The Necropolitics of the Settlement: Extraction and the Commodity of the Roma Body
The European settlement is not merely a site of poverty; it is a laboratory for the most extreme forms of capitalist extraction. To address the trafficking of Roma women and children without centring the mechanics of sex trafficking is to ignore the primary market for our surplus bodies. This is the ultimate commodity frontier. When the state renders a person spatially and legally invisible, it is not an administrative error. It is a deliberate clearing of the land to allow the predator to move in. This is the necropolitics of the border, where the Roma body is the raw material for a shadow economy that the civilised world pretends does not exist while it quietly consumes the product. The Spatial Manufacture of Invisibility The statistics provided by the European Union Agency for Fundamental Rights (FRA) and the OSCE tell a story of targeted predation. Roma communities constitute the largest ethnic minority in Europe, yet they are disproportionately represented in trafficking networks,...