Nando Sigona

Locating ‘The Gypsy Problem’. The Roma in Italy: Stereotyping, Labelling and ‘Nomad Camps’

Romani camps are to be found all over Italy and host around 40,000 residents. They are known as ‘nomad camps’, implying that their inhabitants are vagrants who do not settle in one place. This article investigates how cultural concepts such as nomadism are employed in Italy to legitimise segregation policy. It also explores the role of space and place in the liaison between the Roma and the Italians. The focus, therefore, is not on the Roma themselves, but on how Italians interact with them and the degree to which Italian public policy and bureaucratic practice form, transform and manipulate their identity. By analysing the circularity of the relationship among stereotypes, labelling and policy, the paper deconstructs the so-called ‘problema zingari’ (‘Gypsy problem’). Finally, it stresses the central role played by the camps as loci of the ‘problem’, both in preserving and reinforcing the status quo and in providing a refuge for people with minimal social and legal rights.

Ethnography, diversity and urban space

This article is an introduction to a special issue on ethnography, diversity and urban space. It places the ‘diversity turn’ within studies of migration and multiculture historically and discusses the implications of concepts such as ‘diversity’ and more recently ‘super-diversity’ for scholarship, policy and identity politics. It argues that diversity is a helpful concept for studies of migration and multiculture because it avoids the essentialism and bias towards ethnic affiliation often characterising studies within the multiculturalism framework, while being more grounded locally than studies within the transnationalism framework. It examines the methodological implications of increasing diversity and complexity on ethnographic studies and the definition of the ‘field’. It makes the point that increasing urban diversity poses a challenge to ethnographic ideals of ‘immersion’ and wholeness. Finally, it introduces the individual articles in the special issue.

Migration routes and strategies of young undocumented migrants in England: a qualitative perspective

Abstract Based on data from in-depth qualitative interviews with young undocumented migrants from Brazil, China, Ukraine, Zimbabwe and Kurds from Turkey, this article explores the entry strategies used by young people in relation to the UK immigration system and their undocumented status. Against a brief account of Britains regime, the paper first examines why and how these migrants come to the UK and the ways in which they entered the country. Second, the paper explores strategies in relation to immigration status and considers: the use of different immigration statuses; the role of the asylum system in their strategies including as an attempt to regularize status or as a route to becoming undocumented when refused asylum. Finally, the paper examines the extent to which these young migrants have agency in their efforts to negotiate the complex and exclusionary immigration and asylum regime.

The governance of Romani people in Italy: discourse, policy and practice

Abstract This article provides a critical overview of public policy and practice towards the Romani population in Italy over a period of fifty years. It investigates the uses and consequences of the label ‘nomads’ and widespread essentialist assumptions about their alleged nomadic lifestyle, and the ambiguity embedded in policy which claims to solve the ‘Gypsy problem’. It explores in particular the ways in which recent political debate and policy initiatives have succeeded in reframing the Roma issue exclusively in terms of emergency and public security. This discursive shift has produced the rescaling of the governance of Roma, relocating the responsibility for managing the Romani people from local authorities to central government. A significant corollary to this process has been the transfer of the Roma issue from the social policy agenda to a mere policing one, with important consequences in public policy, especially in relation to housing.

Romani Politics in Contemporary Europe

Foreword; E.Balibar

Integrative Paradigms, Marginal Reality: Refugee Community Organisations and Dispersal in Britain

In Britain, the dispersal system for asylum-seekers, introduced in April 2000, has been widely criticised for its negative impacts, upon both asylum-seekers and the regions to which they were dispersed. This article addresses the effects of dispersal on refugee community organisations (RCOs) through two principal aims, the first of which is to outline the effects of dispersal upon RCOs in selected fieldwork locations. Three themes are examined: the growth in refugee communities outside London, the constraints of funding regimes and the politics of community representation in the local policy environment. The second aim, developed through the presentation of our fieldwork material, is to establish a critical perspective on the role and function of RCOs. We question the assumed integrative role of RCOs as interpreted in the policy and academic literature, and we underline the importance to the integration process of informal networks in refugee communities. A central strand of our argument is that the analysis of RCOs needs to be firmly anchored within the broader context of migrant incorporation operating in Britain. We conclude that the dispersal arrangements serve as a model of inclusion and representation for RCOs which is heavily conditioned by the broader race relations and multicultural framework. Far from promoting the integration of refugees, this framework may rather perpetuate a condition of institutionalised marginality for refugee groups.

