CEU Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2015
| Author | Lyons, Shari |
|---|---|
| Title | Ghetto Politics: The Origins of Roma Camp Segregation in Italy |
| Summary | Today the idea of a ghetto conjures images of a practice that was medieval and barbaric, yet this same institution is currently being repeated in the form of ‘nomad camps’ used to house Roma in Italy. Curiously, when the ghetto was developed in sixteenth-century Italy, it was only applied to Jews, and now it is only applied to Roma. This thesis seeks to explain why the ghettoization of Roma is occurring now, by looking at when the ghetto as an institution has been applied in the past. Using the paradigm of ‘the camp’ developed Giorgio Agamben, the ghetto is understood as a zone of indistinction where the normal rule of law is suspended in order to preserve the norm. In practice, the ghetto is used to segregate people who are seen as threatening to the sovereign but exist in a peculiar limbo because they can neither be integrated nor expelled from the political community. Whereas a large influx of Jews in the sixteenth century threatened to destabilise the papal state, today the swelling population of Roma challenge the system of a bio-political world. |
| Supervisor | Astrov, Alexander |
| Department | International Relations MA |
| Full text | https://www.etd.ceu.edu/2015/lyons_shari.pdf |
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