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This chapter examines some of the double binds or contradictions which shape Roma lives, particularly those of women. These contradictions became particularly susceptible to analysis during the COVID-19 pandemic: borne at the junction between structural constraints from without and norms and hierarchies from within, these double binds have been made more salient by the strengthening of rules and by the rampant antigypsyism that the pandemic engendered. However, contradictions warrant further attention even in less ‘exceptional’ times, as they reveal connections and breaking points between the various layers of social belonging – statal, ethnic and familial – that ethnographic work captures. The chapter focuses on a conservative or ‘traditional’ Roma group in southern Romania, both before, in situ and remotely, and during the COVID-19 pandemic. It shows how members interiorize and attempt to solve the contradictions that encroach onto their lives under the guise of ‘capability’, an emic term signifying one’s resourcefulness to navigate competing demands even at great personal cost and under the permanent threat of ‘trouble.’

The phrase “Roma politics” has come to designate several topics, such as the movement for Roma rights, relations between Romaand non-Roma, or the maintenance of social order in a given group, but these have rarely been addressed together. This is what the present article sets out to do, through the case study of a Roma politician from a southern Romanian town who finds himself in a liminal position between local non-Roma party politics, transnational Romani activism, and the values of his community. He and his fellow Rom negotiate their social relations through an ideology of “help” and “charity,” which I compare to Pitt-Rivers’s notion of “grace,” showing that the decidedly hierarchical political imaginary that suffuses the real-life politics of the Rom is far removed from the abstract apolitical egalitarianism through which transnational institutions and activists frame “Roma politics.”

Revisiting past conflicts is an occasion to re-assess our commitments with the benefit of hindsight. Examining the aftermath of a violent antigypsyist conflict that took place in the early 1990s in a village in Transylvania, I describe how notions of justice, victimhood, and human rights travelled from transnational ideologies and institutions onto local households, through the mediation of state authorities and civic actors. Peering through this kaleidoscope of contradictions, distorted echoes, performance, suspicions, and miscalculations, I reflect on the intellectual and civic ambivalences precipitated by my various engagements — activist, academic, and human — with the reparations process engendered by the conflict. Deliberately stepping beyond humanitarian and justicial idioms, my narrative dwells on the social trauma recounted by the victims of the conflict: that of seeing their properties, bodies, and social belonging damaged by neighbours suddenly turned homicidal.

The conflict that took place in the Transylvanian village of Hădăreni in 1993 stands to memory as the pinnacle of anti-Roma violence in Romania, and as a paradigmatic event of the Roma rights movement. In the aftermath of the conflict, Hădăreni has been the locus of several humanitarian and developmental interventions aimed to compensate the victims, install the rule of law, and restore peace in the community. After two decades, most of the beneficiaries of these interventions and the actors that carried them out jointly declare them to have failed. In May 2013 I interviewed Nicolae Gheorghe, a leading figure of the Romani movement, on the topic of the Hădăreni case. Gheorghe had tackled the case in the beginnings of his activism, and he later described it as the ‘failure test’ of the strategies that had been employed to address Roma exclusion. In light of this statement, in the present chapter I propose to read the case as an exemplary or cautionary tale of early postsocialist Romani activism. To contextualize Gheorghe’s assessment, I build on interviews with state representatives and with other civic entrepreneurs involved in the case, and on my own ethnographic insights from the village, so as to provide an overview of the co-existing and often conflicting notions of ‘rights’, ‘justice’, and ‘reparation’ that were circulated in connection to the events in Hădăreni. By employing a historicizing approach to the process of truth-production around this case, I inquire into the dialectics of ‘improvement’ and ‘failure’ that Roma activism thrives on, and into the tension between ‘emotions’ and ‘procedures’, as envisaged by the various approaches to this case.