| Title | From Folk Devils to Modern State Devils: The Securitization and Racial Policing of the Roma in Italy |
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| Contributor | Ana Ivasiuc(author) |
| DOI | https://doi.org/10.33134/HUP-13-9 |
| License | http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ |
| Publisher | Helsinki University Press |
| Published on | 2021-12-13 |
| Long abstract | This chapter follows the anti-Roma laws in Italy, where the government has moved away from inclusion policies for the Roma to downright ethnic repression, policing and surveillance. Despite the fact that the majority of Roma are no longer nomadic, the public still associate them with nomadism and use their non-nomadic lifestyle as a weapon against them, by monitoring the Roma camps and creating special laws that secure the continuous repression of the Roma. Thus, while their status as outsiders and nomads previously made the Roma devilish figures and imagined as travelling and stealing “Gypsies”, it is now their lack of nomadism that is seen as a threat, as the Roma have now settled in society. |
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Ana Ivasiuc is a social anthropologist working on urban insecurity, social and racial inequalities (with a focus on Roma), policing, and the far-right in Europe. In her postdoctoral research at the Collaborative Research Center ‘Dynamics of Security: Forms of Securitization in Historical Perspective’ (SFB/TRR 138), funded by the German Research Foundation, she carried out an ethnography of formal and informal policing of the Roma in the peripheries of Rome. She is currently affiliated with the Center for Conflict Studies at the Philipps University Marburg, Germany, where she researches informal policing in Germany and The Netherlands, with funding from the Gerda Henkel Foundation’s Special Program ‘Security, Society, State’. She has published extensively in peer-reviewed international journals and has co-edited two volumes (Roma Activism: Reimagining Power and Knowledge, with Sam Beck, 2018, Berghahn Books, and The Securitization of the Roma in Europe, with Huub van Baar and Regina Kreide, 2019, Palgrave Macmillan).