Situational Dynamics in Urban Riots

The aim of this paper is to explore the situational dynamics of urban riots by focusing on three different aspects of riots: (1) their dynamic of discontinuity, volatility, and alternation; (2) their temporal and spatial limitations as challenges to social order; and (3) the impact of the pattern of rioting on public reading of riots as protest or deviance. I will emphasize that rather than analyzing riots as unified events, riots should be disaggregated into multiple, variable, smaller events, in which the protagonists, the repertoires, and the reasons for participating may not only differ but may also be contradictory. Thus urban riots are continuous but fragmented processes of forming and dissolving, during which multiple shifts occur from planned to spontaneous, nonviolent to violent, collective to individual actions and vice versa. This volatile flow distinguishes urban riots from social movements, which also entail a diversity of actors, repertoires, and claims, but are always characterized by a certain degree of coordination, formalization, or organization. Moreover, riots express and are bound by the socio-economic and spatial immobility of their participants in contrast to social movements, which have the ability to shift their mobilization to a broader spatial and political scale. Finally, public readings of urban riots are influenced by the situational dynamics in riots. The presence of structured, organized and concerted collective action during riots favors their reading as political protest. On the contrary, decentred and disconnected violent events are much more likely to be singled out as instances of individual deviance. The paper will refer to the 1992 Los Angeles riots, the 2005 riots in the outer suburbs of French cities, the English riots of 2011 and the Greek December of 2008.