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This paper focuses on building a theory of collective singularity using the case of anti-racist collectives targeting the marginalized Roma minority in the Czech Republic. The collective singularity concept is one in which the values, norms, and practices that constitute a collective render it impossible for the group to transcend its own axioms in any manner other than by rejecting precisely these constitutive elements. The concept of anti-racism contains the trope of ‘the other’, perceived not only as an object of protection, integration, assistance, and interest, but also as an object under pressure to find its own (anti-)concept. Anti-racism oscillates around four dispositives (hysteria, paternalism, individualism, bionumerics) and finds itself unable to follow a radical pluralism with the potential to undermine the roots of the hegemonic discourse. As a result, the dispositives of anti-racism essentially become a ‘hidden’ form of disciplination, reproducing oppression and the impossibility of self-deconstruction. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In the summer of 2015, 1.5 million refugees arrived at Europe's borders. This article examines how and why this humanitarian crisis was transformed into a "racist crisis". It begins by recounting a highly publicized event in the Czech Republic which saw police forcibly removing hundreds of people from trains at midnight in the border town of Břeclav, before inking numbers on their arms and transporting them to detention centres. Thinking with this scene, the article develops the conceptual framework of "racial stigma" to capture some of the multiple practices that characterize border regimes in contemporary Europe. Racism, it argues, is the stigma machine of sovereign power in neoliberal Europe. The article concludes with some reflections on how Europe's current "racist crisis" reanimates both historical spectres of race and spectral geographies of racism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, a methodological approach to the topic of the racial discrimination of Roma people in Bulgaria, the Czech Republic and the Russian Federation draws on three models of modus vivendi between Roma people and the majority, including the concepts and forms of direct and indirect discrimination. The core methodology employed in this article is the legal and sociological analysis of various national and international statistics as well as practices of the courts, which are focused upon throughout. The fieldwork within this article deals with the various attitudes of Roma parents to the introduction of Roma assistants in primary schools in the Czech Republic and is enriched with in-depth interviews conducted with Roma teaching assistants. Data from original research in three Czech elementary schools are compared with forms of discrimination in Bulgaria and in the Russian Federation regarding their educational systems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]