Romani women at the edge of neoliberal Europe: Discursive emancipation and structural violence

Romani women at the edge of neoliberal Europe reveals how EU inclusion policies often reproduce structural violence, limiting Romani women’s opportunities. Drawing on ethnographic research, it explores activism, survival, and resistance, calling for justice-based inclusion grounded in lived realities. Romani women at the edge of neoliberal Europe draws on long-term, multi-sited ethnographic research informed by feminist sociology and critical race theory to show how EU inclusion frameworks, despite their emancipatory promise, have reproduced forms of structural violence that sharply constrain Romani women’s political, social, and economic possibilities.Exploring the paradoxes of Romani women’s activism in Eastern Europe, the book traces how political mobilization unfolds within landscapes shaped by racialized exclusion, precarity, and bureaucratic control. It brings into view both public acts of resistance and the less visible struggles of women navigating devalued and precarious lives. Through case studies from Hungary and the wider European context, Angéla Kóczé reveals how care, survival, and solidarity become sites of political labor and community-making.At once theoretically rich and deeply grounded, this book argues that meaningful inclusion requires confronting the racialized and gendered logics embedded in state institutions and EU governance. It offers a powerful rethinking of emancipation from the perspective of those living at the sharpest edges of neoliberal Europe. Romani women at the edge of neoliberal Europe explores how Romani women navigate racialized poverty, gendered inequality, and neoliberal restructuring across Europe. Based on long-term ethnographic research, it argues that EU inclusion frameworks – despite promises of emancipation – often reproduce structural violence, limiting political, social, and economic possibilities. Through case studies from Hungary and beyond, the book examines paradoxes of activism, strategies of survival, and the emotional and political labor required in hostile institutional landscapes. It highlights how women transform marginality into resistance and solidarity, calling for a reimagined vision of inclusion grounded in justice and lived realities.

Pagina's: 256, Hardcover, Manchester University Press (P648)