves from the
1
Gadjo (fem. Gadji, pl. Gadj) = term assigned by the Roma to non-Roma.
The emic perspective denotes the ways in which the researched subjects themselves understand and
construct the world, by means of categories and concepts meaningful to themselves. The etic perspective,
sometimes considered opposed to the emic, refers to the birds-eye view academics adopt in their theorisation
efforts. Nevertheless, it has to be noted that the two perspectives may also be viewed as complementary
instead of opposed. For an illuminating discussion on this point, see Morris et al. 1999.
2

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observation process as much as possible. Even though, unsurprisingly, it is acknowledged that the
anthropologist is the product of her own societal influences and cultural internalisations and there
are limits to the distance she is capable to take from them at any given moment, the rules of
anthropological field work demand that the researcher engages in reflection, in an attempt to decentralise her own cultural concepts and cognitive categories before entering the field. This decentering movement, consisting of the displacement of conceptual categories from the core of how
we see the world to the provinces of our own conceptions of what the world is (on an observational
level) or should be (on the normative plane), recalls what Chakrabarty named provincialising. As he
explains in the preface of his thought-provoking book Provincialising Europe. Postcolonial Thought
and Historical Difference (Chakrabarty 2000:X), he began to question the undoubted international
significance of Marxist categories when he noticed the tensions arising from the attempt of applying
these concepts to the history of the working class in Bengal. Without necessarily rejecting universal
categories stemming from European political modernity as such, he sets as objective the task of
exploring the ways in which European thought, at once both indispensable and inadequate in
helping us to think through the experiences of political modernity in non-Western nations, may be
renewed from and for the margins (Chakrabarty 2000:16). By building a parallel with this endeavour,
I intend to trace the ways in which the political category of citizenship, seemingly indispensable to
political thought, is at any rate inadequate in thinking through the multitude of ways in which the
Roma3 experience and manifest political belongingness to entities such as the (nation-)state or the
European Union.
This is nothing new: Gayatri Spivak (1999), for example, has already shown, in her analysis of
Mahasweta Devis fiction, how subaltern speech-acts cannot be adequately represented in concepts
such as citizenship and nationhood, with their particular European enlightenment genealogies,
cultural load and normative corollaries. Such positions have facilitated a critique of political science
and international relations literature with their eurocentric doxa negating plural past or future
histories, calling for an intellectual decolonisation and an aperture towards multiplicity and
heterogeneity (Bigo 2009). The methodogical prescription for this endeavour is to shift away from
philosophical and legal categories in favour of practices, including the ones of the unfamiliar;
patently, this is something to which anthropology can oblige particularly well.
The aim of the paper is to bring into a critical spotlight the concept of citizenship itself, as it has
been applied to the Roma case, and interrogate its promises by drawing on its conceptual pitfalls, on
one hand, and on empirical evidence gathered through fragments of anthropological research4, on
the other hand. Through a focus on the grassroots, I propose to shift the attention from the
conventional focus on political practices of the Roma intelligentsia active in institutional settings
involved in Roma activism, or the formal side of the movement, as Vermeersch (2007) defines it, to
the daily practices encountered in Roma communities. Simultaneously, I am aware of the risks
entailed in tracing such apparently immovible boundaries between the two; since a theoretical
debate on grassroots is not the aim of the current paper, for reasons of parsimony I will take the
3
I wish to stress unequivocally that when I invoke the Roma it is stricly for linguistic parsimony reasons, and
not to suggest any unity of representation and practice among the many various groups usually put under the
umbrella of Roma. To attempt to do justice to the diversity or, in order to go beyond ethnicity and account
for hybridisations and the interplay with other variables, the super-diversity (Tremlett 2014) of the Roma,
I will use in my paper examples from various groups, across variables of clan, gender and economic status.
4
This paper is not the result of a focused research on the topic; rather, it is the outline of possible research
paths indicated by some preliminary observations from field work undertaken to other ends during the last
years.

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definition of the Roma grassroots to signify Roma groups living in or near Roma local communities,
who, although they may have links with it, are usually not part of formal structures of the Romani
movement.
The papers argument unfolds in three movements. First, I formulate some concerns regarding the
culture-blindness and empiric scarcity of political science studies of citizenship; by presenting some
questionments around the Roma, I hope to clarify why anthropological and ethnographical accounts
of practices and representations are a necessary methodological addition leading to conceptual and
theoretical enrichment of citizenship studies. Second, I will discuss two axioms inherent in the liberal
conception of citizenship, which are intrinsically linked with the culture-blindness and scarce
empiric support analysed in the first section; I question the foundation of citizenship on the
individual, as well as the emancipatory promises of citizenship in light of its genealogies,
strengthening the argument that other vocabularies and frames may prove more fertile for research
on Roma politics. The third section is divided in two movements. After revealing some tensions
between Roma politics, its representation through political science research, and the European
citizenship in its various articulations within the neoliberal project, I will propose hints for a culturally
relevant and empirically grounded perspective on Roma politics at grassroots level and advocate for
the renewal of an anthropology-inspired scholarly debate on citizenship from and for the
margins through a shift towards a micropolitics of belonging.
Citizenship and anthropological discontents
The reader may have noticed my reluctance to take the concept of citizenship with both hands: the
felt necessity of insulating it with inverted commas before handling it translates uneasiness in using it
uncritically, as a category from above, imputable to my dformation professionnelle as an
anthropologist.
Prior to delving into these considerations, the plurality of definitions and perspectives on citizenship
must be acknowledged. The retreat of the nation-state in the neoliberal era has brought with it
transformations of the concept and hyphenations which modulate citizenship to mean often quite a
different thing than the initial sense of membership in a state. Nevertheless, postnational
citizenship, underneath its transformations signifying the emergence of a notion of universal
personhood above the national membership (Soysal 1994), maintains the sense of belonging to a
polity as defining core.
The section is not intended as a summary of the various definitions and approaches to citizenship
and its transformations, but rather as an articulation of criticisms revealing controversies out of
which may arise suggestions as to how to enrich the debate on citizenship or shift some of its focal
points in the case of the Roma political subject.
Culture-blindness
The starting point of my critical unpacking of the concept of citizenship from an anthropological
perspective simply has to be the prevailing culture-blindness of theoretical constructions of
citizenship, which transpires from most political science literature (Nic Craith 2004; Isin 2005 and
3

