Over the past two decades, the Roma issue has become one of the most current topics in European public space and also became especially relevant in academia. Despite this, there are still under-researched topics, and such was until recently, the history of the Roma in the period between WWI and WWII and the appearance and development of social and political projects proposed by Roma. In this time span, Roma started to be politically institutionalized and, at the same time, also subjected to a variety of controversial policy practices. The present project successfully accomplished the ambitious goal of filling in this gap.
Within both academia and public perception, as well as in the discourse of key political actors and Roma activists, one comes across the ingeminate statement that Roma history has been primarily written by non-Roma and that, because of the absence of a writing tradition, Roma voices have been widely left out of history and that Roma are nothing else but passive recipients of different state governments’ policies. Based on our in-depth historical research conducted throughout Central, South-Eastern and Eastern Europe so far, the project is able to offer a corrective point to this overarching narrative.
Through relying on documents, critical rereading and rethinking of historical sources and older research, this new approach, a norm in other fields of history, will overcome the legacy of a Roma history that has too often been blighted by stereotypes and myths. Through this, the project contributed to overcoming extant stereotypes present in society about Roma as a nation without history and even within academic circles, where a belief is met that there are not sufficient, preserved and written historical sources concerning Roma past to allow for the emergence of Roma History as a field in its own right.
In our research, we were able to discover a large amount of new, largely unknown sources which strongly contradict these claims. In the archives and libraries across the region, we have found numerous documents, written not only about Roma but also by Roma themselves, that shed light not only on wide-ranging Roma vision(s) about the problems of their time and desired future for their communities, and that also reveal their place and role in specific historical events which shaped the world after the Great War.
The project also created a publicly accessible database of sources representing the social and political endeavours of Roma. This, together with publications, is a major contribution to the study of the history of Roma movements and state measures towards them in the Interwar period.
The overarching goal of the project - to incorporate the history of Roma, or Europe’s largest minority, into the mainstream of European and global historiography was achieved in full.