Refugee Community Organisations and Dispersal: Networks, Resources and Social Capital

Introduction Refugee community organisation: paradigms and perspectives The dispersal framework RCOs in the West Midlands: emerging organisational forms The North West: fragmentation and unity in refugee communities RCOs in London: competition and consolidation Comparative issues: RCOs and the impacts of dispersal Conclusions.

Introduction Anti-Gypsyism and the politics of exclusion: Roma and Sinti in contemporary Italy

Roma and Sinti have been continuously present in the Italian peninsula since at least the 1400s and as such must be considered an integral part of Italian history and culture. As Piasere argues (1999, 2005), Roma and Sinti’s cultures and their contemporary conditions in Italy, as elsewhere in Europe, cannot be studied as realities separate from those of Gagé (non-Roma); rather, they are profoundly intertwined with the history, economics and social dynamics of the continent, a fact that has been formally recognized by the European Union (EU). Some major migratory flows of Roma and Sinti can be identified in Italy’s history: a first phase in the late Middle Ages, a second period in the latter half of the 1800s (owing to the redrawing of political borders in Europe and the emancipation of Roma slaves in Romania) and, most recently, following the collapse of communist regimes in Eastern Europe and EU enlargement. While this macro-level migratory history, as well as the many more minor movements within and into the country, are crucial for understanding the great diversity of cultures and social and legal statuses that Roma and Sinti have in contemporary Italy, we argue that an analysis of their roles in today’s Italy must also involve an examination of the purposes they serve, now as in the past, in representing a threatening internal other against which non-Roma society builds community identities, unity and a sense of security (Sigona 2002, 2005; Clough Marinaro 2012). Indeed, since the Renaissance, zingari (Gypsies) have been to a large extent imagined by the surrounding society, but the dangers that they have been seen to incarnate have resulted in very real and often brutal policies to make them disappear, through persecution, forced itinerancy or coercive assimilation. Just as Roma and Sinti’s history has been one of adaptation and resistance to these powerful forces, today they continue to respond to the roles that Gagé society assigns to them and the policies with which it attempts to manage them. This volume therefore focuses on some of the multiple ways in which Roma and Sinti are defined by Italian politicians Journal of Modern Italian Studies 16(5) 2011: 583–589

Editors' Introduction. The Roma in the New EU: Policies, Frames and Everyday Experiences

This article introduces a set of articles that examine Romani mobilities in the context of contemporary European policies on migration and ethnic minority protection. The Roma are a unique case because their experiences of mobility are strongly affected by developments and debates in both these policy areas. Drawing on the expertise of a diverse and international group of social and political scientists, who consider the matter from various disciplinary and interdisciplinary backgrounds, this collection takes stock of two decades of Roma-related research in Europe. At the same time, it connects this work with wider scholarly debates in migration, citizenship, and minority and human rights studies.

Everyday statelessness in Italy: status, rights, and camps

ABSTRACT This article is an invitation to reflect sociologically on statelessness, to date mostly absent from an otherwise burgeoning sociological debate on citizenship, rights, and legal status. Millions of stateless people worldwide confirm the need for a more nuanced understanding of contemporary forms of membership attentive to the interplay of different rights regimes. While the article characterizes the Roma as the undeserving stateless, so alien to the dominant imagination of citizenship as to be even denied access to the procedure for status recognition, it also argues that the experience of Roma families who have lived for years in Italy in absence of any formal citizenship complicates Hannah Arendts insightful characterization of stateless people as rightless. The lack of any citizenship does not make the Roma bare life, it reveals instead political subjectivity as an embodied and emplaced process, where subjects actively negotiate their position in the world and vis-à-vis the state.