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2013; Nyers 2008; Andrijaevi 2013; Clarke et al. 2014). This original sin of theories of citizenship
is hardly surprising: during the decolonisation process, the state system became internationalised
and nation-state citizenship was rendered universal and institutionalised (Hindess, quoted in Rygiel
2012); thus, in the wake of colonialism, a political order originating in a very particular cultural, social
and political context the European one imposed itself as the only possible path for the
organisation of polities globally. This internationalisation of political structures and their cognitive
counterparts political categories has occulted their embeddedness in a particular cultural context.
As Wendy Brown masterfully demonstrates, liberal political thought emerging from the European
context is particularly adroit in concealing its own cultural embeddedness, among other dynamics by
promoting a powerful discourse on the universality of its basic principles: secularism, the rule of law,
equal rights, moral autonomy, individual liberty. If these principles are universal, then they are not
matters of culture, which is identified today with the particular, local and provincial (Brown
2006:21)5. The culture-blindness of citizenship theories, often coupled with a discount of the power
relations in which the practice of citizenship and its conceptual construction have originated, has
determined some critics to advance that citizenship can be read as a kind of conceptual imperialism
that effaces other ways of being political (Nyers 2008:2). The conceit of universality of liberal
political categories functions as to subordinate other political practices and relegate them to the
domain of the pre-modern, not yet quite there, understood as non-European and inferior in
terms of sophistication and complexity, therefore less worthy of serious political analysis. Other ways
of being political have thus been abandoned to the study domain of anthropologists.
With regards to citizenship studies and the neglect of culture, it has been contended that [t]he
mistake has been to focus analysis almost exclusively upon institutional and constitutional
arrangements, thereby downplaying the hierarchies and relationships of inclusion and exclusion
informed by race, ethnicity, class, gender and geography that determine access to citizenship in real
terms. There has been too much focus on rights talk and its emancipatory rhetoric and too little
attention accorded to the contexts, meanings and practices that make citizenship possible for some
and a far-fetched dream for most (Nyamnjoh 2008:77). This echoes anthropological literature which
has argued for a perspective viewing citizenship as a cultural process (Nic Craith 2004:296;
Andrijaevi 2013:50), where categories of race, ethnicity, class, gender, religious belonging and
sexuality, to quote just some of the markers of difference between groups, are culturally bounded
and articulated.
It is the supposed universality, inescapability and the normative saturations of citizenship which, I
argue, orients researchers stemming from political science to identify and theorise manifestations of
citizenship in the case of subordinated groups, prior to (and often plainly without) inquiring about
the cultural embeddedness of those groups in their larger social settings, about their representations
and practices related to state or supra state level politics and about how culture gives shapes to the
political, or, in other words, the political culture, with its practices and representations. Additionally,
they often fail to address issues of variation in understandings and practices related to seemingly
5
It is worthwhile quoting her at length when she explains the mechanism through which liberalism constructs
itself as cultureless: The double ruse on which liberalism relies to distinguish itself from culture on the one
hand, casting liberal principles as universal; on the other, juridically privatising culture ideologically figures
liberalism as untouched by culture and thus incapable of cultural imperialism (...). But liberalism is no more
above or outside culture than is any other political form, and culture is not always elsewhere from liberalism.
Both the autonomy and universality of liberal principles are myths, crucial to liberalisms reduction of questions
about its imperial ambitions or practices to questions about whether forcing others to be free is consonant with
liberal principles (Brown 2006:23).

March 29th, 2015
unproblematic political concepts in different parts and regions of Europe: the Roma seem disjointed
and analytically insulated from the political cultures which developed in their societies. But this is
exactly where the universalistic pretences of liberal political categories conceal the diversity of
practices and representations outside established conceptions.
For anthropology, it is common place to affirm that political practice is structured by the central
values upheld at any given time by a community and that political culture shapes practices and
representations in different ways across the globe. One does not even need time-consuming
anthropological fieldwork in order to acknowledge that political culture displays great variations
across the EU. A simple look at the Democratic Index, without too much time-consuming
anthropological fieldwork, shows discrepancies in political representations and practice between
Western and Eastern, as well as between Northern and Southern European societies. As quantitative
research claims, Central and Eastern European countries would be marked by weaker citizenship
norms and lower levels of civic and political involvement (Coff and Van der Lippe 2010).
Attention to the developments spurred by the fall of the Soviet rule in Central and Eastern Europe
reveal adaptations and redefinitions of the imported liberal political categories. Katherine Verdery,
while exploring the meanings and practices of citizenship in the former Soviet bloc, suggests that
political categories in the West cannot be but imprecisely equated with what they designate in the
rest: The end of socialism brought "democracy" - a word whose etymology means "rule by the
people." But while observers from western countries came to ratify that the elections were free and
fair, they failed to ask: Who are "the people" that will be allowed into the social contract creating
citizens and rights? In the history of democracy in the U.S., "the people" was bounded to exclude
persons of the "wrong" sex and race; in the former Soviet bloc, the criterion that disrupts citizenship is
ethno-national/cultural identity. In the Eastern European context, "people" is more readily an ethnonational term than a label for collective sovereignty by individual "social contractors"; the sovereign
thus becomes the ethnic collectivity; democracy becomes ethnocracy. (Verdery 1997).
Historic analyses of Romania during the modern state formation show, for instance, that the
institution of citizenship was founded on a fundamental contradiction between the liberal discursive
claims for universality, copycat conceptions originating in the Western European context, on one
hand, and essentially illiberal practices engrained in the disenfranchisement of large groups of the
population, among which religious and ethnic minorities and women (Iordachi 2001). Research on
citizenship must always articulate conceptions, representations and practices of citizenship with a
thorough understanding of their historical and cultural embeddedness (Bigo 2009). These analyses
let emerge the fact that citizenship in countries of the former Soviet bloc is based on a conception of
belonging to the majority ethnicity as primary criterion, to a much larger extent than in more
established Western democracies. The popular representation of state belonging as belonging to the
ethnic majority is rich in consequences for the Roma. The primacy of the ethnic criterion induces
hierarchisations of citizenship, whereby the Roma are either constituted as second rank citizens or
denied commonality of citizenship altogether6.
Denials of citizenship can be read in the practices of some bureaucrats to inscribe Gypsy in the citizenship
field on birth certificates of newborn babies whom they would identify as Roma (ERRC 2013). In Romania, a
more symbolic denial of citizenship, producive of boundaries, is the discourse proscribing the use of the
ethnonym Roma, on basis of its phonetic proximity to Romanian and of the widely shared repugnance
against the amalgamation between Roma and Romanians.

March 29th, 2015
Political science literature on the citizenship dynamics in the case of the Roma is particularly lacking
in cultural sensitivity7. Generally, it does not explore or even make references en passant, to other
forms of belonging which the Roma may practice, such as the extended family or the clan8, or a
community of language. One may wonder, naturally, whether such mentions would be relevant or
productive for citizenship studies. I argue the affirmative: the issue of belonging on a macro scale (to
the nation-state, the EU) is preceded by a myriad of belongings on a medium and micro scale (the
linguistic and religious community, the clan, the region, the locality, the neighbourhood, the
extended family, but also the class and social status, and, importantly, gender), likely to shape
patterns of political action and to structure a multiplicity of ties and dynamics of belonging.
For instance, it makes sense to wonder whether similarities of practice and representation can be
traced in the case of Roma from regions of Romania which have been linked to slavery or
deportation in different ways, and whether these are significant for variations in political belonging
and practice. The great variations between, for instance, the Hungarian-speaking Gabor or Romungre
from Transylvania (who also entertain citizenship ties with Hungary and enjoy rights based on their
belonging to the Hungarian community of language), the Romanian speaking Rudari (who often, but
not always, contest Roma ethnicity), and the Muslim Khorakhane Roma from the East of Romania
(marginalised by other Roma, but also by other Muslim groups), predict also variations in political
practice and representation, different patterns of negotiation of citizenship, as well as attitudes
regarding membership to various polities.
Also, what inflections of (non-)belonging to the nation-state push some Roma to engage in
permanent emigration9, while others move in paths of circular, seasonal migration, but with a clear
anchor back home? How do the culturally embedded relations with the non-Roma from the same
locality impact belonging to the nation-state or other forms of polities? In terms of religious
belonging, how do the families and communities recently converted to Neo-Protestantism, or the
more established Roman Catholic, Orthodox or Muslim ones, relate to political belonging?
Religious belonging may, indeed, reveal central to issues of political action: not only the
Transnational Romani Movement has incorporated powerful political organisations rooted in
religious belonging (GATIEF: the Gypsy and Traveller International Evangelical Fellowship and IREM:
the International Roma Evangelical Mission) (Ivasiuc 2014:140), but Evangelism has been seen to
work as a political force at grassroots level (Gay y Blasco 2000). The obvious links between the
Afro-American civil rights movement and (Neo-)Protestant religious practice, as well as other
experiences of conversion to Pentecostalism in Latin America, as the religion of the persecuted and
the poor (Beissinger 2011) should indicate fruitful paths of research on the articulation of religious
7
Not a single author from the more theoretical academic traditions has wondered whether there is, in Romani,
a word for citizenship. In the vernacular versions of Romani, there isnt. The literary themutnipen, derived
from themut (empire, kingdom, city) is a neologism inscribed in dictionaries at the moment of the
establishment of an official Romani language, but unsupported by popular use. Far from supporting a fixist
image of language, I read in the absence of citizenship in vernacular language a hint as to the absence of such
representation among the Romani speaking Roma (I am indebted to Ctlina Olteanu for her support in
elucidating this linguistic issue).
8
Clan belonging may entail crucial hints as to the political organisation of groups. In anthropological literature,
perhaps the best known example is Evans-Pritchards account of the centrality of the social organisation
around kinship as basis for the political system of the Nuer from Southern Sudan.
9
With some even requesting political asylum: Hungarian and Czech Roma have been granted asylum in Canada
(Tth 2010); in 2000, a number of Roma families from Hungary was granted refugee status in France
(Vermeersch 2007).

