In this article, the authors present data gathered in the Reclaiming Adolescence research project, which investigated the educational hardships of Roma youth by comparing their experiences with their non-Roma peers' in Belgrade, Serbia. Serious inequalities in access to secondary and tertiary education affect the life and career opportunities of Romani adolescents in Europe. Yet, despite a plethora of reports and surveys on this topic, the views of young Roma themselves remain undocumented. This article reports on research that addresses this lacuna in terms of both substantive findings and methodological innovation. Using participatory research techniques and focusing on the young people's voices, the authors reveal the direct impact of experiences of discrimination on Romani students' educational and career choices. Youth-based participatory approaches and support for youth leadership emerge as key tools to building robust and sustained adolescent investment in social and political change.

In this article, I argue that policymakers employed unconscious biases and racist beliefs in the formulation and the implementation of the current EU Framework for National Roma Integration Strategies (ʻEU Roma Frameworkʼ) and its corresponding national strategies. Using Critical Race Theory, I explore how these policies have reinforced the commonly held belief in the need to civilize and otherwise change the habits of the Roma, and consequently have further reinforced the power imbalance between the Roma and the dominant majority groups (hereinafter used interchangeably with ʻnon-Romaʼ). I analyse examples of Roma versus universal policies comparatively, emphasizing biases in formulation, implementation, and discourse. I show that the objectives of the EU Roma Framework and national Roma strategies toward Roma education involve ethnic presuppositions and are far less ambitious than the avowed Europe 2020 strategy; this policy mismatch will likely lead to further educational discrepancies post-2020. Finally, I conclude that policies focused on the Roma are doomed to fail if no prior and concurrent actions are taken to change prejudiced attitudes and the behaviours of non-Roma, in particular those biases influencing policy formulation and implementation.

In this article I examine the liaisons between the violence by the far right paramilitary groups, the existing anti-Roma feelings or political discourse, and the various European governments’ actions in combating these phenomena. I argue that strongly-held beliefs of Roma inferiority not tackled through anti-bias education and enforcement of laws, but instead boosted by outspoken racists have encouraged the present extremist views and actions among ordinary citizens. In particular, I examine how the states have neglected their duty to properly address and sanction both legally and morally, such acts of violence. Additionally, I scrutinize the effectiveness of some concrete anti-discrimination measures and discuss a range of other possible strategies at the local, national, or European level.

The impact of COVID-19 has been disproportionately felt by populations experiencing structural racial- and ethnicity-based discrimination. Here, we describe opportunities for COVID-19 response and recovery efforts to help build more equal and resilient societies, through investments in: (i) interventions focused on explicitly addressing racial and ethnicity-based discrimination; (ii) interventions supporting the delivery of universal services, and in ways that address compounding and intersecting drivers of exclusion and marginalization; and (iii) cross-cutting enabling measures, such as participatory mechanisms and data disaggregation.