This collection of essays on Roma poverty in Romania brings me back to the mid-2000s, when I was asked to work for the World Bank as co-author of Roma in an Expanding Europe: Breaking the Poverty Cycle. Primary investigator Dena Ringold needed to figure out how to make use of a disparate collection of World Bank research studies on different topics in different countries. My job was to create a coherent narrative. The editors of this collection had a similar problem and could have done more to make the essays work better together. While many of the individual contributions are excellent and important, the project as a whole does not have the coherence many readers demand.

Some constraints are structural. Roma poverty is really hard to study. First, there is the question of who is Roma, a question not adequately discussed in this volume, but a very thorny one. Do we mean those who self-identify as Roma? For instance in censuses or questionnaires? Or those who appear to be Roma and are categorized or grouped together by the state? Given the gap between those who self-identify as Roma and those assigned Roma identity, research on Roma is extremely difficult to conduct. According to at least one author in this book, the World Bank remains the most important source of data twenty years later.

Given the paucity of data, this study instead provides a multi-disciplinary set of perspectives that show how the question of Roma poverty can be constructed and understood. It holds none of these perspectives up as definitive. Instead, it provides a fascinating romp through various nascent frames that is thought provoking and impressive. So is the editors’ unwillingness to decide which of these frames is most important or how they might or might not fit together. I found the first chapter by Manuela Marin to be the most powerful. A deep history of Roma oppression in Romania, it made the case for seeing the Roma as a formerly enslaved, deeply racialized minority, systematically disadvantaged. This case has been made before, but this essay is the best I have read and presents it in great detail across centuries and a variety of governance and economic arrangements.

I also particularly enjoyed chapter five by Cornel Ban and Petre Buciu. This chapter seems like an entry in a contest for what might have been a proper theoretical introduction because of its broader comparative perspective. It covers the post-communist period and shows how Roma poverty persisted despite Romania’s dramatic catch-up growth and today’s high-income status. Rapid growth does not lift all boats. Other chapters introduce and explore important causal factors and phenomena, such as legacies of racism, Roma workers’ employment as unskilled laborers in the communist period, exploitation and flexibility of Roma labor under capitalism, and transnational labor migration, an area where the data is really poor, but case studies tell poignant stories. Many of these chapters provide important insights. It would have been nice to see the editors tie them together in an attractive bow.

To my great surprise, the final chapter of the book by Angéla Kóczé, not a conclusion but simply the last word, contains a compelling critique of our 2005 World Bank book, Roma in an Expanding Europe. I agree that the World Bank accepted the emergence of inequality as a price to pay for economic growth; that was part of the neoliberal creed. And that the World Bank was unwilling to depart with neoliberalism at that time or to recognize that mushrooming inequality might be bad for some populations like Roma. Much less to change its model to address the needs of a population that it recognized as trapped in poverty. If it had, perhaps the decade of Roma inclusion might have succeeded. Yet the final chapter’s attempt to frame the critique in Fraser’s racialized capitalism concept also falls short. Many other chapters in the book show that Roma faced racialization under communism, under various empires, and under national monarchies and dictatorships. Therefore, racialization is not unique to capitalism. In fact, Romania is no outlier. Most countries have racially or ethically stratified labor markets. Latin America, North America, Europe, Asia. Think of the Uighurs toiling in labor reeducation camps in China.

Future studies might ask how different political economic regimes address racialized or ethnicized inequalities that seem to persist for centuries; why they endure, how they can be broken down and to what end? Liberalism seeks to enhance individual capabilities and capacities, even if this does not lead to full equality. Communism sought a more radical egalitarianism. Both of these liberation projects succeeded and failed in part. Today, a new authoritarian conservatism is rising that seeks to stabilize racialized hierarchies, rather than break them down. Which side are the editors on?