Abstract
Van Baar combines the debate about Roma-related ‘institutional developmentalism’ with a reflection on how anti-Roma racisms have been addressed in the literature. He argues that, at the intersection of discourses and practices of anti-Roma racisms with programmes that are officially dedicated to improving the situation of the Roma, these development programmes have often become highly ambiguous. He argues that under biopolitical conditions, development-related governmentalities vis-à-vis the Roma tend to isolate them and contribute more to governing their poverty than to improving their situation. A ‘de-developmentalization’ tends to take place which is no longer based on the idea that the Roma will gradually join in with their ‘developed’ fellow citizens, but on the racialization of the Roma’s status as representing a lower societal position.
I would like to thank Ulderico Daniele, Ana Ivasiuc, and Regina Kreide for their helpful comments on earlier drafts of this chapter.
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- 1.
We should discuss Roma-related programmes beyond the well-established binaries of plan vs. implementation, intention vs. achievement or success vs. failure (van Baar 2011: 5–6, 252–53, 258–60). I have therefore put ‘fail’ in inverted commas here. In the end, ‘because “failed” development projects can so successfully help to accomplish important strategic tasks behind the back of the most sincere participants, it does become less mysterious why “failed” development projects should end up being replicated again and again’ (Ferguson 1990: 256).
- 2.
This representation is not imposed on the Roma in a top-down manner, for Roma and pro-Roma activistnetworks have also mobilized and upscaled (through lobbying at the EU level) discourses of antigypsyism against EU Member States in order to strategically articulate where their governments have ‘failed’ (cf. van Baar 2011: 267).
- 3.
The idea of developmentalism inherent in post-colonial thinking was not entirely new historically, but had clear predecessors in anti-imperial thinking in the Enlightenment (van Baar 2011: 92–99, 140–46), as well as in 19th century schemes of social evolution (Ferguson 2006: 179). Yet, Ferguson (ibid. 180–81) emphasizes that, with the emergence of racial thinking in its modern form in the 18th century, racial difference had started to be seen as a result of history, and the correlated thinking in terms of different ‘races’ reflected a reified hierarchy in which ‘inferior’ races were seen as degenerative.
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van Baar, H. (2019). From ‘Lagging Behind’ to ‘Being Beneath’? The De-developmentalization of Time and Social Order in Contemporary Europe. In: van Baar, H., Ivasiuc, A., Kreide, R. (eds) The Securitization of the Roma in Europe. Human Rights Interventions. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-77035-2_8
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