Paper short abstract:

This paper examines the social construction of the Roma under Sarkozy’s presidential mandate as an internal security threat by exploring the complex and contradictory processes at stake. Drawing upon international relations and critical social theories, it argues that the symbolic and performative construction of the Roma creates different understandings which, in return, reify the nation and neutralise the Roma in the national space.

Paper long abstract:

The ethnography of the Roma controversy in France provides a window into the debate on the complex and changing nature of the nation-state against the background of globalisation. Engaging both with the concept of 'essential crisis' coined by Feldman when discussing the relationship between the migrants and the nation-state and the debate on securitization, this article seeks to contribute to the discussion on the anthropology of security at a time of intense internal and external reconfiguration. Using the trope of the 'Roma crisis', the paper argues that a complex and multilevel process of re-nationalisation and securitization has taken place against the construction of the Roma as an internal threat, the erosion of the nation-state as a guarantor of universal rights, the decline of a centralised bureaucratic culture as well as the broader issue of the decline of sovereignty which call into question the natural order of the nation. It also critically engages with the limits of the performative approach to migrants and minorities in the context of the securitization of the European Union.