Jasmine Arpagian

This chapter suggests that the nature of the modern homo sacer is exemplified by the problematic dystopian imaginaries that circle some Roma peoples, and that these imaginaries are often codified spatially by local council and state policies. It draws upon ongoing fieldwork—in the form of interviews and observation-bolstering archival and news media research—which began in Slovenia in Autumn 2013 and in Romania in Autumn 2015. The chapter considers the Roma primarily from their urban, but also national, political subjectivities. It argues that young ethnic minorities are particularly vulnerable to a revanchism that is hidden under state policies of seeming democracy and justice. The chapter examines that the contexts of urban Roma youth denied full citizenship rights for a variety of reasons, and how that denial contextualizes itself in the urban spaces of Maribor in Slovenia, and Cluj-Napoca in Romania.