March 29th, 2015
and political belonging in the case of the converted Roma. Moving on from political science
vocabularies refering to the formal Romani movement to anthropological accounts, we may invoke
Lszlo Foszts anlysis, contending that rituals of the Spirit and of the open heart such as those
found in Pentecostal revivals appeal to people for whom direct access to ritual empowerment and a
symbolic bracketing of the social order can produce and reinforce a universalistic orientation of the
self. Universalistic symbolism promises a radical reversal of status hierarchies and immediate access
to resources and social mobility (Foszt 2007:188), pinpointing to a heavenly citizenship (Gog
2009:104) which entails the potential of being articulated with other modes of more mundane
political action. The collective engagement in conversion can be read as an expression of belonging
and contesting established orders (Foszt 2007:119). This suggests hybridisations of citizenship which
can be revealed by shifting the focus from the macropolitical (the formal side of the Romani
movement) and from registers of action visible on the radar of political science, to the micropolitical
of everyday practice in its cultural frame and anthropological accounts of practices and
representations.
Scarce empiric support

Linked to the first point, the second methodological criticism to citizenship theory which may enrich
the debate from the perspective of anthropology is the fact that what ordinary people associate
with citizenship has been identified as one of the biggest lacunae in the literature (Joppke
2008:43). From the perspective of a discipline in which contextualisation is the basis of theorisation,
this shortcoming is not negligible (Neveu 2012). The empirical void in which much of citizenship
theorisation takes place precludes an in-depth understanding of the work of inclusionary /
exclusionary dynamics of citizenship rooted in experience. In this point of criticism, anthropology
allies with the feminist insistence of embodying and contextualising citizenship, rather than accepting
its suspension in a purely abstract realm (Lister 2008:54-57). Thinking in abstracto about citizenship is
liable to occult the complex ways in which exclusion is lived and to curtail the exploration of
pathways of resistance to exclusionary practices. In turn, canvassing strategies of resistance to
exclusion may open up the conceptual boundaries of citizenship and enrich the debate.
That recent literature has acknowledged the necessity of interrogating the ways in which citizenship
operates as a lived experience (Isin et al. 2008:3) is a promising development. This
acknowledgement calls for greater contextualisation and empiric embeddedness of citizenship
studies and stresses the importance of ethnographic accounts of citizenship enactments, a concern
shared across disciplines (Nic Craith 2004; Neveu 2012; alar and Mehling 2013). Simultaneously, a
greater contextualisation in daily practices and experiences necessarily contributes to connecting
citizenship to culture and cultural practice, thereby addressing the first criticism exposed above.
The interest for a greater empiric grounding of citizenship studies amounted to the proposal of acts
of citizenship as analyzable events through which citizenship is claimed by subordinated groups (Isin
and Nielsen 2008). Some scholars have even posited that acts of citizenship should be viewed and
used as a methodology challenging conventional approaches to citizenship (Andrijaevi 2013:49).
However, the focus on acts of citizenship as a methodology entails a few shortcomings, among which
the disproportionate focus on the performance side of activism, as well as too little concern for indepth changes of habitus. As to the Roma case, the focus on acts of citizenship performed by activists
(Aradau et al. 2013) evades issues of representation of the Roma activist intelligentsia in relation to
the grassroots they profess to speak for. As Dagnino demonstrates (2008:60), under neoliberalism,
7

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an important displacement of the meaning of political representation took place in that civil society
organisations capacity to represent seems to be displaced onto the kind of competence they have,
thereby breaking away from responsibility towards their constituencies and contributing to a
fracture between their professionalised (and often depoliticised) vocabularies and those of the
grassroots. In the Roma case, Nicolae Gheorghe was vocal in pointing out that the Romani
movement, embodied in Roma civil society organisations, has significantly and deplorably moved
away from the grassroots (Gheorghe with Pulay in Guy 2013:42 and 86). In this context, the focus
on elite Roma activism from the sphere of professionalised NGOs risks to produce
methodologically and conceptually problematic pars-pro-toto metonymies. Concluding that the
Roma claim citizenship through certain performances formulated as acts of citizenship loses from
sight the process through which collective claims of some groups are articulated (Andrijaevi
2013:58), internally and externally negotiated, as well as issues of representation reflecting wider
concerns.
If thought is to be something other than mere subjective opinion, it has to have anchorage in the
historical world of citizenship talk and practice within which we find ourselves, a world that is
constituted and reconstituted in relation to traditions of citizenship, both past and present (Yeatman
2008:103). Analysing the possible traditions of citizenship (as membership in a polity) on which the
Roma may build up and which they might articulate with conceptions and practices of citizenship
more easily identifiable as such by political scientists is a preliminary step which may illuminate and
inform citizenship studies to a new level. But in searching for these traditions, one must also beware
of identifying certain elements as traditions of citizenship, when other concepts would be more
appropriate. For the Kalderash Roma, for example, what regulate social conduct in communities are
cultural concepts of honour, shame and cleanliness, which mediate rights for individuals within their
communities, rather than traditions of citizenship proper. Obeying the cultural rules guarantees
membership in the community and the enjoyment of rights. But simultaneously, these cultural rules
also work in constructing boundaries around the group and delimitate the inside from the outside,
the community in which membership is relevant (ones own), from a Gadj world in which
membership stakes may or may not be relevant. The relevance of membership of particular groups
of Roma in Gadj worlds still needs to be interrogated through empiric research prior to the analysis
of forms and manifestations of this membership under the label citizenship. In other words, how
can one be sure that what one studies is indeed about membership in a polity, and not, for instance,
about negotiation, exchange, boundary tracing, or some other process granting some sort of benefit?
How do the people themselves see what they do through their practices?
This set of questions calls into the debate epistemological concerns about the ontology of the studied
objects and their constructedness and discussions in the philosophy of science which reach far
beyond the scope of this paper. Suffice it say, with Bruno Latour, that [f]or scientific, political and
even moral reasons, it is crucial that enquirers do not in advance, and in place of the actors, define
what sorts of building blocks the social world is made of. (Latour 2005:41).
Promises or dead-ends? Theoretical dilemmas
If the first two criticisms formulated towards citizenship studies refer more to methodological
concerns, this sections endeavour is to uncover some of the theoretical tensions of the concept of
citizenship which critical citizenship theories have underlined.
8

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Privileging the individual in citizenship

