The Rights of the Roma
The Struggle for Citizenship in Postwar Czechoslovakia

Explores the evolving human rights of Roma in Eastern Europe's recent history, and the complex politics of Roma rights today.

Celia Donert (Author)

9781107176270, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 14 December 2017

308 pages, 13 b/w illus.
23.5 x 15.8 x 2 cm, 0.57 kg

'Both books are serious and lucid works of scholarship. Both do an exemplary job of embedding a Czechoslovak case in larger literatures and contexts … Gerlach and Donert put Czechoslovakia on the map of dystopian history.' Jeremy King, The Journal of Modern History

The Rights of the Roma writes Romani struggles for citizenship into the history of human rights in socialist and post-socialist Eastern Europe. If Roma have typically appeared in human rights narratives as victims, Celia Donert here draws on extensive original research in Czech and Slovak archives, sociological and ethnographic studies, and oral histories to foreground Romani activists as subjects and actors. Through a vivid social and political history of Roma in Czechoslovakia, she provides a new interpretation of the history of human rights by highlighting the role of Socialist regimes in constructing social citizenship in postwar Eastern Europe. The post-socialist human rights movement did not spring from the dissident movements of the 1970s, but rather emerged in response to the collapse of socialist citizenship after 1989. A timely study as Europe faces a major refugee crisis which raises questions about the historical roots of nationalist and xenophobic attitudes towards non-citizens.

Introduction
1. Legacies of 1919
2. Stalinist Gypsy workers
3. But Roma are rural!
4. Cracking down on nomadism
5. Politics get personal
6. Prague Spring for Roma
7. Human rights, minority rights, Roma rights
8. Losing rights after 1989
Conclusion.

Subject Areas: Human rights [JPVH], Ethnic studies [JFSL], Social & cultural history [HBTB], European history [HBJD]