The creation of an EU Framework for national Roma integration strategies (2011) marks a significant step in the politicisation of Roma identity by ensuring a further increase in the number of initiatives, projects and programmes explicitly targeting Roma. The Framework itself is part of a process that began with postcommunist transition and which has produced historically unprecedented levels of Roma political activism along with a proliferation of national and transnational policy initiatives focussed on Roma identity. In seeking to explain this contemporary political phenomenon, the article argues that Roma is an identity constructed at the intersection of political and expert knowledge by various actors, such as policymakers, Romani activists, international organizations and scholars. This political-expert identity is applied to groups that are not bounded by a common language, religion, cultural practice, geographic location, occupation, physical appearance or lifestyle. The article explores how this collation of disparate populations into a notional political community builds upon a centuries-old Gypsy legacy. It scrutinizes five strands of identification practices that have contributed to the longue durée development of today's Roma as an epistemic object and policy target: police profiling of particular communities; administrative surveys; Romani activism; Roma targeted policies; quantitative scientific research. The article argues that the contemporary economic and political conditions amidst which the politicisation of Roma identity is occurring explain how the ideological and institutional construction of the ethnic frame tends toward the reinforcement of the exclusion of those categorised as Roma, thus increasing the perceived need for Roma policy initiatives. A self-sustaining cycle has been created where Roma knowledge identifies Roma problems requiring a policy response, which produces more Roma knowledge, more needs and more policy responses. Yet, there are consequences to racialising public discourse by presenting Roma as both problematic and essentially different from everyone else. Hostility towards Roma has increased in many states indicating that the expert framing of Roma groupness affects social solidarity by disconnecting and distancing Roma from their fellow citizens.

This article scrutinizes the administrative and scientific practices by which the Gypsy/Roma category has been historically constructed in Europe, particularly in Central and South Eastern Europe. Censuses, police-led inquiries, social surveys and expert estimates made the ‘Roma’ category appear objective, making invisible the multiple technical and political decisions behind their interpretations. This paper examines the technologies behind the production of ethnic categories and that of Roma in particular: namely, guidelines and manuals for field workers, recruitment and census campaigns, consent forms, questionnaires, data processing, basic assumptions and interpretation of data.  While expert networks give objectivity and flexibility to the collection and circulation of data, the labour involved in crafting ethnic statistics often remains obscure. This paper follows the historical departures and continuities of Roma categorization from the 18th century to present times. The category ‘Roma’ was produced and reproduced through quantification practices with the justification that ethnic data (or categorization) would help solve social problems and contribute to Roma integration. The technical literature reviewed in this paper and the auto-ethnographic analysis shed light on the machinery of ethnic categorization, and allows us to assess the impact of various kinds of labour upon this categorization: from the more visible work performed by ethnopolitical entrepreneurs and scholars – to the relatively invisible contributions of field workers, administrators and census takers. This article calls for a critical scrutiny of how Roma ethnicity is crafted through practices of ethnic quantification and encourages researchers to use methodological prudence and more self-reflection in their own academic practices.

ArgumentMoreau (2019) has raised concerns about the use of DNA data obtained from vulnerable populations, such as the Uighurs in China. We discuss another case, situated in Europe and with a research history dating back 100 years: genetic investigations of Roma. In our article, we focus on problems surrounding representativity in these studies. We claim that many of the circa 440 publications in our sample neglect the methodological and conceptual challenges of representativity. Moreover, authors do not account for problematic misrepresentations of Roma resulting from the conceptual frameworks and sampling schemes they use. We question the representation of Roma as a “genetic isolate” and the underlying rationales, with a strong focus on sampling strategies. We discuss our results against the optimistic prognosis that the “new genetics” could help to overcome essentialist understandings of groups.

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