Dr Angéla Kóczé has published a new book chapter: Poverty and the Roma as a lasting entanglement in Central and Eastern Europe in a new book called The Political Economy of Extreme Poverty in Eastern Europe. The chapter critically examines the conceptualizations of Roma-related poverty research, their accompanying methodological parameters, and the empirical findings obtained in Central and Eastern Europe in academia or civil society. Parallel to these scientific inquiries, Roma poverty has been conceptualized, diagnosed, and measured by several international organizations. The chapter cross-reads and re-examines these studies through their epistemological and methodological threads, which have suggested policy interventions informed by particular understandings of the causes of poverty among the Roma across Central and Eastern European countries.
Dr Angéla Kóczé highlights the limitations of the structural theories; the neo-conservative interpretation, the underclass debate in the early 2000’s, the institutional mission and ideological standing of the international organizations, such as the neoliberal governmental technologies. The neoliberal racial capitalism that gradually unfolded in Central and Eastern Europe after 1989 imposed a systemic condition of crisis and structural violence that rendered and normalized the vast majority of disenfranchised Roma as racialized “subhumans” and “nonhumans”.
These dominant approaches undermine state-supported collective welfare protection and caused strong culturalist, functionalist and structuralist influence fueling an assimetric power relations.
The chapter demonstrates that the issue of poverty in Romania needs to be linked with the wider political economies of Roma in Central and Eastern Europe.
Vincze, Ban, Gog and Fiberg (2024): The Political Economy of Extreme Poverty in Eastern Europe, A Comparative Historical Perspective of Romanian Roma
This volume is a result of a common research project that focused on the impact of socialist industrialisation, neo-liberal de-industrialisation and recent capitalist re-industrialisation on precarious workers.