RESPONSE
Julija Sardelić, Victoria University of Wellington
Before I begin responding to the reviews of my book The Fringes of Citizenship, I would like to express my deep gratitude both to the GlobalCit Observatory team, for organizing the review symposium and the reviewers Sunnie Rucker-Chang, Djordje Sredanovic, Manuela Boatcǎ, Tina Magazzini and Will Kymlicka for a fruitful, thought-provoking and critical engagement with the book. I would also like to thank other reviewers who have engaged with my book on different occasions as well as those who have read it. Given this is my first monograph, I feel humbled that the scholars whose work I appreciate immensely have taken the time to first read the book and engage with it in so many different ways. The reviews have illuminated the many different directions that this book could have taken in its analysis and opened a number of questions that I hope I will be able to consider in more detail in the future as I am not sure I will able to do them justice in this response. I am hoping, however, that I will be able to offer some modest reflections at least. I would also like to extend an apology for not being able to write a response earlier (which resulted from unexpected medical leave followed by parental leave).
In The Fringes of Citizenship I sought to offer a socio-legal inquiry of how citizenship, and in particular its practical materialisations within Europe, asserts itself to be striving towards the inclusion of all citizens, either through a universalist liberal notion or with the establishment of special ‘multicultural’ variations; yet at the same time all the manifestations of citizenship have ended up marginalising Roma. The practical manifestations of citizenship were accompanied by an uncritical mass production of different policies for ‘Romani integration’ both at EU and national levels, on one hand. On the other hand, as Sunnie Rucker-Chang illuminates in her review, there has been growing important scholarly work in Critical Romani Studies, including her work such as Roma Rights and Civil Rights (Chang and Rucker-Chang 2020), that challenge the policies, practices and structures that lead to the subordination of Roma as racialised minorities. There is, of course, also a long-standing scholarly literature in citizenship studies (including the Routledge Handbook on Global Citizenship Studies, the edited volume Within and Beyond Citizenship and many other works) that show, as Manuela Boatcǎ explicates in her review and work (e.g. Boatcǎ and Roth 2016; Boatcǎ 2021), that citizenship has never been an all-encompassing inclusive endeavour of equal members in practice.
Yet there seems to be a discrepancy between this scholarly literature and still a broadly accepted view among policy makers and state authorities that citizenship, in its essence, is an inclusive endeavour that needs to be slightly tweaked to address instances of marginalisation rather than reconsidered in itself. With The Fringes of Citizenship I was hoping to highlight some evidence that shows citizenship itself and not Romani ‘integration’ (the conceptualisation of ‘integration’ is problematic at best (Goodwin and Buijs 2013) or racist at worst (Matache 2017)) should be reconsidered at its core (p.12). To reflect on my own position, the book partially came out of the discontent with state and EU policies that were ‘imposed’ on the Romani-led and pro-Roma grass-root NGOs I was a part of. It very much echoed some of the findings that the work of these NGOs was ignored, and then the same NGOs were expected to work to ‘integrate’ Roma rather than question the structures that marginalise Roma, including citizenship. In this regard, I wanted to contemplate ‘how dominant groups maintain their positions through the invisible edges of citizenship and contribute to marginalisation’ (p. 11) and also shed light on how different national and international authorities use the policies around citizenship to ‘justify actions that are clearly racist towards Roma’ as well as ‘state discourses used to legitimise racism towards Roma’ (p.6).
Upon reflection, after reading the reviews, I should have been more explicit throughout the book that departing from a focus on Roma as migrants, ethnic minorities or a disadvantaged social group in order to mount an investigation of citizenship, is grounded on previous work on racism and racialisation. This includes my own research (for example, ‘Fifty Shades of Racism’; Sardelić 2014) where I say that the position of Roma ‘cannot be simply explained by socio-economic deprivation or ethnic discrimination, but needs to include the dimension of racialisation’ (Sardelić 2017: 490). While I have specifically dealt with racialised citizenship and statelessness in Chapter III, I have less explicitly connected my work in other chapters (for example Chapter I, p. 23). I agree with Sunnie Rucker-Chang that Europe still problematically positions itself predominantly outside racial hierarchies and especially not as the space where these are produced. I also think that Djordje Sredanovic importantly illuminates that racism towards Romani minorities in West Europe reinforces racism in Eastern Europe and vice versa.
As Tina Magazzini notes in her review, the scholarship has only recently turned from the ‘blaming the victim’ discourse to the discussion on societal processes that perpetuate marginalisation in different contexts. Yet the continued policy preoccupation with ‘Romani integration’ that has been reproduced through numerous international, EU and national reports, does little in the way of re-thinking how basic building blocks, such as citizenship, operate to position different groups within different hierarchies or topologies (Hepworth 2015).
Furthermore, as Manuela Boatcǎ very rightly points out, it is crucial to reflect on centuries-long domination throughout history (including slavery), as for example Ian Hancock (2002) did in his work and Ana Mirga-Kruszelnicka in her incredibly illuminating book Mobilizing Romani Ethnicity (Mirga-Kruszelnicka 2022). I absolutely share the conviction that this broader history is connected to the formation of citizenship inequalities and it should be elucidated through the connected histories approach. While I have made references to this longstanding history and the previous work on it, I have emphasized much more how majority groups and structures maintain their own dominant position through current arrangements that produce civic marginalisation within citizenship. Part of the reason why I also chose this orientation was not only because others have illuminated this history in detail, but also because I found that a number of court cases and other documents only referred to this history when they wanted to disengage from the responsibility for the current position of Roma, but also other marginalised citizens. These often claimed that Romani minorities are on the margins because of the history and it is not the responsibility of current regimes to address these injustices in a self-congratulating logic that this is the ‘best of all worlds’, which is obviously not the case if you look at it from the fringes. Furthermore, I also strongly subscribe to Shachar’s view on citizenship being a ‘birth-right lottery’ (Shachar, 2009), but I wanted to focus mostly on what citizenship ‘does’ to people who it claims to be including as citizens. However, I agree that it would have been an important angle to include to the discussion as well as connect it to other crucial work, including Tudor’s (2018).
