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Paper short abstract:

This paper analyses the ways in which Roma people have been constructed as a security problem in the Romanian town of Baia Mare. It uses archival research to focus on the period between 1979 and 1989, when the Communist Party initiated a national process of forced integration of Roma people.

Paper long abstract:

This paper analyses the ways in which Roma people have been discursively constructed as a security problem in the Romanian town of Baia Mare. It uses archival research and interviews to focus on the period between 1979 and 1989, when the Romanian Communist Party initiated a national process of forced integration of Roma people.

This analysis seeks to depart both from an exceptionalist view of securitisation and from a non-elitist “everyday” perspective. The securitisation of Roma people in Baia Mare in the 1980’s was a state-led project aimed at constructing and strengthening the newly built socialist infrastructure. Roma people were articulated as a threat to this infrastructure, inasmuch as they actively resisted being enrolled in the socialist workforce and being registered in one territory. However, despite its dense array of policing mechanisms, the Romanian Communist state did not tackle this “threat” with exceptional measures, but rather through an assemblage of administrative and criminalisation policies.

The Roma people were seen as a surplus population that posed a number of problems such as theft and petty crimes, squatting, “hooliganism”, carrying diseases and generally disturbing public order. The local authorities claimed they were being “helpless” against these situations, and demanded an increase in policing. A series of complaints from local residents likewise demanded more security against Roma people. As a result, these people were evicted, removed from the city, or segregated in peripheral territories at the city's margins. As a result, currently, Baia Mare is witnessing an extreme marginalisation of Roma people.