‘Get out of Traian Square!’ : Roma Stigmatisation as a Mobilising Tool for the Far Right in Timişoara, Romania

Post-communist Central and Eastern Europe has seen far right movements and parties gain considerable ground by drawing on nativist and ethnic claims to call for a return to an imagined past. In Romania, far right groups have been able to capitalise on a sense of injustice while also playing on historically negative feelings towards the Roma community. These patterns have been seen in Timişoara where the group Noua Dreaptă (New Right) has established a foothold over the past decade by emphasising claims that blame Roma for loss of built heritage and corruption in the administration of property restitution. The aims of this paper are to 1) examine the emergence of Noua Dreaptă and its use of Roma stigmatisation, and 2) consider the ways extreme views are normalised by appealing to beliefs and perceptions. The findings of the paper show that pre-existing prejudices can be a powerful force to not just target marginalised communities, but also challenge administrative practices and build organisational support. Focusing at the level of the city, it is possible to identify the way these claims can be more precisely calibrated to draw on concerns that circulate within the community

Geo-Metrics and Geo-Politics : Controversies in Estimating European Shale Gas Resources

This chapter explores the relationship between geoscientific knowledge production and geopolitical agencies in the making of new subsurface resources, specifically unconventional fossil fuels. Focusing on recent controversies surrounding the assessment of potential shale gas resources in Europe, we analyse the ways in which highly speculative and contested resource estimates have come to inform the geopolitical imagination of many EU states and, in turn, provided a new impetus for geoscientific inventories and exploration of shale formations. In the first part of the chapter, we engage with recent volumetric accounts in political geography and cognate disciplines to conceptualize these epistemic struggles of resource-making as a case of “subterranean geo-politics”. The empirical analysis in the second part then traces the geo-politics of shale gas prospecting in Poland and the UK, describing how volumetric projections of resource abundance have become undermined by diverse materialities and socio-political constructions of the subsurface. This is evidenced by the difficulties of translating knowledge across geo-economically disparate sites of resource development, notably the failure to apply the US-based expertise to the European context. Finally, we document more recent efforts by the European Commission and other epistemic authorities to overcome the deficiency and incompatibility of local resource estimates by developing standard, EU-specific geo-metrics for shale energy assessment. Fractures in the EU energy future: at the crossroad between security, transition and governance (Formas 2015-00455