Realizing Roma Rights (Pennsylvania Studies in Human Rights) - Hardcover

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0812248996 ISBN 13: 9780812248999

Verlag: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2017

Inhaltsangabe

Realizing Roma Rights investigates anti-Roma racism and documents a growing Roma-led political movement engaged in building a more inclusive and just Europe. The book brings to the forefront voices of leading and emerging Romani scholars, from established human rights experts to policy and advocacy leaders with deep experience.

Realizing Roma Rights offers detailed accounts of anti-Roma racism, political and diplomatic narratives chronicling the development of European and American policy, and critical examination of Roma-related discourse and policies in contemporary Europe. It also investigates the complex role of the European Union as a driver of progressive change and a flawed implementer of fundamental rights.

This book will provide a useful source for those interested in the dynamics of contemporary stigma and discrimination, the enduring challenges of mobilizing within severely disempowered communities, and the complexities of regional and transnational human rights mechanisms. Spanning as it does a broad disciplinary range that encompasses law, history, sociology, political theory, critical race theory, human rights, organization theory, and education, Realizing Roma Rights is a useful teaching tool for interdisciplinary courses on human rights, racism and xenophobia, political theory, European studies, and minority issues.

Contributors: Jacqueline Bhabha, James A. Goldston, Will Guy, Fernando Macías, David Mark, Teresa Sordé-Martí, Margareta Matache, David Meyer, Andrzej Mirga, Kálmán Mizsei, Krista Oehlke, Alexandra Oprea, Elena Rozzi, Erika Schlager, Michael Uyehara, Peter Vermeersch.

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Jacqueline Bhabha is Professor of the Practice of Health and Human Rights at the Harvard School of Public Health, the Jeremiah Smith Jr. Lecturer in Law at Harvard Law School, and Adjunct Lecturer in Public Policy at the Harvard Kennedy School. She is Director of Research at the Harvard FXB Center for Health and Human Rights. Andrzej Mirga is Polish Roma, an ethnologist, analyst, and activist. He chairs the board of the Roma Education Fund (Budapest). Margareta Matache is a Romani scholar and activist from Romania. She is an instructor at the Harvard FXB Center for Health and Human Rights and Director of the Roma Program at Harvard.

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Realizing Roma Rights: An Introduction
Jacqueline Bhabha

The Roma scholar Ian Hancock opens his classic book The Pariah Syndrome with a remarkable quotation from the work of Sam Beck, an American and fellow scholar about his fieldwork in Romania: "Romanians who are in administrative government and political positions of authority, explain the Tsigani [a racial slur for the Roma] situation by referring to America. 'You know,' they say, 'The Tsigani are like your Negroes: foreign, lazy, shiftless, untrustworthy, and black.' " Virulent and deep-seated racial hatred is only one of the commonalities linking these two large minorities in the world's richest continents. A recent history of centuries-old slavery and the persistence of dramatic contemporary social and economic disadvantage and marginalization are others.

But alongside the commonalities, there are notable differences. The eminent U.S. civil rights advocate and constitutional law expert Jack Greenberg notes that "for much of their histories, the Roma in Eastern Europe and African Americans traversed similar paths. . . . During World War II . . . their paths forked." He notes the contrast between the development of the civil rights movement and antisegregation legal victories in the United States on the one hand, and the lack of political visibility and concomitant social marginalization and educational segregation of East European Roma on the other. From the perspective of this book, which aims to bring Roma rights issues to the foreground for an international readership interested in con- temporary human rights challenges, other differences are also striking and relevant.

A significant difference between the African American and the Roma communities, explored in this book, is the nature of civil society engagement with the communities' respective issues. The American civil rights movement has a long and venerable history, encompassing a broad range of discrete political and social currents to be sure, but eventually generating highly visible and effective national leadership, coherent political and legal demands, and mass mobilization. A huge body of literature reflects this tradition and cumulative experience. By contrast, the Roma movement, in Europe and elsewhere in the world, has not yet established a visible presence as a mass movement. In spite of targeted demands and modest forms of organizing in a range of different countries during the twentieth century, it was only in 1971 that Roma leaders from around the world gathered outside Lon- don for the first International Romani Congress, to decide on the symbols of Roma unity and launch concerted legal and political claims.

