Projects
Over the last decade in post-socialist Bulgaria the displacement of Roma people from derelict legal and semi-legal settlements has drastically increased. While Roma property rights on the parcels of land and constructions are often dubious, this is not less the case with illegal houses, villas, luxury complexes, garages, and balconies which have mushroomed among the majority population. Yet, after new legislation on land ownership was passed in 1999 and 2005, it has mostly been shabby Roma settlements which have been destroyed and replaced with bits of infrastructure and new development projects. The inhabitants of these settlements have been displaced often to remote destinations with no conditions and infrastructure for them to continue their normal life. My study asks what past and present legal regulations and economic and cultural policies make Bulgarian Roma settlements particularly vulnerable to practices of demolition and their inhabitants to displacement. What were the policies in socialist Bulgaria which allowed the permanent precariousness of Roma housing and contributed to the post-socialist change of status of their settlements from extra-legal to illegal?
To explore these questions I will use archival materials and interviews with high-ranking officials with decision-making power in municipal and national institutions. I will analyze the materials through the theoretical tools developed by scholars, who have researched empirically how neoliberal regimes treat communities in the margins of the state (Wacquant 1999; Smart 2001; Das & Poole eds. 2004). Their work has asked how nation states create categories to regulate in favor of the market and disenfranchise surplus populations and push them out by the urban frontier (Smith 2004). As a result, marginal groups live in a state of exception, subjected to neurotic regimes of citizenship (Isin 2002). Their life and labor become increasingly precarious and their struggles remain invisible (Sassen 2001; Smith 2004; Tayyab 2010). Roma displacement has similar effects. To understand how this process impacts Bulgaria, it needs to be understood vis-a-vis Bulgaria's socialist past. My research explores policies and practices under state socialism, which allegely - and unlike its adversary of decentalized laissaiz-faire capitalism - aimed at centrally planned economy under which housing was provided to all workers (French & Hamilton 1979; Tsenkova 2009). I ask how did socialist regimes reason their decision to put a blind eye on informal housing arrangements, and leave marginal communites in extralegal - if not necessarily illegal - situation?