Roma discrimination and stigmatization in Europe are well-documented, with urban scholars emphasizing pervasive prejudices and stereotypes alongside negative policy outcomes. However, the focus on Roma marginality has tended to centre on punitive state and urban governance to the neglect of everyday urban relations. In this article we focus on the micro manifestations of stigmatization--racialized urban encounters--and their neglected longer-term affects for Roma in Czechia and Romania. Ethnographic research and in-depth qualitative interviews with Roma respondents expose a complex, dynamic and multi-layered response to stigmatization that challenges the simplistic binary of resistance versus the internalization of stigma. The concept of fragmented habitus is deployed in capturing this dynamic process and providing a nuanced representation of the urban inhabitation of a long-term stigmatized and racialized position, beyond generic 'Otherness'. We argue for more attention to the specificities and complexities of everyday relations and their affects in capturing the interdependence between urban encounters, the longer-term construction of Roma inferiority, and the heterogeneous, dynamic and ambivalent ways in which Roma inhabit their racialized urban position.
This paper addresses the influence of organized crime on the performance of democracy in the Czech Republic and seeks to determine which dimensions of its political system (if any) are most endangered. We construe organized crime in terms of corruption networks, questioning in effect the predominant understanding of these two concepts as distinct or even exclusive phenomena. The paper thus construes corruption and organized crime as concepts referring to transgressive acts (i.e., behavior that involves a violation of moral or social boundaries that need not be legally codified), rather than in terms of legal norms. The influence of corruption networks is demonstrated using the “Nagygate” affair, which is analyzed using Maltz’s framework of potential harm. We argue that the debate on organized crime in the Czech Republic is, in fact, inherently tied to the study of corruption, since corruption constitutes an integral part of organized crime activity. Our findings are that transgressive behavior has a mostly negative impact, including loss of trust, the widespread belief that injustice goes unpunished, a weakening of the political system, and degeneration of the democratic regime. Moreover, the Nagygate scandal provides evidence that democratic institutions are not solely victims of organized crime but also a potential source of transgressive acts.
Bouncers have recently attracted the interest of criminologists, some of whom have utilized Pierre Bourdieu’s concepts to grasp the sociocultural realities of bouncing. The present study continues this line of enquiry, aiming to demonstrate that bouncer ethnography will benefit from yet another of Bourdieu’s concepts, that of the field. A study of bouncers in a Czech city is utilized to argue that (1) field analysis is a valuable analytical framework for ethnographic research in this context, (2) it allows relationships both among bouncers and between them and other relevant agents to be explored, (3) it has the potential to investigate these relationships without criminalizing them, and (4) it provides a framework for comparative studies of bouncing in different contexts.
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