Roma Activism. Группа авторов
of sociopolitical relations.” Her three modalities involve “a non-convert, non-activist and kin-oriented; a convert and communitarian; and an activist and universalizing” modality (Gay y Blasco 2002: 174). She largely bases the delineation of each of these modalities on the portrayal of the latter two. While the activist modality would be “premised on non-Gypsy models of personhood—by which all persons become entitled to the same human rights, effectively working as equally valuable units of humanity,” the convert, communitarian (Pentecostal) modality would fully maintain “the Gitano belief in two kinds of persons, Gitanos and others, who are endowed with incommensurable moral differences and who are therefore differently positioned in the world” (Gay y Blasco 2002: 181).4 At the beginning of Gay y Blasco’s (2002: 173) article, where she introduces and puts into context her three modalities, she states that “even today, when Roma activists are increasingly drawing on the political discourses of the dominant society to call for the full extension of human rights to Gypsies everywhere, there is little grassroots support for [their] appeals.”
Gay y Blasco’s general, and in many respects also generalized portrayal of the diverse ways in which Roma approach the “world” could be considered as characteristic of how several scholars have assessed phenomena of Roma-related activism and nongovernmentalism. Gay y Blasco’s distinction between the three diasporic modalities does not necessarily imply a rejection of one of these modalities. Yet, her uniformized account of activism and its distance from grassroots support clearly hints at a normative critique of what she describes as the “activist and universalizing” modality. This combination of a generalized idea of activism with a normative or even moral, rejectionist critique of some kinds of activist activities and organizations has become a recurrent element in several scholarly analyses of Roma-related engagements with the nongovernmental.
Nidhi Trehan (2001: 138–41: 2009a: 163–75) and Zoltan Barany (2002: 279–81), for instance, have been among the first who warned against the rise of what they call the “Gypsy industry.” This industry would have turned more professionally organized activism into an “ethnobusiness” in which some—primarily pro-Roma and Romani elites as well as human rights and development experts—would make money and careers while they leave the situation of the poor Roma largely unaffected. This “industry” would also cover, or overlap with, several other phenomena, such as the increased managerialism in the Roma-related third sector, the co-option of Romani activists by more professionalized CSOs (“NGOization”), the lack of democratic or grassroots constituencies of CSOs, a growing gap between Romani “elites” and “grassroots,” and the neglect of “local knowledge” (Trehan 2009b: 65). More recently, several scholars have joined Trehan and Barany in their critique of these trends (e.g., Nirenberg 2009; Rostas 2009; Sigona and Trehan 2009; Voiculescu 2013). Additionally, Elena Marushiakova and Veselin Popov (2011) have critiqued what they call “NGO science”—that is, the dissemination and policy implementation of what they consider “biased knowledge” that has been produced within and by some influential NGOs.
Elsewhere, I have argued that the phenomena and mechanisms that these scholars have described and analyzed—and that some of them have attributed to neoliberalism writ large—could be considered as the ambiguous consequences of the governmentalization of civil society (van Baar 2011a: 153–74, 233–47). Yet, if we take seriously the rather radical blurring of state–civil society relations central to this governmentalization, we should also be critical of the implicit or explicit suggestion in the narratives of many of these scholars that we deal with clear and clearly distinguishable oppositions between elites and grassroots, the represented Roma and the Roma’s representatives, top-down and bottom-up approaches to their situation, external expertise imposed on the Roma and local knowledge developed by them, and NGOization and grassroots (or community) empowerment.
Undoubtedly, we have to be critical of several of the developments that these scholars have examined. Yet, the attitude of some of them to criticize both these developments and the civil society actors or organizations that are involved in “NGOization,” “NGO science,” or the “Gypsy industry” more generally, tends to throw the baby out with the bathwater, and, moreover, often results in opting for disputable alternatives of localism. Indeed, those who reject many of the more organized forms of Roma-related activism because these would be based on the imposition of external knowledge or even of “non-Gypsy paradigms of identity and personhood” (Gay y Blasco 2002: 185) often and implicitly assume that the local, community-based, Romani grassroots, or neo-Protestant alternatives are not implicit in these larger, more ambiguous trends. In contemporary Roma-related scholarship, we rarely find scholars who, in the nineteenth-century tradition of George Borrow, openly defend the existence, then or now, of a “pristine” Romani culture that has been endangered by a “predatory” outside world. Nevertheless, some of the scholars who have adopted a critical or even rejectionist attitude toward Roma-related activism and nongovernmentalism rely on a form of localism that tends to “essentialize the local as discrete places that host relatively homogeneous communities or, alternatively, constitute sites of grassroots mobilization and resistance” (Mohan and Stokke 2000: 264; see also Davoudi and Madanipour 2015). The glorification of local community as the site where Romani activism or resistance should start and be mobilized privileges a notion of politics in which the main aim seems to be, somewhat naïvely, to “carve out spaces of empowerment where ordinary people can define their lives outside the imprisoning architecture of developmentalism” (Corbridge 2007: 185).
Similarly, networks of neo-Protestant communities might provide “an alternative space for social organization that avoids the domination of non-Roma representatives” (Fosztó and Anăstăsoaie 2001: 362). Yet, any naïvely positive appraisal of the role of neo-Protestant communities as alternatives to activist and advocacy networks, or as cases in which agency and participation are unproblematically embedded, disregards the ways in which these (neo)religious practices are also—and ambiguously—implicated in processes of neoliberalization (Comaroff 2012; Freeman 2012; Dillon 2013). A differentiation of CSOs—ranging from professionalized, relatively small, and activist NGOs to faith-based associations and grassroots organizations or groupings—can be firmly grounded in actual practices. Yet, any suggestion that we could easily apply a kind of “ethical” yardstick to this diverse spectrum of CSOs would radically reduce its complexity and fundamental hybridity. This picture resembles the common view, expressed by the most fervent critics of the “Gypsy industry,” of NGOs as sometimes “representing the depoliticized ‘end-points’ of once vibrant social movements, which have lost their once-radical edge” (Lewis 2010: 339).
A rejectionist attitude toward CSO practices omits the fact that the inability or inadequacy of CSOs to maintain a specific activist stance often has a cause that is largely beyond their reach (van Baar 2011a: 174–88, 233–69). This attitude also, and indirectly, assumes that CSOs are a kind of tabula rasa on which diverse kinds of desired activities and responsibilities—such as empowerment, participation, and community building—could be projected (Lewis 2005). To a large extent, therefore, this scholarly approach neglects the politico-sociological context of CSOs. Moreover, it also tends to reduce dramatically the agency of those who work in the critiqued CSOs and thus their anthropological dimension.
Toward a Critical Anthroposociology of Nongovernmentalism
Instead of adopting rejectionist stances toward some CSOs or developing easy binaries or differentiations regarding their affinities or rationales, I would like to call for a critical anthroposociology of Roma-related nongovernmentalism and activism that discusses these phenomena beyond the attitude of being “in favor of” or “against” (some kinds of) CSOs. In this final section, I draft a rough agenda of this critical anthroposociology, which is also based on some promising studies that have recently been published.
One of the central elements of such an anthroposociology involves a careful analysis of what I have called “traveling activism” (van Baar 2011a; 2013). With this notion, I have drawn attention to the significance of how various discourses, strategies, and techniques of activism are translated across space and (ethnic, gender, class, etc.) difference. Indeed, activists “travel” through disjunctive circuits, and the diverse forms of coalition building that arise from these interactions and mediations can serve as a productive