Georgie Wemyss

Kathryn Cassidy

Nira Yuval Davis

Using detailed examples from Finland, Hungary, Canada and the UK, this book explores relationships between the racialization and discrimination experienced by heterogeneous European Roma populations, and the processes of everyday bordering embedded in state policies and media discourses. In the context of the long histories of discrimination experienced by Roma people across Europe, the chapters engage with changing EU policies, including the recent tensions between inter-European de-bordering and the selective immigration policies introduced as different states react to EU free movement. Employing an intersectional analysis, the authors capture the perspectives of differentially situated people and associated discourses to examine the continuing racism experienced by European Roma citizens in their interaction with bordering technologies. They examine the homogenizing ‘racial othering’ and construction of Roma as a ‘criminal category’ that co-exists with the differentiations made between ‘indigenous’ and ‘migrant’ Roma central to dominant bordering discourses and the contestations of different Roma populations. Chapters focus on Roma activism and the media, the exclusion of Roma residents via urban regeneration and welfare provision, and powerful media and political discourses about Roma populations in different national and transnational contexts. This book was originally published as a special issue of Ethnic and Racial Studies.

Racialized Bordering Discourses on European Roma

Nira Yuval-Davis

Controlling national borders has once again become a key concern of contemporary states and a highly contentious issue in social and political life. But controlling borders is about much more than patrolling territorial boundaries at the edges of states: it now comprises a multitude of practices that take place at different levels, some at the edges of states and some in the local contexts of everyday life – in workplaces, in hospitals, in schools – which, taken together, construct, reproduce and contest borders and the rights and obligations associated with belonging to a nation-state. This book is a systematic exploration of the practices and processes that now define state bordering and the role it plays in national and global governance. Based on original research, it goes well beyond traditional approaches to the study of migration and racism, showing how these processes affect all members of society, not just the marginalized others. The uncertainties arising from these processes mean that more and more people find themselves living in grey zones, excluded from any form of protection and often denied basic human rights.

Kathryn Cassidy

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