Another contrast between African American and Roma movements relates to the modality of political organizing. The priorities and the methods advanced by Roma organizations, especially in post-Communist Eastern Europe, were often influenced by external stakeholders. Whereas grassroots activism on African American civil rights was a critical precondition and precursor of constitutional and policy transformations across the United States, advances in the rights and circumstances of the Roma have largely been the result of a different form of activism. Advocates have focused their efforts on legislative and policy reforms, strategic litigation, or access to education and health, with less attention paid to community empowerment and participation. This form of organizing has had some impact. Whereas the 1969 Council of Europe Recommendation on the situation of "Gypsies and Other Travelers in Europe" framed the issue in terms of Roma victimhood and vulnerability, more recent EU member state or commission documents, by contrast, stress the central importance of Roma leadership and active participation in processes of change. Roma activism has forced EU policy makers to engage with the Roma community on more equal terms.

In the United States these developments in the political positioning of the Roma community do not register. The vast majority of Americans, including otherwise well-informed people, know little if anything about the estimated 14 million Roma worldwide, despite a long-standing (if small) Roma presence within the United States. This lack of awareness persists, even with well-publicized recent government-sponsored attacks on Roma settlements in France and Italy, and the proliferation of anti-Roma hate speech, including by representatives of mainstream political parties in Hungary, Romania, and Greece. These situations are discussed in detail in several of the chapters in this volume.

This American knowledge lacuna makes the publication of Realizing Roma Rights long overdue. We hope awareness and discussion prompted by the book will stimulate integration of Roma issues into broader social and political debates on ongoing discrimination, stigma, and segregation in the United States, Europe, and elsewhere. Because its focus is cross-regional, and its contributors have diverse backgrounds—national government, the academy, civil society, and international organizations—the book provides insights into a wide range of themes related to Europe's Roma community. Future research needs to target other under-studied Roma populations living all over the world, including Latin America, the United States, and the Middle East.

Realizing Roma Rights explores the dynamics of social exclusion and stigma, the challenges of European and national policy development and implementation, and the history of Roma political and social mobilization. We hope that increased familiarity with Roma rights challenges will stimulate activists and experts who have developed successful strategies for tackling social exclusion in other fields to contribute their insights to advancing the Roma situation.

Part I, "The Long Shadow of Anti-Roma Discrimination," investigates the efficacy of targeted intervention, both from the perspective of impact litigation (Alexandra Oprea) and more broadly across the domains of education, housing, and social violence (Elena Rozzi). Part II, "International and Regional Perspectives," presents the perspectives of government officials (Erika Schlager, David Meyer and Michael Uyehara) involved in Roma rights promotion. The contributors to Part III, "The Longue Durée: The History of Roma Policy as an Element in U.S. Foreign Policy" (Andrzej Mirga, Kálmán Mizsei, and Margareta Matache and Krista Oehlke), switch the focus to European and national institutions themselves and toward the obstacles to Roma inclusion that they have encountered or contributed to. Why is the current impact of vigorous interventions and well-funded innovations targeting Roma exclusion so limited? Exploration of the reasons for this disappointing result lies at the heart of the analysis advanced by the authors in this volume.

Part IV, "The Enduring Challenge of Tackling Anti-Roma Institutional Discrimination and Popular Racism in Contemporary Europe: A Comparative Analysis," features the work of James A. Goldston and of Will Guy. Part V of this volume is titled "Looking Forward: The Imperative of Roma Community Mobilization and Leadership" (Peter Vermeersch, Teresa Sordé Martí and Fernando Macías, and David Mark). The critical question of Roma political engagement, at the level of leadership within national and European institutions, but also at grassroots level in municipalities, regions, and national forums, resonates across the European Union. It is an urgent continental issue, whether the vantage point is France, Italy, and Spain or, farther east, Romania, Czech Republic, and Hungary.

Experts have noted that much European Roma policy, within the European Commission for example, has been prompted not by grassroots demands for justice or inclusion but by pressure from EU member states concerned about Roma...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: University of Pennsylvania Press
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2017
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0812248996
• ISBN 13: 9780812248999
• Einband: Gebundene Ausgabe
• Anzahl der Seiten: 308
• Herausgeber: Bhabha Jacqueline, Mirga Andrzej, Matache Margareta
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: preigu; mail@preigu.de; ; Lengericher Landstr. 19; Osnabrück; 49078; Deutschland