FOR REMEMBRANCE OF THE ROMA GENOCIDE

Roma Holocaust: The End of Silence 53
not suffer from them, but also secures descendants of the victims
the right to identify themselves in a different way.
We may thus speak, in more general terms, about a split of
the agenda of the Roma movement, which is paralleled by the
split within Romani studies 25 , into the economy/human rights
approach and the cultural politics of identity. The problem of
the two approaches is that there hardly is a connection between
policy-oriented research on the conditions of life and the culturalpolitical
approaches to identity. Rare exceptions focus on a very
general link between the social position of the Roma and their
identities, and interpret “being Rom” as a defensive social mechanism
against the hostile environment 26 or, less radically, as a social
and cultural “response to the nature of the symbiotic relationship
between the Roma and the wider majority communities on which
they have always depended for their livelihood” 27 .
An interesting perspective of synthesizing the “inequality/
exclusion” approach and the “identity approach” within a single
theoretical perspective is offered by Axel Honneth’s recognition
theory, modified in view of Nancy Fraser’s criticism. This theory
conceptualizes society as a network of the relations of recognition 28
and identifies cultural recognition of identity and difference as the
main goal of political struggle to eliminate social injustice 29 . In this
25 Thomas Acton, “Romani Politics, Scholarship, and the Discourse of Nation-
Building”, in A. Marsh, E. Strand, eds., Gypsies and the Problem of Identities:
Contextual, Constructed and Contested (Istanbul: Swedish Research
Institute, 2006).
26 Michael Stewart, “How Does Genocide…”
27 Will Guy, “Romani Identity and Post-Communist Policy”, in W. Guy, ed.,
Between Past and Future. The Roma of Central and Eastern Europe (Hatfield:
University of Hertfordshire Press, 2001), p. 5.
28 Axel Honneth, The Struggle for Recognition: The Moral Grammar of Social
Conflicts (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1995).
29 Fraser, Nancy (2003) Social Justice in the Age of Identity Politics: Redistribution,
Recognition, and Participation. In: N. Fraser and A. Honneth,
Redistribution or Recognition? A Political-Philosophical Exchange. London
and New York: Verso.