Czech scholar wins prestigious grant to research the impact of war on Romani families

The aim of the research is to understand how wartime conflicts and their consequences impact Romani kinship ties, family structures and community cohesion in different parts of Europe and the Middle East. The RAW project is innovative in that it systematically investigates the influence of wars on Romani families in several regions simultaneously.

“For me, this project is developed from two observations: First, Romani people live in all of the European and Middle Eastern countries which have experienced war over the last 35 years. These wars had specific impacts on Romani civilians, frequently intensifying their social exclusion and inequality. The second finding is that just as in the case of other marginalized ethnic minorities, family and kinship ties are crucial to maintaining their social cohesion and continuity and to a feeling of solidarity,” Fotta explains. 

The project will analyze the relationships of Romani people who are related to each other from Iraq, Syria, Ukraine and the former Yugoslavia, in other words, areas afflicted by long-term armed conflict. The survey focuses on the questions of how Romani people mobilize their kinship networks in crisis situations and how those ties adapt to extreme conditions.

“We know very little about how Romani communities have been resisting and surviving during the recent wars and after the cease-fires. How do they make use of their relationships with their relatives in the context of war and forced displacement? How does war influence their family structures? What are the differences and similarities in how various Romani groups cope with violent events? How adaptable and permanent is kinship as a social form? More generally, what does this case reveal about social structures and how they change over time?” Fotta asks. 

Fotta has been inspired by the concept of “plasticity”, borrowed from epigenetics, to explain how families of Roma manage to respond to the shocks of war. The research will explore several dimensions of this, from wars which have already officially ended to those which persist in a latent form.

“This will make it possible to research how wars are reflected in people’s lives and how they transform over time. The performance of ethnographic research in such a context will be a big challenge and I am looking forward to collaborating with different scholars within and outside of Europe,” Fotta said in an interview published on the website of the National Institute for Research on the Socioeconomic Impacts of Diseases and Systemic Risks (SYRI).

“It is obvious that a project of such ambition and scope, one that might fail in more than one way, cannot be implemented with national-level financing only. I am grateful to the ERC panel for recognizing its potential,” admits Fotta, who designed the project with the support of experts from the Institute of Ethnology and Technology Centre Prague.

Fotta has repeatedly stressed the need for methodological innovation and an interdisciplinary approach during his career. His previous work has included a study of the resilience of Romani communities during the COVID-19 pandemic and the development of participatory research methods.

Martin Fotta leads the Department of Mobility and Migration at the Institute of Ethnology. He is also a co-designer of the bilateral Czech-Polish project “Unequal Citizenship and Transnational Mobilisation of Polish, Czech and Ukrainian Roma in the Face of the War in Ukraine”.

Fotta was awarded the Lumina Quaeruntur prize from the Academic Council of the Czech Academy of Sciences in 2021, given to excellent scholars who are advancing their field of study. That made it possible to develop a unique research program entitled “Romani Atlantic: Transcontinental Logic of Ethno-Racial Identities” to investigate the Romani diaspora from a transatlantic, transcultural perspective.