The past 10 years have been marked by a series of high profile and heavily mediatised riots across the globe. The earliest major example occurred in autumn 2005, when France witnessed 3 weeks of nationwide rioting following the deaths of two youths in the infamous banlieues, the underprivileged suburbs at the fringes of major French cities. The latest example was in April 2015, when the death of 25-year-old Freddie Gray in police custody led to large-scale disorder in Baltimore, a city in the US state of Maryland. The intensity of these riots prompted the mayor of Baltimore to declare a state of emergency and saw some 4000 National Guard troops deployed throughout the city.1 These examples are notable but not isolated incidents. Other high-profile riots have occurred in Australia (2005), Greece (2008), England (2011), Sweden (2013), and the USA (2014). From the overspill of racial tensions in Sydney to anti-police riots in London, democratic societies have, in recent years, witnessed powerful and costly outbursts of anger and violence. Not surprisingly, these developments have renewed interest in the nature, significance, and causes of collective disorder, both in terms of public perceptions and the political response to riots, and in terms of academic debate on how these phenomena should be theorised and understood.
The Endurance of the Irrationality Thesis of Crowd Behaviour
For a good part of the twentieth century, the dominant theoretical orientation in the study of crowd behaviour was underpinned by the notion of irrationality. Driven by the work of nineteenth century theorists such as Le Bon and Tarde, the core principle framing this classical school of thought is that
In recent decades, however, thinking in this area has undergone a fundamental transformation as the idea of the irrational crowd has given way to rational approaches to understanding crowd behaviour. From the âgame theoryâ approach expounded by Berk in 1974, to Reicherâs Social Identity Model, first published a decade later, contemporary thinking has been driven by the belief that the choices made by participants in emotionally-charged and often volatile events such as protests and riots are rooted in logic and reason.4 Crucially, this shift in perspective has opened new avenues of enquiry and analysis, with the result that recent theoriesâincluding the Flashpoints Model of Public Disorder that is at the core of this bookâhave adopted a more holistic approach to understanding collective behaviour, recognising the need to go beyond the immediate dynamics of the crowd and consider the broader context within which particular disorderly events are situated.[T]he mere immersion of individuals in a crowd is sufficient to obliterate their moral faculties and customary powers of reason.2 Processes of anonymity, suggestibility and contagion inevitably ensure that civilized and pro-social standards of behaviour are supplanted by a more sinister, unfeeling and potentially barbaric mind.3
Yet despite a substantial and growing body of empirical evidence to support the rationalist perspective, classical approaches continue to influence thinking on crowd behaviour and, of particular relevance to this book, the causal factors and significance attributed to episodes of collective disorder. Indeed a 2006 article by Christian Borch constituted a call to arms of sorts, with the author seeking to revive elements of classical crowd theory and denouncing what he terms âthe re-description of crowd behaviour in rational termsâ that obliterates âalmost every distinguishing trait that the crowd possessed according to nineteenth-century semanticsâ.5 The thrust of Borchâs argument resounds with that of American sociologist Gary Marx who, some three decades earlier, claimed that the efforts of modern theorists to advance understanding of crowd behaviour âhave caused the pendulum to swing too far away from Le Bonâ.6
Drawing on examples that span three centuries, Marx makes the point that advances in the theory of crowd behaviour have been limited by their failure to account for those instances of disorder where âelements of protest, ideology, grievance, strain, lack of access to channels for redressing complaints, social change and social movements [have been] relatively insignificant factors, if not absent altogetherâ.7 The argument here suggests that seeking to attribute logic and justificatory cause to all riots is, in its own way, as problematic as failing to recognise that some instances of disorder are driven by particular causes. In this context, he makes the distinction between issueless riots and issue-oriented ones, in the process renewing some of the core tenets of the Lebonian tradition. The task for sociologists has thus been âto show how these spontaneous and apparently unpremeditated outbreaks of disorder could still be defined as rational in terms of their underlying motivationâ.8
Disorderly Criminals
The enduring influence of nineteenth century notions of irrationality in the academic literature is reflected, and indeed magnified in the public arena. Take the UK riots of 2011, for example. Both during and after these events, a host of media organisations and prominent politicians described the violence and destruction as âmindlessâ, âsenselessâ, and without justification.9 This idea of the irrational âmobâ was given further legitimacy by none other than the president and vice-chair of the British Sociological Association in an open letter to the mayor of London: âCrowds are irrational. Crowds donât have motivesâthatâs far too calculating and rational. Crowd behaviour is dynamic in unpredictable ways, and reason and motive disappear when crowds move unpredictablyâ.10 This thinking was fuelled, in no small measure, by the looting that accompanied the riots. The highly mediatised images of high street stores being looted by masked youths appeared to challenge the idea that these riots had any political significance, that they were symptoms of a deeper social malaise. For many observers, the spectacle amounted to little more than an âorgy of wanton violence, theft and destructionâ.11
