Cultural politics of human rights of Roma and gypsy travelers

Because of the obvious noble aim of the instrument of human rights, it is often uncritically accepted as an indispensable product of humankind. However, it is crucial to understand how human rights are developed and implemented, or in one word, institutionalized. Only in this way we are able to fully understand and critically assess the meaning and implications of human rights, which is a necessity given the incomplete realization of human rights in practice. We need to grasp the power dynamics between the involved social and political actors who aim to superimpose the meaning of human rights by manipulating the discourse. Discourse is an indispensable object in a contextual critical sociological account of human rights as it not only informs us about the context trying to lay down a certain construction but also about the consequences of such constructions for the same context. The most important dynamics in this context are these of the global versus the national level, and of inclusion versus exclusion. With regard to Roma and Gypsy travelers, strong nation states for long coincided with strong exclusion because of the migrant or minority status of the Roma. However, once human rights come into the picture, these dynamics are apt to change, although the outcome is not necessarily straightforward. Therefore we want to look at the making and implementing of human rights of Roma and Gypsy people to gain insight into the contextual dynamics of the global versus the national, and of inclusion versus exclusion. By assessing which and whose rights are being defended by which actors on which levels in cases of human rights violations of Roma and Gypsy people, we want to find an answer to our research question: what does the cultural politics of human rights of Roma and Gypsy travelers tell us about the power dynamics between the global, national and local level and the degree of inclusion/exclusion in the institution of human rights? In the future, we plan to set out an empirical specific and valid plan to pursue this research