In the first section I mentioned that the centrality / de-centrality of certain values for a particular
group structures its political practices and representations. I would like to follow this argument more
in depth, by advancing the case of the Roma and wondering how a conception of citizenship as
grounded in the individual may articulate for groups in which the individual does not have the
sacrosanct overtones it has in liberal political thought.
Indeed, it may reveal itself problematic that citizenship prescribes individual, rather than collective
self-preservation, for populations which value group belonging and community preservation above
the individual level. Cultural variation accounts for different representations and manifestations of
individualism: at the one end of the spectrum, individualism may be virtually worshipped (such as in
the liberal western traditions); its universality should not, however, be taken for granted: at the
other end of the spectrum it may be shunned as a threat to group ties and solidarities. That
citizenship is bound up with individualism (Yeatman 2008:102) curtails its promises for some of the
Roma groups whose cultural values stress group ties and their precedence over individual concerns,
and raises crucial questions as to whether the appropriation of vocabularies of citizenship in the case
of some Roma groups, and their subsequent mobilisation in political struggles, may reveal appealing
to them, and whether the application of such frames of analysis may be relevant to scholars. As Anna
Yeatman reminds us, echoing the concept of socialisation through which children learn the cultural
norms of their environment, There is nothing automatic about a human being achieving unit status.
For this to occur, the human being has to live within a world that values living life on ones terms and
in ones own way, and that offers both support for and facilitation of this way of being (Yeatman
2008:106).
At this point, one has to acknowledge, however, the particular centrifugal dynamics of Roma
feminism10 in relation to the precedence of group preservation over individual rights and freedoms.
The tensions inherent in the Romani movement between Roma feminism and the segments
advocating for unity in the face of discrimination and exclusion by the Gadj, issuing injunctions to
postpone the feminist agenda as a secondary concern (Biu 2005), are revealing of the dynamics at
play in this multiform, fragmented movement. From a political science perspective, citizenship
struggles based on the focus on individual freedom and rights are essential for Roma feminism in the
achievement of gender equality.
However, among the unconscious biases deriving from the culture-blindness of liberal political
thought, liberalisms excessive freighting of the individual subject with self-making, agency and a
relentless responsibility for itself (Brown 2006:17) not only conceals the structural power relations
10
Roma feminism (in its explicitly assumed form) stems, however, largely from the middle-class segments of
the Roma within Roma activism. The feminist representations and practices of Roma at the grassroots, or
traces of what could be coined, after the model of African, Black or Chicana feminism, Romani feminism, is,
deplorably, a largely underresearched field in Romani Studies. The absence of this focus in research stems,
perhaps, from an unchecked assumption based on the belief that Roma women would be totally subjugated to
Roma men (because of the allegedly pre-modern character of Roma culture), and therefore what could be
identified as feminist practices and representations at grassroots level are unlikely to exist. I strongly refute this
essentialising argument, not only in light of the cultural racism it conveys, but also in virtue of empiric evidence
found earlier in research on the Boldeni flower traders clan, in which there are clear matriarchal elements
(control of family finances and decision making by the grandmother, as well as female leadership of the clan
until relatively recently) (Chirioiu et al. 2011).

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giving birth to groups with shared trajectories and shared practices, but also plants in the liberal
category of citizenship the seeds for its own depoliticisation in the neoliberal era11.
Genealogies of exclusion, but promises of emancipation?

The genealogy of citizenship reaches back to a process of ascription, resulting in the production of
citizens / non-citizens along arbitrary boundaries tied to rigid criteria, such as the jus sanguinis
principle, still structuring citizenship membership in a number of European countries. The genealogy
of citizenship, in the writings of Locke, is also tied to a certain conception of who could be citizen (the
rational male property owner) and who could not the others of citizenship: the woman (...), the
atheist, the foolish, the idle poor and the American Indian (Mezzadra 2005). Especially these two
last categories resonate with the ways in which the European Roma are problematised in popular
discourse as the undeserving poor, the benefit tourist and the dehumanised12, essentially nonEuropean salvage who, eventually, should go back to India (no pun intended). One may claim that
the concept of citizenship has transformed and democratised since Locke, but some of the criteria
for exclusion from substantive citizenship have bitterly survived in the case of the Roma and do their
work unhampered in our days. What does that say about citizenship and its emancipatory promises?
Ayelet Shachar offers an unsettling reading of citizenship as the quintessential inherited entitlement
of our time (Shachar 2008: 146). While other birthright entitlements have largely been discredited,
she argues that current citizenship regimes entail an inherent moral weakness, since the outsider
status is due to circumstances beyond the individuals control: where and to whom they were born.
Her position is strengthened by the observation of the evolution of immigration and naturalisation
laws in favour of the global elite, disprivileging the undesirable outsiders. This inherited property
dimension of citizenship is a mechanism of legitimising distinctions not only between jurisdictions,
but also between vastly unequal opportunities (ibidem:140-141), whose function can be interpreted
to safeguard the reproduction of the global dominant13. How then, we may ask again, can citizenship
hold the promise of emancipation for the dominated?
It has to be acknowledged that citizenship, as a political category, has historically been an instrument
of state power mobilised in exclusionary practices separating insiders from undesirable outsiders, but
also a core component of projects of cultural homogenisation in the nation forming process
(Delanty 2008:69) and later: the assimilationist policies of communist regimes applied to the Roma
are a recent case in point. For Isin, citizenship is that particular point of view of the dominant, which
constitutes itself as a universal point of view (Isin 2002:275). Ignoring the contribution of citizenship
in producing categories of subordinated subjects is occulting the Janus face of citizenship and the
dynamics of inclusion / exclusion citizenship arrangements set in motion, as well as possible paths of
resistance which subordinated groups may have taken against these exclusionary practices. While
engaged political scientists privilege a normative perspective which advocates for practices
advancing inclusive citizenship for the Roma, the question becomes more challenging if we
11
We will see later how the focus on the individual facilitates the depoliticisation of citizenship through
neoliberal technologies of citizenship.
12
Think of the controversies of early colonists on the American continent about whether the Native had a soul
or not.
13
The jus sanguinis principle of citizenship transmission in some states completes the picture in a rather
unsettling way, since citizenship would then be the legitimiser of the reproduction of global domination along
ethnic lines.
10

March 29th, 2015
hypothesise that the exclusion / inclusion binary may be complicated by yet other dynamics away
from the state. I will illuminate my point by proposing two observations stemming from the empirical
realm.
The first example I will use is the observed practice of electoral bribing occurring in some of the
Roma communities, more specifically the cases in which Roma voters have collectively nullified their
votes by placing their option on both candidates in the decisive round of mayoral elections, thereby
effectively renouncing one of their citizenship rights. What readings could we offer of this practice?
While it has been asserted that these cases reveal increased vulnerability to manipulation and lack of
political awareness (Paji 2012:32-37; NDI 2009), explanations which I consider excessively simplistic
and imbued with culture-blindness and paternalism, I propose that this type of electoral behaviour
could signify a conscious retreat from the institutions of the dominating Gadj, performed as a form
of shmekeria14 which attempts at reversing the power relations, since it leaves the candidates
rather powerless in front of this subterfuge. While this practice may perhaps be interpreted as
subversive citizenship, my own intake is to see it as a strategy of resistance15 which effectuates
simultaneously a movement away from the established political system of the Gadj. Why
resistance and not citizenship? Yoav Peled unpacks modern citizenship as historically and
conceptually dependent on three essential characteristics: membership in a political community
transcending other memberships; mutual responsibility between all members, manifested by the
state; equality of rights guaranteed to all who are considered citizens. Subsequently, he posits that
if any of these features is absent, or is weakened beyond a certain point, we are no longer in the
realm of citizenship, but of some form of subjecthood (2008:100). It isnt difficult to problematise
the presence of the three attributes of citizenship in the case of the Roma: very simplistically put,
clan membership tends to transcend the national one or replace it altogether16; in Eastern Europe,
states representatives17 periodically waver the states responsibility towards Roma citizens in virtue
of them being a European responsibility; equality of rights may be guaranteed formally to Roma
citizens, but the practice reveals persistent inequalities in accessing rights.
On a more extreme note, it should be explored to what extent some of the most marginal Roma
groups may have adapted their ways of life simply to avoid any dealings with the state, seen as an
instrument of Gadj control and subordination of the Roma. It is wholly possible that this dynamic of
self-exclusion did not happen in a void, but rather in the continuation and as a consequence of
exclusion mechanisms engineered by the dominant groups. However, some interpretations of
ethnographic accounts have gone more in the direction of a cultural explanation, advancing that
Roma values are essentially illegitimate in the eyes of the state: Nation states as particular
discursive systems are based on a relationship between people and territory, on the idea of central
power and on citizenship, on disciplined adherence to these systems. The Roma do not adhere to
these principles either discursively, or in action. Their identity is not related to a fixed territory, but to
14
Turkish word present in many of the Balkanic cultures which have been under Ottoman rule, signifying
deceiving, cunning, cheating, and celebrated in popular culture as a sign of superiority to the person one tries
to deceive.
15
I have developed this point further in my PhD thesis (Ivasiuc 2014:124-125).
16
The Gabor from Transylvania, for example, speak of the naia rromane rroma (the nation of the Romani
Roma) when they refer to their clan (Olivera 2012:168).
17
In a de-reifying move concerning the state, I stress here the fact that behind state structures, there are
bureaucrats, who are themselves socialised in particular cultural frames which reflect in their decisions. A
state decision or statement should therefore be contextualised in the cultural frame conducive of its
production.
11