The looting that soon took centre-stage in the media gave additional momentum to a process that saw the rioters uniformly categorised as criminals and delinquents. Speaking to the media after a meeting of the British governmentâs national emergencies committee, for example, David Cameron described the riots as âcriminality, pure and simpleâ, a sentiment that was echoed by many other commentators.12 It is important to note that this process draws onâand indeed conflatesâdistinct, albeit related, approaches to understanding crowd behaviour, both of which are rooted in the classical tradition. The âagitator viewâ of rioting holds that crowds are vulnerable to the example of prominent individuals seeking to foment confrontation for politically nefarious purposes.13 This view found expression in the discussion of the role played by gangs in the UK riots; indeed the perceived prominence of gangland figures in the disorder prompted the coalition government to launch a dedicated âgangs taskforceâ in the aftermath of the riots.14 In terms of the relationship between criminality and crowd behaviour, the so-called riff-raff approach goes further and takes as its point of departure the assumption that those involved in collective disorder are âtypically drawn from criminal and/or deviant sections of society that have been drawn into irresponsible and anti-social ways of life as a result of their failure to cope with the social upheaval induced by patterns of economic crisis, deindustrialization and mass migrationâ.15
Depoliticising Collective Disorder
Prime Minister Cameronâs response to the riots was hardly novel and, indeed, came as no surprise. The state response to public disorder is often similar across different national contexts. Faced with a riot, local and national authorities move quickly to suppress the violence and restore order. The return to law and order is, of course, necessary; riots bring considerable destruction and can pose a threat to life. Yet this process is frequently positioned within a broader, concerted effort by the political elite to delegitimise the violence through a narrative that reduces the riot to simple acts of criminality and/or the nihilistic tendencies of deviant groups. The problem is framed in terms of a binary opposition: good versus bad, right versus wrong, the rule of law versus crime. The problem thus posed, the solution is presented as relatively straightforward by the authorities and the response usually takes the form of repressive measures such as higher arrest rates and convictions, tougher sentencing for offenders and more stringent legislation targeting acts of crime and delinquency.
The narrative here is fuelled by media coverage of riots. In a media environment where ratings are the âhidden God [âŠ] who governs conduct and consciencesâ, sensationalist headlines and striking images of violence and destruction form the bulk of the media coverage, giving rise to fear and insecurity among the general public.16 The âofficialâ narrative, in turn, gives further weight to the sensationalist perspective of the media, with this circular process ultimately positioning the rioters as âfolk devilsâ at the centre of a powerful moral panic.17 As this self-perpetuating cycle gains momentum, other voices and interpretations are often lost in the noise. The result of this cyclical process is that riots are stripped of any political significance, and any message that the violence and destruction held goes largely unheard.
Although framing the response to riots in terms of the simple binary logic outlined above may be politically expedientâthe appearance of quick and decisive action in times of crisis can translate into valuable political capital for a leaderâit is also reductive, flawed, and even dangerous. Viewed through this lens, riots appear in monochrome and the nuances that colour our understanding of public disorder are lost. From an academic perspective, this interpretation feeds into a theoretical approach that seeks to prioritise and reinforce the notion of the irrational crowd, often at the cost of context.
Riots are complex phenomena and their outbreak is inevitably symptomatic of deeper societal problems. These events may often appear to be âissuelessâ, or at least lacking a clearly discernible cause that would bring a welcome analytical coherence to the series of events in question. However due consideration of the range of factors framing episodes of collective disorder (from broad structural issues of economic marginalisation, to intangible sentiments of political powerlessness, to the day-to-day interactions that shape policeâpublic relations in a particular community) can provide us with a better understanding of the nature and sources of the destructive behaviour and, consequently, access to the internal logic of the riot.
Multivariate Explanations and the Political Significance of Riots
Against this background, this book seeks to provide a more nuanced understanding of the nature and causes of some of the most significant episodes of rioting that have occurred around the world over the past decade. Our objectives here are twofold. First, we seek to advance theoretical understanding of collective disorder by setting out a revised version of the Flashpoints Model of Public Disorder which has long been associated with the second author (David Waddington). First appearing in the late 1980s, the flashpoints model continues to be recognised as the dominant conceptual framework for interpreting and understanding large-scale episodes of public disorder.18 The book sets out the key elements of this model and shows how its layered nature both evidences the need for a broad approach t...