Politics of (Dis)Integration (IMISCOE Research Series)

This open access book explores how contemporary integration policies and practices are not just about migrants and minority groups becoming part of society but often also reflect deliberate attempts to undermine their inclusion or participation. This affects individual lives as well as social cohesion. The book highlights the variety of ways in which integration and disintegration are related to, and often depend on each other. By analysing how (dis)integration works within a wide range of legal and institutional settings, this book contributes to the literature on integration by considering (dis)integration as a highly stratified process. Through featuring a fertile combination of comparative policy analyses and ethnographic research based on original material from six European and two non-European countries, this book will be a great resource for students, academics and policy makers in migration and integration studies. Book Presentation: On April 22, 2021, the University of Sheffield hosted the book presentation on "Politics of (Dis)Integration". During this event, the editors, Sophie Hinger and Reinhard Schweitzer, discussed the book. The event was chaired by Aneta Piekut and Jean-Marie Lafleur was the discussant. Please find the recording here: https://eu-lti.bbcollab.com/collab/ui/session/playback. Integration is a term that can fittingly be included in what W. B. Gallie labelled 'essentially contested concepts', since it has become a key term in both academia and policy-making and yet can be used - as it is - for a variety of meanings. While usually understood to address the situation of migrants, it has also recently been applied to Roma minorities in Europe, the vast majority of whom are European citizens and a minority of whom have left their country of origin. This chapter builds upon a discourse analysis of the National Roma Integration Strategies in Italy and Spain and on interviews with the policy-makers in charge of them, in a bid to understand what the term 'integration' means for Roma minorities according to the authorities. Through this analysis, I show how the politics of (dis)integration can affect not only migrants but also ethnic minorities who are represented and treated as similarly 'foreign' to the mainstream's imagined community. In this sense, Roma-specific integration policies do not challenge wider structures of inequality. Even if they are well intended, they can contribute to the normalisation of a hegemonic narrative that sees a certain section of society - namely a national middle-class white society - as the bar for normality