Reassembling Insecurity: The Power of Materiality

Abstract

Between 160.000 and 180.000 Roma and Sinti live in Italy, amounting to less than 0.3% of the population.1 Notwithstanding this insignificant percentage, in the spring of 2008, following an episode of moral panic around a murder perpetrated by a Romanian citizen of Roma background in Rome, the Italian government declared a state of emergency spurred by the presence of numerous “nomad settlements” in the regions of Latium, Lombardy and Campania. The ruling was motivated by the “massive invasion” of what in popular parlance, but also administrative labels, are commonly called “nomads”: a heterogeneous group made of various Roma from ex-Yugoslavian countries, as well as from new EU member states (in particular Romania and Bulgaria), but also Italian Roma (including Sinti and Caminanti2). The declaration of a state of emergency provided prefects with exceptional powers and resources to combat “nomad criminality”. This episode, referred to as emergenza nomadi, was neither a real emergency—the declaration of a state of emergency being limited to natural catastrophes3—nor about “nomads”: most of the Roma and Sinti in Italy, like in most European countries, have been sedentary for at least three generations. A “fictitious state of emergency”4 declared by decree, the emergenza nomadi was ruled unconstitutional in November 2011.5 Yet, 10 years after the declaration, some of the structures and dynamics brought about by the emergency decree pursue unimpeded their insecuritization work in Rome’s peripheries. The “Public and Emergency Security”