Summary and Best Practices

This book has covered much ground to unpack the historical and contemporary ethnic labeling practices and Roma identity formation in Hungary and Russia. After the initial historical examination of state legacies and state institutions, I turned to contemporary non-state actors and bottom-up identity formation in the second part of the book. Each chapter looked at how ethnic labels charged with normative content—”bad Gypsies” and “good Roma”— developed over time and became mobilized through formal and non-formal educational institutions through time.