by Riccardo Armillei

Introduction

The alarming proliferation of ‘campi nomadi’ (nomad camps) in Italy intensifies the urgency of analysing their internal mechanism and the complex relation between all the parties [1]; ‘camp dwellers’, government agencies and Civil Society organisations [CSOs][2], involved in their production and reification. To arrive at an adequate appreciation of this nexus, the three components of what has been termed the ‘camps system’ have been analysed separately. This approach helped to pinpoint how they have combined to produce a hegemonic perspective on Romani issues, which yields a simplistic binary interpretation of a complex and dynamic phenomenon: Romanies are generally viewed as either victims or threats, narrowing the range of responses to charity or hostility.

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by Colin Clark

[First published on the Blog page of the Coalition for Racial Equality and Rights, 1 April 2015: http://www.crer.org.uk/crerblog/entry/culture-confidence-and-community-the-new-european-roma-institute-eri ]

On March 26^th George Soros, founder and chairman of the Open Society Foundations, and Thorbjørn Jagland, secretary-general of the Council of Europe published a co-authored article entitled ‘Why we are setting up a European Roma Institute’ (Soros and Jagland, 2015).

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by Yaron Matras
University of Manchester

It might have appeared a bit like a Hollywood drama about the rich and powerful pulling the strings behind the scenes, except that the topic was, supposedly, how to empower Europe’s weakest and most marginalised nation – the Roma. Over the past year negotiations have been taking place between the Council of Europe and a small group of activists who claimed the title “Roma elite”. Backed by the Open Society Foundations (OSF), the formidable civil society enterprise led by billionaire philanthropist George Soros, the group drew up plans for a European Roma Institute (ERI). It would, they said, “license” research on Romani culture and ensure that the dissemination of information on Europe’s largest ethnic minority would be “Roma-led”.

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by László Fosztó

As we approach the end of the Second Cycle of the Network project I though it would be interesting to see how far we are with building the Network and connecting the different nodes.

This is a visualization of the distribution of the Network members worldwide. You can zoom to resize the map using the + and – signs on the top left. You can also drag the map to reposition it or search for a particular country or city tying into the search window on the right.

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