The Construction of Racial and Social Difference through Securitizing Mobility. Viapolitics and the Disputing of Citizenship of Roma

Abstract

This chapter uses the case study of the European Roma to demonstrate the importance of mobile governmentalities in regulating mobility and citizenship. These are political technologies in which mobility itself is turned into a strategy to govern mobility, particularly through keeping people on the move. Whereas most studies about mobility and migration focus on the governing of mobilities and on interrelated biopolitical mechanisms, I extend these investigations to mobile governmentalities, which include what I call governance and securitization through 'nomadization', as well as through what William Walters calls 'viapolitics'. The latter is a form of governance that considers vehicles, routes and journeys as mobile sites of power and contestation in their own right. Through an examination of a historical case study about Dutch Roma, I show that not only camps and halting sites, but also vehicles and mobility itself are to be understood as technologies of governing minorities such as Roma along racial and security lines, thereby turning them into irregular citizens.