#  CES: "Condemned to Rootlessness and Unable to Budge”: Roma, Migration Panics, and Internment in the Late Habsburg Empire 

 



####  calendar\_today Date and Time 

 **October 6, 2016** 

 04:00PM - 06:00PM EDT 

####  pin\_drop Location 

 **Adolphus Busch Hall, Goldman Room, 27 Kirkland Street, Cambridge**  



 

 



 

*New Directions in European History Study Group*

**Tara Zahra**,   
Professor of History at the University of Chicago

In 2015, Europe faced a refugee crisis of a magnitude not seen since the  
Second World War, as more than a million individuals arrived on the  
continent. The contemporary refugee crisis has brought barbed wire  
fences, internment camps, and “no-man’s lands” back to the European  
landscape. We are not only in the midst of a “migration crisis,”  
however. The situation in Europe should also be understood as what  
Zygmunt Bauman has called a “migration panic.” A “migration panic,” like  
a “moral panic,” reflects and magnifies an alleged threat to a society.  
Mass migration has been reshaping European societies for at least 150  
years, but it has not always induced the same responses.

About  
What then, are the causes of migration panics, and what outcomes have  
they produced? This talk will turn to the history of Roma in the  
Habsburg Empire, a group long stigmatized for its allegedly intractable  
mobility, to reflect on these questions. We don’t typically analyze the  
history of refugees and Roma together, although both groups have been  
fodder for migration panics and objects of state efforts to govern  
migration. It is striking that before Europeans began to panic about  
refugees, Roma were the most visible targets for anxieties about freedom  
of mobility in the expanding European Union.

  
Throughout the twentieth century, states and international organizations  
repeatedly turned toward camps – refugee camps, internment camps, and  
concentration camps- in response to the perceived problem of  
disruptively mobile, unwanted, or stateless populations. The purposes of  
these camps has varied greatly but all sought to contain human mobility  
as a strategy for managing populations. In the years leading up to the  
First World War in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, a chorus of voices began  
to call for the forcible internment of individuals labeled “Gypsies.”  
This represented a shift from earlier strategies for governing Roma,  
which typically entailed either policies of forcible sedentarization or  
deportation. The history of Roma in the Habsburg Empire may shed light  
on the origins of statelessness and internment more broadly in Modern  
Europe.

  
Sponsors  
New Directions in European History Study Group

*Hosted by the New Directions in Eurpoean History Study Group.*

Contact: **James McSpadden** (<jmcspadden@fas.harvard.edu>)



 

 



 

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