Paper short abstract:

This paper examines the discursive entanglements of human rights discourse articulated with respect to migratory flows of 'bodies' and commerce. As such, it evinces site-specific Roma rights articulations of contestation in Germany to the Schengen Agreement.

Paper long abstract:

The contextual terrain within which Roma communities encounter forced expulsion and persecution by some EU leaders and citizens of member-states, exact a spatio-temporal cartography of human rights based mediation that exceed normative institutional and regulatory state-centric formations. This paper examines the discursive entanglements of human rights discourse articulated with respect to migratory flows of 'bodies' and commerce. As such, it evinces site-specific Roma community articulations of contestation in Germany to the Schengen Agreement, to nation-state constructions of subject coherence and membership, as well as the prevailing hegemonic logic of market fundamentalism in the eurozone. Roma subject trajectories are explored within the context of the European Union; Council of Europe; Amnesty International; European Roma Rights Centre, and other NGOs. Specifically, this critical inquiry invokes two alternating registers of analysis within the context of Roma rights activist practices and cooperative advocacy affiliations. The first register of analytical intervention, as constituted by a politics of mobility, examines sites of contestation by Roma transnational migrations, both political and economic, and how they relate to citizen-centric and EU membership eligibility discourse and policy implementation. The second register deploys the politics of location, as Roma-site-specific enunciation that unsettles conflicting market grid assemblages and 'social democratic values'. In this way, this ethnographic investigation interrogates the macro-political implications of human rights advocacy in connection to EU and IMF policy articulation, and Roma micro-political encounter and event.