Can the concept of moral economy be useful to understanding riots, popular indignations and protest – in Africa and elsewhere? This paper will combine: 1. a theoretical discussion of the concept and its application to riots in poor countries–paying a particular attention to two centrals aspects: the link it establishes between popular expectations and the patronage of authorities (how popular expectations owe to a paternalistic and protective model in which authorities were supposed to provide for the needs of the people in case of dearth), the fact that it helps to consider popular riots as non inherently spasmodic and pathologic (Thompson), having their own social rationality,. 2. the problems the notion raises : and particularly the risk of a culturalist use, in which it would be used as a “black box” supposing that people rebel because they have such or such a moral economy, which would be given a causal status. 3. Then, with a fieldwork carried out in Bamako (Mali), I examine (through interviews with ex-rioters, press data and administrative archives, on riots in 1994-2010), what can be inferred from riots in terms of political expression. Riots evoked by Thompson and in Mali occur in societies of subsistence, where extreme poverty cohabits with the possibility of outrageous wealth. Any riot, whether the trigger is per se political or not, has to be carefully examined to understand what tastes and detestations, what forms of craving for abundance and dismissing the wealthy and the villains of the moment are expressed.
