Introduction to the Special Issue “Talking about Roma: Implications for Social Inclusion”

By the last decade of the twentieth century, official discourse calling for the elimination of Roma had been largely replaced by approaches aimed at inclusion. Contemporary approaches of this kind can be roughly divided into those which emphasize human rights as a basis for measures to improve the Roma’s situation and those rooted in the proposition that improvements in the situation of Roma can be expected to provide economic benefits for the general populations of the countries in which Roma live. The contributions to this special issue critically examine public discourses from throughout Europe which are ostensibly aimed at promoting the social inclusion of Roma. While the fact that the discourses treated fit broadly within human rights and/or economic paradigms allows the articles to speak to one another in various ways, the articles also exhibit a wide range of variation in approach as well as geographical focus. Whereas the first four articles deal directly with issues of definition in relation to Roma, a second group of contributions compares developments across multiple countries or institutions. The last four articles each treat a single country, with the final article narrowing the focus further to a single city.