When Cities Fight Back: Migration, Integration and Urban Conflict in France

What explains the incidence of conflict between minority groups and the state in Europe? This paper takes advantage of the natural social science experiment unique to the cases provided by the 2005 riots in France to study why immigrants and ethnic minorities are more prone to engage in violent political confrontations with the state in some local contexts than in others. In contrast to existing accounts that emphasize the effects of socio-economic inequality, cultural variables or national integration regimes, this research proposes a distinctively political explanation for group violence at the local level in Europe. I find that the incidence of collective urban violence depends on the entrenchment of local political elites and their strategic social alliances with minority populations. More specifically, when the breadth and depth of this local partisan entrenchment is either too robust or too feeble, the risk of minority conflict increases as minorities experience diminished leverage vis-à-vis the socio-political infrastructure; whereas the competitive characteristics of mid-level entrenchment militate against the onset of violence by decreasing its value as a tool for political expression. With data collected from 12 months of fieldwork in France, these patterns emerged from the statistical analysis of 112 French cities and 4 in-depth case studies.