“Romani Family in an Age of War”

Martin Fotta has successfully applied for a consolidator grant from the European Research Council (ERC). He will receive approximately €2 million to conduct an ambitious groundbreaking research project titled “Romani Family in an Age of War” (acronym: RAW). It will be the third ERC project currently based at the Institute of Ethnology, demonstrating the ongoing world-class quality of its research.

The project offers a groundbreaking analysis that sits at the crossroads of the anthropology of kinship and the anthropology of war and political violence. As Martin Fotta explained during the project preparation:

“For me, this project emerges from two observations: First, Romani people are found in every European and Middle Eastern country that has experienced war in the last thirty-five years. These wars have had specific impacts on Romani civilians, frequently worsening their social exclusion and inequality. The second observation is that just like in the case of other marginalized ethnic minorities, family and kinship ties are crucial for maintaining social cohesion and continuity, and for people to feel a sense of belonging.

Curiously, however, we know little about how Romani communities have resisted and survived during recent wars and after the ceasefire. How is kinship mobilised in contexts of war and forced displacement? How does war impact family structures?  What are the similarities and differences in how different Romani groups handle these violent events? How adaptable and durable is kinship as a social form? And more generally what does this case reveal about social structures and how they change over time?”

This project is the first to systematically compare the experiences of Romani communities from Eastern Europe, Southern Europe, and the Middle East within one framework. It examines wars of different durations and phases. The team will conduct ethnographic research with Romani communities from five conflicts: the Yugoslav Wars, the Iraq War, the Syrian Civil War, the Russo-Ukrainian War, and the Israeli–Palestinian conflict. For safety, much of the research will focus on displaced Roma, such as Syrian Dom refugees in Turkey or Roma from Eastern Ukraine in Western Europe.

Martin Fotta is the head of the Department of Mobility and Migration at the Institute of Ethnology. He is also a co-PI on a bilateral Polish-Czech project “Unequal citizenship and transnational mobilisation of Polish, Czech, and Ukrainian Roma in the face of war in Ukraine”. In 2021 he received Lumina Quaeruntur Award established by the Academic Council of the Czech Academy of Sciences, given to outstanding prospective researchers. This enabled him to develop a unique research program entitled “Romani Atlantic: Transcontinental Logic of Ethno-Racial Identities” exploring the Romani diaspora from transcultural and transatlantic perspectives.