This paper draws on ethnographic research with Roma families living in the Holylands area of south Belfast, a neighbourhood that became a focal point of tension after the UK-wide anti-immigration riots of August 2024. Although Roma residents were not the primary targets of these attacks, Roma residents consistently described heightened fear, increased scrutiny in public space, and a withdrawal from everyday activities in their aftermath. These dynamics were especially intensified during the 2025 Ballymena violence, when racially motivated unrest and attacks on minority households (specifically Romanian Roma) led to the displacement of Roma families and reinforced a climate of fear extending well beyond the immediate sites of violence. For many Roma interlocutors, the events in Ballymena were understood not as exceptional, but as part of a longer continuum of anti-Roma hostility that periodically resurfaces at moments of social and political crisis. The aftermath of the violence exposed the limits of rights-based protections when everyday practices of recognition, from neighbourly relations to institutional responses, fail to secure Roma as legitimate members of the local and national community.

In this paper, and based on engagement with Roma residents, institutions and support networks in Belfast, Northern Ireland, I examine how intersectional processes of racialisation, including ethnicity, class, migration status, and locality shape Roma experiences of citizenship, rights, and European belonging in a post-conflict, post-Brexit context. I argue that Roma occupy an ambivalent position within Northern Ireland’s social and political landscape: formally recognised as EU citizens with mobility and residency rights, yet persistently framed as suspect, out of place, or undeserving within local policy frameworks, media representations, and everyday encounters. This ambivalence is further complicated by Northern Ireland’s specific ethno-religious history, where older modes of division intersect with newer racialised hierarchies.

By tracing these processes ethnographically, this paper contributes to debates on how Europe is constructed through everyday practices rather than formal policy alone. I show that European belonging, for Roma in Northern Ireland, is not guaranteed by legal status but is continually negotiated through local interactions, crisis moments, and uneven forms of solidarity. In doing so, the paper highlights how intersectional inequalities both shape and unsettle dominant narratives of Europe as a space of inclusion, rights, and shared political community.

The EU plays a key role in Roma inclusion policies, framing Roma as the “European minority”. However, EU Roma policies are not delivering the desired results, and in the field of work, Romani women encounter precarious and informal work, along with high unemployment due to structural and intersecting inequalities of anti-Roma racism, patriarchy and capitalism.

This socio-legal research adopts a social realist paradigm to explore how EU rights and policies influence the intersecting power relationships that shape the everyday experiences of Romani women in field of work.

The aim is to explore and explain the gap between EU policies and EU-derived rights and Romani women’s experiences, needs, and understandings in the field of work, including formal and informal employment and reproductive work. The research seeks pathways to close this gap by developing concepts for transformation of EU-derived rights and policies towards more emancipatory, tailor-made, and bottom-up approaches. To explore EU influences on Romani women’s position in the field of work within the EU and its neighbourhood, the research compares a member state (the Czech Republic) with an accession state (North Macedonia).

The overall methodology proposed is feminist participatory research. Empirical research will be based on multilevel intersectionality analyses, conducted through interviews and workshops with Romani women and Romani women’s NGOs. The theoretical framework draws on feminist intersectionality to explore inequalities within and across social divisions, examining their interplay rather than single-axis analyses. Critical political economy provides a structural lens on the influence of EU economic and labour policies in Central and South-Eastern Europe.

The research addresses a significant gap in the existing literature by providing an in-depth analysis of how EU rights and policies impact Romani women in the field of work, an area that has not been comprehensively explored before.

By using a bottom-up approach, the study is investigating if and how EU-derived rights and policies are used and enjoyed by Roma women, contributing to the discussion of constraining Europe through practice. The practices of exclusion of Roma women from the labour market, as well as the unjust conditions under which they can participate, are shaping their European (non)belonging.

This research is a work in progress, and as a participatory, bottom-up study, the key concepts and theoretical frameworks will emerge from the data collected in the field.

In the context of increasingly exclusionary and ethno-nationalist politics across Europe, belonging itself has become deeply contested: who counts as European, whose political participation is legitimate, and which identities are recognised as compatible with European norms are all sites of struggle. This paper examines intersectionality as a methodological tool for capturing social complexity of multi-layered belonging within legal frameworks. Focusing on the post-Yugoslav space - a historically and politically liminal region of Europe, the paper explores how ethnicity, political opinion, and gender operate as mutually constitutive axes shaping access to political participation, public office, and representation. The paper situates contested European belonging as both a legal and social phenomenon, highlighting how equality law fails to address the power relations that produce and sustain exclusion.

The paper presents a doctrinal and critical analysis of selected domestic cases from the post-Yugoslav space on political discrimination in employment, and political office and elections. It finds that, while courts and equality bodies increasingly acknowledge multiple and intersectional discrimination on grounds such as ethnicity and political opinion, they do this in a formally descriptive rather than analytically transformative way. They tend to note the interaction of grounds without engaging in a substantive analysis of the underlying power relations and their entanglement. This is particularly relevant in the post-Yugoslav space, where ethnicity and political opinion are deeply politicised, and political belonging is shaped by gendered norms of representation, loyalty, and legitimacy.

By disregarding underlying power relations, judicial engagement with intersectional discrimination risks reducing intersectionality to an identity-focused classificatory exercise, obscuring the structural roots of exclusion, hollowing out its transformative potential, and limiting its capacity to challenge existing power hierarchies. In contexts of contested belonging, this prevents courts from explaining how ethnicity, political opinion and gender become mutually constitutive markers of legitimacy and loyalty, thereby obscuring the legal production of inclusion and exclusion within European political communities, particularly for Roma, whose participation has been dubbed as instrumentalised, disloyal, or deviant.

Mobilising intersectionality as a methodological lens calibrated to foreground power relations, this paper shows how courts become spaces for reproducing contested belonging, even when using cutting-edge tools, such as intersectional discrimination. It argues that equality law must move beyond a formalistic handling of multiple and intersectional discrimination to address how belonging is legally produced and constrained. Without such an approach, courts risk reproducing dominant ethno-national and gendered imaginaries of Europeanness.