March 29th, 2015
groups of people, they resist central leadership, they resist education and wage labour as instruments
of repression. Thus, the central cultural values that Roma would claim as an ethnic group to
support their way of life are not legitimate, as their way of life is excluded from the discursive
system of the populations they live among (Engebrigtsen 2014). Hence, [t]he Roma are struggling
to secure a place outside state power not by resisting but by evading it. While I would strongly
qualify the statement by advancing that some Roma groups may seek to evade state power, while
some others may position themselves differently, and by proposing a more dynamic view on the
central cultural values, which are perpetually subjected to change, this perspective offers food for
thought about the relevance of citizenship and of the state to some Roma groups.
Perhaps emblematic, along this line of reasoning, is the second example I will propose: the case of
Roma without identity papers18. Although it is widely assumed that either bureaucratic lockdown and
poverty (the benevolent explanation) or neglect, chaotic lifestyle19 and a general lack of awareness in
their case (the paternalistic explanation with cultural racist overtones) is conducive to their
effacement from the citizenship status induced by the lack of identity papers, a historically grounded
hypothesis one could advance is that the experience of deportation, as well as centuries of
domination by the Gadj, within and outside of their state structures, has made some of the Roma
weary of maintaining visibility in front of the state and brought about practices of total selfeffacement from the state panopticon and, more generally, a retreat from and a refusal to deal with
Gadj institutions. This hypothesis, however, needs to be explored empirically, in an attempt to
capture the emic perspective of these groups on their relation to the Gadj and the state.
Seen the ugly face of citizenship as mechanism of exclusion of others, one may question the
promises of emancipation which many scholars advocate in the pursuit of citizenship by
subordinated groups. Anthropological insights that cultural practices of exclusion precede their
reflection in legal arrangements leaves one to wonder if formal access to citizenship rights
necessarily ends exclusionary practices rooted historically and culturally and happening far from the
domain of law and mostly unhindered by it: putative access to formal citizenship may occult the lack
of substantive citizenship in practice. Questioning the emancipatory promise of citizenship is all the
more relevant in light of the history of Roma who have been subjected to slavery. Their
enfranchisement a century and half ago contained the promise of emancipation and acquisition of
full citizenship rights; nevertheless, their subordination continued unimpeded, hinting that the locus
of Roma domination in Gadj societies resides elsewhere than in legal arrangements or formal access
to citizenship status.
From the impasse of EU citizenship to the promise of a micropolitics of social change
18
This discussion is not about the stateless Roma who lost citizenship status in the migratory project they or
their families have undertaken, but about the Roma who live within each state without proper identity papers.
In Romania, there are currently probably only a few thousand Roma individuals without any form of identity
papers left, due to the implementation of PHARE (pre-accession) projects aimed at the inclusion of the Roma;
however, in the past, this group, subjected to the most extreme forms of exclusion, was larger (Ivasiuc 2014).
19
Sometimes attributed to a culture of poverty. The school of thought originating in Oscar Lewis study of
Mexican families in the United States (1959) has been criticised because of the modernistic overtones and a
propensity to legitimate victim blaming mechanisms against groups constructed primarily as poor.
12

March 29th, 2015
After uncovering some of the criticisms addressed from methodological and theoretical points of
view to the concept of citizenship and its representations in academic theories, I will now turn to
problematise the promises of the paradigm of EU citizenship in the case of the Roma. The last part of
the section will propose some empirically grounded considerations, arguing in favour of a shift
towards a micropolitics of social change as purposeful lens for elucidating representations and
practices of political belonging and the agency of grassroots Roma. Interpreting political action as an
attempt to improve the social position of a group, I propose, in the second part, to shift to a
perspective which takes into account the dynamics of social change in which Roma groups engage at
the grassroots level.
Citizenship in the neoliberal era of EU governance

European citizenship is questioned and challenged by the abundant practices of exclusion of the
Roma from the mobility regime on which European citizenship itself is founded (Squire 2011). The
sense that the Roma [encroach] upon the EU right of free movement underlines the contradictions
inherent to EU citizenship, by making graduations of citizenship apparent and invalidating the
acclaimed ideal political and economic qualities of EU space (alar and Mehling 2013:159,163).
In the relatively recent securitisation of migration in Europe (van Munster 2009), the Roma constitute
a case in point as they are increasingly represented as a threat on a multiplicity of levels, subjected to
unequal treatment, exclusion and expulsion practices in Western European states, regardless of their
formal membership in another EU state. The trend to securitise the Roma implies that they are
increasingly governed through securitising narratives, instruments and practices (van Baar 2013,
2014, 2015a, 2015b), revealing illiberal practices in liberal regimes (Bigo and Tsoukala 2008). This
produces the Roma not as second rang, but as third rank EU citizens20, oftentimes pushing them
outside of the boundaries of EU citizenship through the enactment of arbitrary expulsions which do
not conform to the rules applied to other EU citizens (alar and Mehling 2013:168).
The neurotic insistence on security and the emergence of what has been called the neurotic citizen
(Isin 2009) has shifted the order of political priorities in rather ambivalent ways, since security is a
citizenship right, yet at the same time security presides over citizenship and the nexus of citizenship
and security works towards the exclusion of the dangerous class, constituted as non-citizens
(Guillaume and Huysmans 2013:3-4). In opposition, the good citizen is constructed as the low risk
individual, but its subjection to increasingly complex mechanisms of surveillance contributes to
stripping off its citizen rights, in the name of ensuring its right to security. With the rise of the risk
society21, the propensity to pose a threat (to whatever may be considered important) is a new
criterion of exclusion from citizenship, and the Roma are particularly vulnerable to this kind of
exclusion and the inscription in states of emergency. The Italian case, with the declaration of a
nomad emergency in 2008 as first action of the newly elected Berlusconi government, is
emblematic in this sense.
As Ruth Lister observes in her unpacking of inclusive citizenship, what is striking is the disjuncture
between the inclusionary philosophy of critical citizenship theory and the increasingly exclusionary
stance adopted by many nation-states towards outsiders, as we witness an anti-(im)migrant
backlash reinforced by the securitisation of migration (Lister 2008:54). To what possible readings
20
21
The second rank would comprise the non-Roma nationals of new member states.
For a critique of theories of risk society, see Isin 2009.
13

