Romani Refugees and the Postwar Order

Bibliographic Data

ID10074966
AuthorsAri Joskowicz (Vanderbilt University, corresponding author)
Year2015
Volume51
Issue4
Pages760-787
Publication date2015-08-04
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueJournal of Contemporary History (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0022-0094 • E-ISSN: 1461-7250
PublisherSAGE Publishing (PUBLISHER • US)
DOI10.1177/0022009415585890
OpenAlexW2217733480
LanguageEN
Citations received5

Scholarship on Romani (Gypsy) migration has typically focused either on longue durée patterns of persecution and marginalization or on Roma migrants within Europe since the fall of communism. This article shows how the westward migration of Roma after the Second World War and during the early years of the Cold War breaks with several common assumptions about the history of displaced persons, refugees, and Roma alike. Contrary to claims about unbroken continuities in the persecution of European Roma, in the immediate postwar years officers of the International Refugee Organization used ‘Gypsy' as a privileged category that improved an applicant’s changes of getting support from the organization. Internationalization thus offered a brief respite from discrimination for one of the only ethnic refugee groups without its own lobby. This situation changed by the 1950s, when national refugee administrations replaced the earlier international refugee regimes established in the wake of the war. Roma became an exception at a time when West European governments were accepting asylum-seekers from Eastern Europe as part of their ongoing Cold War propaganda efforts. In this period government officials concerned with protecting national interests reverted to earlier classifications of ‘Gypsies' as nomads who were, by definition, not refugees

Communism · Development economics · Persecution · Political economy · Political science · Politics · Refugee · Sociology · World War II · Gender Studies · History · Law · Romani and Gypsy Studies

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