Governing the “Unmarked” Citizens: Romania’s Roma in the Grip of Socialist Technologies of Power

Abstract

While many scholarly contributions have documented the socialist state policies deployed toward the Roma from Central and Eastern Europe, less attention was paid to how discourses and policies have aimed to turn the “non-European,” “backward Roma” into reformed and modernized subjects that were supposed to conform to an “European,” sedentary way of life. Thus, I discuss proletarization and sedentarization not as state policies but as programs and technologies of power, specific to a socialist governmentality. The article interrogates the programs, technologies of power and biopolitical regulations that allowed the state authorities to legitimize their intervention in the daily lives of the Roma, with profound depoliticizing effects. I analyze political programs, governmental reports on Roma and ministry regulations as instruments of governmentality through which the governance of the “Roma question” took shape. Special attention is given to data/knowledge production. Finally, the research pinpoints that the micro-scale and the everyday workings of the socialist technologies of power might explain the different trajectories of socio-economic adaptation among Roma groups, which some studies have revealed during post-socialism.