Roma as both European Minority and Outsider par excellence? Interactions between Inclusionary and Exclusionary frames

• In Event: 066 - Section on Political Sociology Roundtables (one-hour)
  In Refereed Roundtable: Table 02. Citizenship and Inclusion

Abstract

The Roma take a paradoxical position in the constructed European space. On the one hand, European institutions have argued from the 1990s onwards that Roma can be seen as a European minority ‘par excellence’. However, Roma are still continuously confronted with their construction as ‘the other’, exemplified by the persistent violations of their human rights across multiple European countries. This article claims that more research is needed into the interaction of both inclusionary and exclusionary frames in order to understand this paradoxical Roma subject position. Therefore, this article focuses on the discursive contestation in the media in the aftermath of a human rights violation, as this entails a struggle between different interpretive communities defending specific meanings and interpretations of inclusion and exclusion. The case in our study involves a deportation of Slovak Roma immigrants by the Belgian government in 1999 (Čonka case). Using framing and category analysis, we identified multiple conceptualizations of the Roma migrants: Roma as disempowered victims; as the ‘good’ non-deserving; as unlawful, deserving refugees; and as deserving inadaptables. Furthermore, Roma were overmarked by multiple differentiating categories. These frames were connected by an emphasis on the excluded character of the Roma, a possible ‘deserving’ status, and a dominance of the nation state model in a migration context. As these chains of equivalence clarify how inclusionary and exclusionary conceptualizations of the Roma migrants can interact and converge, these results aim to contribute to Romani and migration studies, connecting the research on inclusionary tendencies and on exclusionary regimes.

Author

• Chloë Delcour, Ghent University