I explore how modern urban violence is waged through policy, paperwork, and silence. Drawing from lived experience with the Romani community in Zaharna Fabrika, Sofia, I trace how institutional violence – evictions, unregistered addresses, police complicity in black-market economies, and the denial of basic documentation – renders poverty a permanent state. These ghettos, formed through the erasure of ancestral Romani lifeways, are targets of a slow, bureaucratic war that ultimately leads to actions of ethnic cleansing justified by misrepresenting poverty as culture.
Martia Petkova is a writer and consultant, currently consulting Pixar on Romani culture together with her partner, and working as a writing consultant for the UN.