March 29th, 2015
does this disjuncture open itself? Must we read in it the failure of the political category of citizenship
as something attempting to be more than identity based membership? Is this regression of sorts to
identity politics tributary of the demise of inclusive citizenship and other idealistic conceptions?
Does it signify a progressive reduction of citizenship to its formal character and a negation of its
substantive promise? What kinds of transformation of citizenship can we glimpse behind such
deprivation of citizenship (Mantu and Guild 2013)? When rights derived from citizenship implode in
such dramatic ways, is it still productive to apply the citizenship frame, or would it be more fertile to
shift our lens towards other perspectives?
On the EU agenda, one can find recurrent mention to active citizenship as a desirable ideal to be
attained. Active citizenship, Niamh Gaynor (2009) argues, arrived as a salve to many of the social
ills of our time. Emphasizing citizen's own responsibilities, and espousing values of solidarity,
community, and neighbourliness, active citizenship embodies all that is good, rendering it somewhat
immune from criticism. He further argues that active citizenship, as it is currently promoted by state
and select civil society organizations alike, substitutes self-help for redistribution and self-reliance for
state accountability, in a progressive movement of transformation of collective demands and
struggles into schemes of self-governance. If the onus is on the individual to change her own
situation, then failure to become an active citizen through improving ones life conditions is no
longer imputable to the state22. The syntagm emerges in the trail left by the state in its retreat in the
neoliberal era.
Could we perhaps speak of a movement of depoliticisation of citizenship, with the emergence of
neoliberal funding schemes made available by EU bureaucracies for the advancement of active
citizenship23? Could this activation of the individual be read as a neoliberal technology of
citizenship (Cruikshank 1999) in which the focus lies on individual responsibility rather than the state
or collective political mobilisation, and through which the interests of government and the governed
are indirectly harmonised, thereby leading to the pacification of citizens struggles and the
depoliticisation of citizenship? Dagnino offers an illuminating reading of the transformations of the
notion of citizenship in the neoliberal era; she contends that citizenship has been appropriated
and re-signified in various ways by dominant sectors and the state. Thus, reflecting the effects of
neoliberalism, citizenship has begun to be understood and promoted as mere individual integration
into the market (Dagnino 2008:63). For the Roma, this shift has engendered a graduated citizenship
in which preexisting racializing and biopolitical schemes which had already been inscribed onto
Romani populations under communist rule have been reinforced, reshaped, and intersected by new
modes of governance that differentially value population groups according to market mechanisms
(van Baar 2009:29). In a reverse movement, Trehan speaks of the marketisation of Roma rights in
the context of the rupture between Roma NGOs and the grassroots (Trehan 2009:65).
The embeddedness of this new syntagm emerged from the EU bureaucracies in neoliberal funding
schemes on which most of the large Roma NGOs base their activity problematises the role which the
formal segment of Roma civil society may play in fostering political resistance and struggles for the
22
For an incorporation of the active citizenship rhetoric by the European Roma Grassroots Organisation
(ERGO), see van Baar 2011:251-252. The way in which the ERGO defines the notion exemplifies the
depoliticisation of citizenship, with a disproportionate focus on the individual responsibility to empower
oneself. For a critique of empowerment narratives in development, see Ivasiuc 2014:48-51.
23
Taking in Nic Craiths point that [l]ike culture, citizenship is an active rather than a passive process
(2004:290), the syntagm could be considered a pleonasm; at any rate, the juxtaposition of the two indicates
the shift of the enactment of citizenship away from rights and towards a paradigm of volunteer participation.
14

March 29th, 2015
political rights of the Roma. As it has been argued by other observers of the modes of functioning of
Roma NGOs (Kcz and Trehan 2009; Kcz 2012; Kcz and Rvid 2012), these organisations are
sometimes constrained by the environment in which they operate24 to become mere service
providers to Roma communities, operating social inclusion programmes within the rigid frames
designed by funding agencies. At any rate, in the world of NGOs, active citizenship risks to
comfortably install itself as a fund-collecting buzzword rather than a principle structuring strategies
of political mobilisation and activism.
Finally, could we not speak of a certain perverse and paradoxical contribution of the insistance on
citizenship, as individual rather than the collective link to the state, to the depoliticisation of issues of
inequality and marginalisation? These forms of subjecthood require a process of cognitively rooting
collectivities, not individuals, in patterns of historic subordination, and demand political solutions
anchored in collective mobilisation. The focus of citizenship on individual belonging marries strangely
well into the family of neoliberal discourses depoliticising Roma issues by laying the emphasis on
individual lacks and unsuitabilities rather than historical processes of deepening inequality and by
subsequently blocking forms of collective struggle for recognition and redistribution. Analysing the
Roma in terms of citizenship, moreover, risks to essentialise them as the perpetual non-citizens,
especially if observation is not sufficiently fine-tuned to other forms of political belonging and
resistance the Roma may deploy in their daily practice. Perhaps it is not coincidental that the terms
which have been advanced in relation to the study of citizenship in the case of the Roma are often
defined by the negative. Partial citizenship of women in a Roma community of Portugal (Casa Nova
2012), imperfect citizenship of Roma in Italy (Sigona and Monasta 2006), these adjonctions point to
the inadequacy of the category in itself and the need for qualification, in reference to a presupposed
total or perfect citizenship. The perverse reading which such labeling may encourage, in the
paradigmatic shift from collective struggles to mechanisms for the self-disciplining of the individual,
is the inadequacy of the Roma themselves to a nearly sanctified, inescapable, normative political
modernity.
The advance of neoliberalism contributes to the depoliticisation of citizenship by breaking
collective identities into individual units and rendering collective struggles irrelevant compared to the
endeavour of individual empowerment, activation and responsibilisation (read: self-disciplining).
To these dimensions, neoliberalism adds the exacerbation of economic adequacy: if neoliberalism
presupposes the modelling of the state on the example of the profit-seeking firm and the remaking
of individuals to specks of human capital (Brown 2010:97), one may rightfully wonder which
directions, theoretically and empirically, citizenship discourses may take. The focus on the
economically able transforms citizens into consumers and further delegitimises the voices of the
economically deprived. In the case of the Roma, the focus on the right to free movement of citizens
of EU member states economically active within the formal economy, from which derives largely the
current conception of the European citizenship, reduces, rather than expands, the rights of the
destitute strata of the Roma minority in seek of better opportunities in Western countries,
normalising and legitimising their exclusion through the citizenship regime of the EU.
Towards the Roma political subject through a micropolitics of social change

So far I have attempted to uncover the shortcomings, inadequacies and contradictions of the
citizenship frame when researching issues of social change among the European Roma. I have
24
For an expansion upon this point see also Ivasiuc 2014, notably pp. 88-90.
15

