The Rights Of The Roma: The Struggle For Citizenship In Postwar Czechoslovakia Hardcover

Celia Donert

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.

9781107176270

English

Cambridge University Press

19 March 2019

308

Celia Donert is Senior Lecturer at the University of Liverpool. She received her Ph.D. from the European University Institute, Florence, and has held research fellowships in Berlin, Bratislava, Paris, Potsdam, and Prague.

Donert places the lives of Roma in twentieth-century Czechoslovakia within the larger context of citizenship and human rights. What results is a superbly researched history that resonates far beyond this small country's borders.' Paulina Bren, Vassar College, New York