ABSTRACT
The state has always been an important actor for the Roma, defined and approached differently in various periods. Whereas the socialist state was a centralised and repressive structure with harsh mechanisms of control and surveillance, the postsocialist political and economic transformations generated gaps of legal authority. As previously discussed, in the introduction of this book, immediately after 1990, the withdrawal of the state generated a high level of insecurity and inequality due to monopolies of power1, but also informal opportunities to be exploited further. Additionally, as analysed in the previous chapters on Roma leadership and political fields, representatives of the local patronage have control over the distribution of welfare and documenting identity process, and Roma relations with the local state bureaucracy are often mediated through patronage politics. Hence, state bureaucracy constitutes itself as a space of power struggles for identification, governance and constitution of subjectivity from within which Roma can actively contest or accommodate forms of membership and belonging to state structures. The current chapter explores variations and differences in the relations and interactions Roma groups establish with the local state, which reveal differential access to opportunities/constraint, self-governance and distinct subjectivities. It enquires into the state’s main mechanism of subjection – documenting identity – through which the Roma are constituted as subjects and identifies changes brought by post-socialism in the relations Roma have with the street level bureaucracy. In the following, a brief overview of the main respondents is offered.