March 29th, 2015
shown the limits of a culture-blind approach of citizenship research and suggested that robust
grounding in empiric research has the potential of recentering some of the academic debates, as well
as reveal new, scholarly productive pathways through which the Roma shape their political
belonging. Also, I have problematised the liberal conception of citizenship as grounded in the
individual and relativised the relevance and usefulness of the citizenship lens in the neoliberal frame,
stressing some of its potential adverse effects for the European Roma.
If notions of citizenship can be problematic in understanding the Roma political subject, not only
because of the inherent contradictions outlined above, but also because of the multiple de facto
exclusions which they face (both at national and supranational levels), can an analysis of grassroots
politics (or practices which may resemble it) suggest new paths where we might find better suited
vocabularies? Can grassroots Roma practices aimed at bringing about social change inform us on the
representations and mechanisms of political action and on dynamics of belonging to various polities?
I argue the affirmative. For the purpose of the argument, I would like to offer two empiric
foundations and propose them as suggestions for further research: the agency of the Roma strategic
group of civil servants at grassroots level and the reactions of the other Roma, and the institution of
kirve / nie as a practice of sociality seeking to forge transgressive links across ethnic and social
status boundaries.
Through an ethnographic approach, I propose to move from the macropolitics of citizenship to the
micropolitics of belonging and of social change. In my view, this necessary shift of our lens from the
macro- to micropolitics has three merits. First, informing us on the micropolitical dynamics of Roma
at the grassroots, who are generally perceived as incapable or unwilling of conducting political action
in the classical sense, will contribute to bringing into the spotlight the agency of the non-militant
Roma, painfully underresearched25. Second, an empirically grounded perspective of the micro level
will necessarily reveal cultural practices and illuminate their meanings, thereby potentially suggesting
other ways of being political and new, more culturally adequate concepts and frames. Third, such a
shift will contribute to de-essentialising the victimhood status to which most political science studies
tend to confine the Roma, by revealing the strategies that these groups put in practice daily in
order to transcend their subordination.
First, I will mobilise the analysis of what I identified in my dissertation (Ivasiuc 2014) as a strategic
group at grassroots level and indicate ways in which this group engages in building bonding capital
across community boundaries with development actors, inscribing themselves and their families in a
project of social mobility. The argument which I offered, drawing extensively upon Olivier de Sardans
work on the development encounter as methodological focus for the analysis of development
processes (Olivier de Sardan 2005), is that local Roma actors harness development programs of
various NGOs to the advancement of a collective social mobility project. What is crucial, however, is
that these collectivities tend to be constructed and structured around kinship ties26.
The example I will use is that of a grassroots Roma NGO from the North of Romania, whose strategies
were observed during the implementation of the second component of a project using the
25
Apart from anthropology and ethnologic approaches in applied research, other academic disciplines devote
relatively little attention to the agency of the Roma at grassroots level. Chapter two of my PhD dissertation
provides a more in depth discussion on the framing of the Roma as victims, which is closely linked to this blind
spot.
26
Actually, a simple glance at the kinship ties among various individuals engaged in the formal side of the
Romani movement will also reveal that these are much more prevalent than in the non-Roma formal civil
society sector, indicating cultural patterns whose significance still needs to be ethnographically unearthed.
16

March 29th, 2015
community development approach27. For this component, the implementing organisation,
mpreun Agency for Community Development, headquartered in Bucharest, had selected partner
NGOs in the counties in which the project took place. In the county, the only organisation which
fulfilled the minimum criteria established was recently founded, but was evaluated as having a good
potential to develop and become a relevant actor at the regional level. The role of the NGO was to
work together with the local initiative groups in community development, build their capacity to act
together and to negotiate with the local authorities, assist them in implementing local projects and
conduct advocacy at the county level.
In the community of C, there was already a local organisation. It had 15 members, most of all related
through kinship, out of whom one was a local elected counsellor28, two were health mediators, one a
school mediator and one a Romani language teacher. They were all visibly and significantly more
prosperous and enterprising than the rest of the community. Some of the members of the family had
construction firms, a mini groceries store and stable employment. Because some of them were
employed by the municipality on civil servant positions created for support to Roma communities, or
counsellors involved in local decision making, they were very well linked with the local government
and, although there were regular conflicts with some of the non-Roma within the municipalitys
apparatus, adopted a cooperative approach with the non-Roma in power positions. Also, at national
level, they had links with Roma activists in Bucharest who regularly liaised with them and provided
support. Because of these links and despite the low professionalisation level of the organisation in
terms of capacity, they were preferred partners for any development initiatives undertaken by other
Roma NGOs in the community.
However, the organisation lacked in one respect: its links with the more destitute segments of the
Roma community were fragile at best. There were tensions and the poorer Roma made frequent
allegations as to the self-interested nature of the organisations involvement in Roma related
projects. Gossip channels were directed against this family and their legitimacy to work in the name
of the community was contested. They did not want to have anything to do with the organisation.
In turn, members of the organisation complained that the other Roma, the poor ones, were never
grateful for anything they did for them, and that they were envious of their familys achievements.
The encounter between the selected NGO and the local organisation29 created tensions: the local
NGO contested the legitimacy of an organisation coming from outside the community and refused to
help the facilitator to get in contact with key stakeholders within the municipality. It became
apparent that without the support of this organisation, well engrained within the local decision
making formal and informal networks, the implementation of the project was going to be impossible.
However, if a consensus was to be found, the most destitute segments of the community would not
want to be involved in the project. The choice was to either try to forge links with the organisation in
order to secure entrance to significant decision making individuals within the municipality, who could
advance the goals of the project, or to work with the rest of the community and risk to fail the
implementation of the local project.
The members of the local organisation acted in such ways as to become significant, unavoidable
partners in the project. Thus, the activity within the project was entirely reshaped and based on the
27
I have detailed the logics of the project and its implementation in my dissertation (Ivasiuc 2014:156-189). For
a more detailed account of the case summarised here, see pages 220-222.
28
Subsequently, three more members of the extended family were elected counsellors.
29
The local organisation did not fulfill the minimum criteria set by mpreun, so it could not be selected to
participate formally in the project.
17

March 29th, 2015
participation and cooperation with the local organisation. The members of the organisation
defended its privileged position at local level and brokered a deal which was likely to strengthen its
position and increase the probability of accessing resources. During the project, the county level NGO
supported it and submitted requests for institutional support from the Open Society Institute
Budapest for both organisations. In practice, the local organisation gained access to the network of
development brokers involved in the project, and strengthened its position by building alliances
with other Roma NGOs. In this particular situation, the result of the intervention was the
reaffirmation and strengthening of the position of the strategic group of Roma civil servants in the
community, through the institution they had formed. The influence they already held in relationship
with the local authorities facilitated the sidetracking of the project, which shows that the strategy of
Roma civil servants to build networks with the public authorities can be rewarding in the context of
access to development resources.
What I would like to underline in this case is how certain Roma at local level mobilise development
resources to the advancement of their families project of upward social mobility and manage to
sidetrack and appropriate interventions in order to strengthen their position and increase their
access to resources, forming interest groups whose foundation lies in kinship ties. By using kinship as
a resource, they secure civil servants / counselor positions in strategies recalling monopolistic
practices. They rely mostly on patron-client relationships with non-Roma in powerful positions to
help other members of their extended families reach positions of interest. In exchange, they are
expected to intervene in the Roma community as informal delegates of the local authorities and they
are instituted as representatives of the Roma. Their privileged position with regards to access to
resources, however, problematises their role as social inclusion brokers for the Roma. The
profoundly egalitaristic values of many Roma, expressed in an ethics of sharing (Stewart 1997:75),
put pressure on the families which engage in social mobility by means of gossip and complicate their
work as health or educational mediators in the community. We can see here a micropolitics of both
groups: on one hand, the better-off family seeks to improve and strengthen its power within the
local authorities and, beyond this level, in networks of Roma development brokers, by positioning
themselves as sole legitimate representatives of the Roma community; on the other hand, the most
destitute segments resort to destabilisation tactics and deny the representation legitimacy of Roma
families engaged in social ascension.
In my view, what this account suggests is how finely striated political action within a single Roma
community can be, and how inadequate the macro lens on citizenship, belonging and political action
is to detect such fine-tunings in various strategies of social change. A closer look at these dynamics in
the context of social inclusion policies and development projects would reveal the various social
logics which inform the action of different segments of the same community, as well as patterns of
social change in which various Roma groups engage.
The second account I would like to explore in this section is the place of ritual kinship (kirve / nie30)
in shaping strategies of social mobility of the Roma. I think that this institution has not been explored
sufficiently as a frame for the micropolitics of social change. I would like to propose that the
institution of cross-ethnic ritual kinship relationships, in which a non-Roma is called upon to play to
the role of godfather / godmother to a Roma child, is mobilised by many Roma from different groups
30
The ties between godparents and the family of the baptised child. For an example of kirve (in Romanian:
nie) relations in a Transylvanian community, see Foszt 2007:95 and following.
18

