Introduction

The Introduction presents the research puzzle that the collective volume addresses and the central argument it relies on. Standing on the peripheries of Eastern Europe, an EU member state since 2007, upgraded by the World Bank to a high-income country group in 2019, Romania has the highest rate of poverty and social exclusion, and poverty among the Roma surpasses 80%. To explain this, the authors of the book trace the interconnected roles of material and nonmaterial factors in the (re)production of “Roma poverty” from prewar capitalism to contemporary neoliberalism. They engage in comparative historical analysis across several disciplines, clarifying how this poverty was manufactured historically, politically, economically, and culturally by different development models, welfare/housing systems, and racialization processes under various political economy regimes. The chapters uncover the meso- and micro-level mechanisms that make poverty so extreme in Romania, approaching it through the combined lenses of qualitative comparative political economy, historical, and ethnographic methods. Compared to existing literature focused on the cultural and political mechanisms of ethnic discrimination and racialization, this book uses a longitudinally and spatially comparative approach delving into the socio-economic drivers of poverty and also reconstructing how poverty theories contribute to it when they inform poverty eradication programs failing to address its systemic causes.