Readers have much to learn from Celia Donert's The Rights of Roma. The main thrust of the book's argument is that Roma activists in the context of communist Czechoslovakia developed concepts of human rights that substantially differed from that of the western world where rights were defined by liberalism and individualism. The concepts that developed were uniquely based on the political and economic currents of thought flowing in the communist east. The communist and Romani notion of rights were tied to collectivist and materialist conceptions that spawned from both long-term conceptions of nation in East Central Europe and communist promises of progress.

The book follows a broad chronological sweep that investigates the prewar status and wartime targeting of Roma through the communist period and into the early 2000s. While the focus is on communist Czechoslovakia, the addition of the earlier and later periods shows how the trends did not change abruptly but followed previous pathways. So, for instance, in the 1950s communist policies mirrored the thinking of prewar officials and Nazis, even when trying to devise solutions to counter anti-Roma attitudes. Similarly, Donert shows how western European nations backpedaled from their insistence on the sanctity of human rights in favor of greater governance over the treatment of minorities in the face of increasing Romani migration to the west in the late 1990s.

The book provides a thorough history of the Communist government's efforts to deal with the “gypsy question” in postwar Czechoslovakia. It shows how many of the government's policies aimed to eliminate the cultural and social lives of Roma under the cover of progress or socialist transformation. As the author shows, the reality was that most of these efforts and the attitudes that precipitated them were long-held suspicions and stereotypes wrapped in new terms. One was the notion of Roma living conditions as unhygienic and unsafe. Efforts to liquidate Gypsy settlements in the 1950s were thus done under the cover of public health. Similarly, the idea that Roma were lazy and sought to live from state benefits infused government policies. As Donert notes, such thinking continued after 1989 and she points to Slovakia's 2003 Law on Assistance on Material Need as an example of the new state attempting to meet European Union's demands for human rights while it argued that social benefits, such as the ones the law was offering, would only reinforce the tendency of Roma to avoid work.

Another strength of the book is its efforts to show how Roma activists emerged and shaped the ongoing struggle for Romani rights. Too often Roma remain cast as victims without a voice in their own historical narrative. Here, Donert introduces us to several individuals who played important roles in the efforts to gain rights. Anton Facuna and Elena Lacková actively pushed for educational and cultural rights for Roma. This approach breathes fresh air into the narrative by showing how these activists worked in the confines of the one-party state. At times, the Communist Party encouraged and enabled their work. Just as importantly, the Party could shut them down. In the early 1970s, for instance, Party leaders closed the Romani Cultural Unions after just four years because they feared the implications of their work.

The story that Donert tells, then, is how Romani rights followed from the competing goals of Roma activists and party-state officials. Donert argues that while state officials sought to turn Roma into productive citizens in the early postwar years, Roma activists sought greater benefits and rights as a national group. Initially, these initiatives were united in a common cause to better integrate the Roma into society and the socialist economy. The activists realized that this would best be done by allowing Romani to be educated in their native language through schools, grammars, and literature. Given the narrow space for nationalist dialog and antagonistic local leaders, however, these activists continually ran into obstacles.

The book has much to offer, but the reader must do much of the work to follow the various threads in Donert's analysis. The discussion of human rights comes and goes without clear indicators. Conclusions are sometimes inconclusive. For example, the conclusion for chapter six on the 1960s simply discusses the end of the Roma Cultural Unions by reviewing the state's actions to shut them down. At other times new points are raised without enough context. In other cases, various themes compete for the reader's attention. On page 152, for instance, the author shifts from a discussion on Romani educational policies to that of Brown v. Board of Education in the United States, to a remark about the “gendered assumptions about the private lives of Roma and in particular the role of ‘Gypsy women’ as a barrier to assimilation.” While all these points might be worth discussion and inclusion here, the reader can sometimes lose track of what exactly are the key points of the author's analysis.

Even so, the importance of this work on the history of the Roma in communist Czechoslovakia should not be missed. Donert's work contributes much to a greater understanding of their social and economic lives as well as their political activism—something that has been almost completely overlooked in western analyses of the Roma. For scholars working on human rights and questions of citizenship, this book challenges the idea of singular approach to these notions by exploring how competing narratives of what constitutes these rights were happening in the communist east. Only through such an understanding can we begin to understand the current ways that Roma continue to face—and fight against—discrimination and official repression in the postcommunist world.