March 29th, 2015
as a strategy of transgressing ethnic and social status boundaries31. Socio-economic interests32
structure the choice of a non-Roma godfather / godmother, since (s)he is expected to play the role of
a sponsor, support the childs family when in need and be an important contact point within the
dominant group: [t]he godfather should be the protector and sponsor of the godchild; his door
should be open at all times to receive him/her; he should not forget to offer gifts on his godchilds
birthday and name-day, and he should be willing to meet occasional requests from his godchild for
small amounts of money or other trinkets (Foszt 2007:96-97; see also pp. 111 and 127).
From a micropolitics perspective, this institution could be seen not only as an attempt at gathering
social capital and forging links with the economically dominant, but also as a micropolitics of
recognition and, simultaneously, of redistribution. If, with Dagnino, we see citizenship struggles as
the right to define what we want to be members of, citizenship is no longer confined to the
relationship between the individual and the state, but becomes a parameter for all social relations,
bringing an ethical dimension to social relations (2010:104-105). Through the institution of kirve /
nie, regulated by rules putting respect and generosity at the core of social relations, some Roma
oblige non-Roma, in a piecemeal way, to acknowledge their humanity through the ties they are
encouraged to create with Roma families, to recognise their legitimate belonging to a community
forged through these types of social ties, and to redistribute material benefits (albeit in limited
manner) through such channels. Thus, they become political, in that by forging these social ties with
the dominant they question the naturalness of the hierarchies producing them as socially inferior
and excluded from social contact with them, they expose the arbitrariness of the foundations of the
social order and invite other types of ties into the relationship. With Isin, we may contend that these
acts are not political in the way being political [is] envisaged by their dominant others, citizens.
Rather, these acts [redefine] the ways of being political by developing symbolic, social, cultural, and
economic practices that [enable] them to constitute themselves as political agents under new terms,
taking different positions in the social space than those in which they were previously positioned (Isin
2002:275-276). They enact power from below by opening up new possibilities to establish
themselves not as Gypsies suffused with negative stereotypes, but as ritual kin, therefore eliciting
another kind of gaze from the Gadj than the one which constitutes them as dominated. They forge
new possibilities of belonging and of being political by making claims. These practices are neither
political claims in the name of the Roma as abstract subject, nor individual claims. They are pragmatic
claims for new socialities between Roma and non-Roma families, a social unit both culturally
meaningful for the Roma and within immediate grasp33.
31
It is noteworthy that Lockwood finds that this form of fictive kinship is practiced by the Muslim Bosnians
with Christians or with better-off Muslims, exclusively to forge links across major social boundaries
(Lockwood 1979).
32
A very interesting case is the underage marriage of King Cioabs daughter in 2003, with a former Romanian
minister of interior as godfather of the couple; this event spurred international critique and a major scandal in
Romania. Following the intervention of Baroness Emma Nicholson against the marriage, King Cioab invited her
to be the godmother of the future children issued from the marriage. This shows how the institution can serve
not only socio-economic interests, but also mediate conflicts. For a complete account of the event, see Foszt
2007:203-207.
33
Granted, this will not alter power dynamics at macro level or show any immediate dramatic improvements
for the whole Roma population. But it is by gradually opening other possibilities that the field of the possible is
altered. The strength of a micropolitics approach, if we side with Deleuze and Guattari, is that it makes
perceptible what macropolitics cannot grasp, the quanta flows, the molecular escapes from omnipotence
(Deleuze and Guattari 2005[1987]:216-218) through which resistance is enacted.
19

March 29th, 2015
These two examples illustrate how, if we shift the perspective from the macro to the micro level and
embed the analysis in ethnographic accounts, we may find units of relevance which can be
significantly more productive than the state or suprastate levels. It is because of the place of kinship
ties among the Roma and their historical embeddedness in local Gadj societies that it might prove
more fertile to focus the analysis of their political agency on this unit, and not on levels which are
much more distant to be acted upon from the grassroots in ways described by classical citizenship
studies.
The hints offered in this section for a rooting of Roma citizenship in grassroots practices come to
support the suggestion of developing a less dramatic notion of politics (van Baar 2011:236). But
what I propose by mobilising an anthropological approach to the issue is also to root this notion of
politics in cultural practices observable at grassroots level and modulate it by using a micropolitics
approach. Through such an approach, the vocabularies of social change and resistance open up new
possibilities to enrich the debate on the Roma as political subject.
Conclusions
In this paper, I have interrogated the promises and dead-ends of approaching the Roma political
subject in terms of citizenship. In the first part of the paper, I have suggested that the cultureblindness of citizenship studies and their insufficient or superficial grounding in empiric research are
likely to occult more than they illuminate: such accounts revolve around modulations of
citizenship, arguing that the Roma are partly, imperfectly, in graduated ways or not at all citizens,
but failing to address the issue of the relevance of the concept itself in front of these
imperfections. Neither the political culture of the societies to which the Roma groups belong, or
the representations and practices of the Roma themselves, articulated in culturally relevant ways,
have been brought into political science debates in order to illuminate some of the dynamics
explored.
As a result, essential inflections and normativities embedded in the concept of citizenship have not
stricken many political scientists as problematic, or even as slightly irrelevant. I have shown, for
example, how the focus on the relationship which citizenship installs between the state and the
individual might prove irrelevant for some Roma groups who might wilfully evade state power and
privilege group ties rather than individual freedom. The oppressive side of state power, which, I
think, many Roma have experienced, suggests that it is relevant to question whether the Roma
themselves see, in a reconciled relationship with the state, a promise for emancipation; whether
they do, or are likely to mobilise resources for such a project; and whether they would readily
embark on it, instead of using other, culturally familiar strategies to improve their standing in society
(or to evade being subordinated to it). Might it be our own ethnocentric lack of imagination blocking
from our view other ways of being political than the ones our societies take for universal?
The last part of the paper has started by questioning the relevance and productivity, for the Roma, of
the EU citizenship lens in a neoliberal Europe in which security concerns precede citizenship rights
and the market logic transforms citizens in depoliticised consumers. These problematisations call for
new approaches and perhaps a fresh look at the Roma political subject from new perspectives. Thus,
the last section has been an attempt at opening up new conceptions of being political and seeking
change which the Roma may articulate at grassroots level. Through ethnographic accounts of
20

March 29th, 2015
strategies and tactics taking place at the local level, within and across ethnic and social status
boundaries, I have attempted to indicate that underneath all the citizenship talk, there are other
perspectives to be explored in a micropolitics of social change. These perspectives would not only be
more respectful of the diversity of humans in articulating explicit or implicit political projects, but
also scholarly productive, signalling our engagement in a project of intellectual decolonisation. The
analysis invites caution in prescribing Gadj conceptual categories as panacea to Roma subordination
and exclusion and warns against such prescriptions, especially when our knowledge and
understanding of the Roma, beyond the complexity of the research object in itself, are so limited.
Also, the analysis is an invitation to vary the focus of political science accounts by supplementing the
analysis of the formal side of the Romani movement, with its familiar vocabularies of citizenship and
human rights, with alternative articulations of being political engineered by Roma groups at the
grassroots. What lies behind familiar vocabularies is what still needs to be unearthed.
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