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In our everyday lives, we rely on routines that make tasks and interactions easier and provide a sense of order--routines of greeting each other, getting to work, organizing the things we do on the job, at the gym, or during family dinners. Yet, we have all experienced situations where routines fail and people behave contrary to expectations. In Situational Breakdowns, Anne Nassauer demonstrates that when routines break down, surprising outcomes often emerge. Focusing on detailed accounts of peaceful and violent protests from the 1960s until 2010, violent uprisings such as Ferguson 2014, and armed store robberies caught on CCTV, Nassauer argues that by systematically looking at the way situations unfold, clear patterns can be identified for how and why routine interactions break down. Employing over 1,000 visual recordings, documentary sources, interviews with participants, and participant observation with police, she shows which factors can draw us into violent situations and discusses how and why we make uncommon individual and collective decisions. Drawing on insights from sociology, psychology, primatology, international relations, and neuroscience, Nassauer compares situational dynamics with human motivations to demonstrate that our interactions, interpretations, and emotions greatly influence the outcome of situations. A novel interpretation of surprising social outcomes, Situational Breakdowns reveals that, despite the course of events overriding motivations, people can avoid being caught up in violence, if they know what to look for.

In Protests and Riots: Past, Present and Future Perspectives, the authors analyse a variety of civil disturbances in Manchester and Salford, beginning with the English Civil war to demonstrate that a contemporary claim of senseless violence with later acknowledgment of the implication of the broader context is as true of this locality as of anywhere else. Afterwards, the 2011 August riots are situated within this pattern and it is maintained that any reading of these and future riots must be informed by this tendency to ignore societal conditions. Next, the authors attempt to classify the politically significant social protests in postwar Japanese history by identifying five types of social protest: ideological, labor, item-centered, local and conservative. The specificity of concrete forms of protest is analyzed from the points of view of their substance and organization. South Africa's volatile post-Apartheid landscape is addressed. Centuries of oppression and racial segregation firmly entrenched inequality and violence, negatively affecting its democratic ethos and economic prosperity. The authors seek to answer the following questions: “Can these embedded paradoxes result in South Africa spiraling out of control, cementing protests and violence as the new discourse? Or will Social Self-Defense serve as the democracy barometer, redirecting leaders towards stability, trust and substantive democracy?” Later, the 2008 global financial crisis and the ensuing protest across the European Union is analyzed. Previous literature on contentious activism and economic hardship has linked a person's deprivation to the selection of protest as a means of political expression. This book aims to determine whether relative deprivation, measured by economic indicators, correlates with protest activity in Europe. The final two issues that are addressed are why individuals choose self-sacrifice as a means of protest and whether protests in a society have an impact on the suicide rate of that society.

In this book David Mansley argues that the frequency with which violence intrudes on to the streets is related to both how society is governed and how it is policed. With the help of an innovative methodology, he quantifies and tests three variables – collective violence, democracy and protest policing – using protests in Great Britain in 1999–2011, for his sampling frame. The result is the design of new tools of measurement and a harvest of new data, including previously unpublished details of banning orders and riot damages, that enable us to reflect, with the benefit of broad sociological perspective, on the causes of contemporary violent events.Mansley's explanation of the trends he identifies draws from the work of the best thinkers on violence – especially Charles Tilly, Thomas Hobbes and Norbert Elias. He shows how the style of protest policing and the depth of democracy, both of which function under the direction of the political economy, are crucial to the state's credentials as the monopoly supplier of legitimate violence. His discussion touches on such current topics as the institution of police commissioners, the privatisation of policing duties, and the decline in homicide.This cultured study, which includes an engaging review of the existing scholarship on violence, is essential material for undergraduate and postgraduate students reading criminology, sociology or political theory.