Similarly, I also agree that I should have made it much clearer how I had intended to relate my work to the approaches of connected sociologies (Bhambhra 2014) and global citizenship studies (Nyers and Isin 2014). First, in relation to connected sociologies (referred to on p. 14; which I read as linked but nuanced from connected histories), while acknowledging historical relations, I wanted to conceptually move beyond ideal types (when I say ‘should be offering all-encompassing inclusion’ (p. 15) I refer to these ideal types rather than to my own conviction) examining the social realities of law, which is always political, as Tina Magazzini argues in her review. I could have also more precisely explained that I have aimed to connect my work to the global citizenship studies as I particularly connected it to the understanding offered by Isin and Nyers (and have not discussed other conceptualisations) in the Routledge Handbook of Global Citizenship Studies, where they interpret citizenship as a contested fluid institution constructing relations between subjects and different polities (Isin and Nyers 2014: 1). According to them, citizenship is always in making but it is also a ‘state’s toolbox of management and governance of the population’ (Isin and Nyers 2014: 8) and furthermore ‘[s]truggles of citizenship in relation to the polity are most obviously made in relation to the modern state. However, we have already seen how citizens do not belong to one polity but to many overlapping and conflicting polities (city, region, state, international). These polities are not in a historical queue for dominance, but are rather coeval and marked by a contested coexistence’ (Isin and Nyers 2017 p. 8). At the present moment, it seems to me that the current structure of sovereign states (and with it dominant groups within the states) maintain their dominance also by using international and regional entanglements, as a number of other studies in the Handbook investigate. While reading a number of national and international documents connected to legislation around in the European Union (and its states) and then in settler-colonial contexts, the approaches that led to the domination of marginalised citizens were strikingly similar, although it concerned very different groups; while I could not show the direct connection, it seemed to me it complied with Rigo’s findings that within the European Union similar colonial approaches (especially towards reinterpreting what is a part of the postsocialist domain) have been used internally by the most powerful actors (Rigo 2005). There has been incredible work done in this domain that I have not engaged with in this book (including Bhambra 2022 and Boatcǎ and Parvulescu 2022, among others), but I hope I will have an opportunity to do so in the future.
In terms of the material covered in the book, I echo the suggestions made by Djordje Sredanovic and Tina Magazzini that it would have made a lot of sense to focus on other comparative angles like citizenship stripping and citizenship struggles of Roma outside Europe (which has been superbly done by some scholars such as Mirga-Kruszelnicka, 2022). In terms of terminology (I agree with Manuela Boatcǎ that it needs to be reconsidered carefully), I have tried to follow some key terms as they have been used and adopted in Critical Romani Studies, as for example, racism against Romani minorities: ‘Antigypsyism is a core concept of Critical Romani Studies and can be used methodologically, analytically, and theoretically as a way of understanding the position of Roma in Europe historically and in the present moment’ (ERIAC 2018), and also used by organizations such as European Roma Grassroot Organisations Network (ERGO, n.d.), European Roma Rights Centre (Lee 2018), which recommends using the term and definition coined by Alliance against Antigypsyism (this included predominantly Romani scholars and activists with non-Romani allies). It has been a term used by a number of critical Romani scholars, for example Iulius Rostas (link), Ismael Cortés (Cortés and End 2019) and others (Nicolae 2007, Rostas 2017, Cortés 2021). However, while some critical Romani scholars have argued this is the term coined by Roma themselves and it should be used (Rostas 2023, link), the term has also been contested by critical Romani scholars (Oprea and Matache 2019), which I have indeed not discussed in the book, but only the contestation of pejorative terms for different Roma groups (for example, p.134).
As I have been much more focused on comparative contemporary analysis, I have not made grand predictions about the future of Roma as citizens in Europe, as Rucker-Chang has rightly pointed out in her review. I agree with her that Romani activists as well as Romani individuals are addressing the invisible edges of citizenships at the fringe, either through activism or through what I have called ‘citizenship sabotage’ in my book. At the same time, when it comes to reconsidering citizenship as an institution from the perspective of majority populations as policy-makers, the prediction could be much bleaker. As many Romani scholars and activists have pointed out, there is much responsibility being put on individual Romani NGOs without being given sufficient power, while the systemic and structural anti-Roma racism produced by states, international organizations and majority populations, remains unaddressed also when it comes to citizenship. I am hopeful though that the establishment of the Roma Foundation for Europe (Jovanović 2023) could become a game-changer.
This brings me to the question raised by Will Kymlicka: given that citizenship has not brought equal membership for Romani minorities, would it be better to abolish it completely and rather think in terms of ethical territoriality as suggested by Linda Bosniak? I do not have a ready-made answer to this question normatively. What I tried to show in my book is that even when there has been seemingly some movement into directions of giving non-citizens more equal rights in the countries where there are not citizens (such as in the case of EU citizenship), Romani minorities have not been afforded equitable rights. While citizenship has hierarchically included Romani minorities at best, I am not sure that ethical territoriality would in practice do a better job. I am however wondering whether there are other ways to think of this dilemma beyond both citizenship or ethical territoriality and I hope critical Romani scholars will examine this in the future.
In conclusion, I would once again like to thank everyone participating in this review forum and their helpful and stimulating comments. Although I am not convinced I have fully addressed all the angles and concerns from the reviews, I hope I was able to offer a bit of reflection with this response.