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A number of commentators have suggested that the riots in England in August 2011 were distinctive because of the character and extent of the looting that took place. In doing so they have argued that the nature of modern consumer capitalism should be placed front and centre of any explanation of the disorder. Whilst concurring with elements of such arguments, we depart from such analyses in three ways. First, we argue that it is important not to overstate the extent to which the 2011 riots were a departure from previous outbreaks of civil disorder - violent consumerism having a quite lengthy history. Second, using testimony from those involved, we argue that a focus on looting risks ignoring both the political character and the violence involved in the riots. Finally, and relatedly, we suggest that the focus on consumption potentially simplifies the nature of the looting itself by underestimating its political and expressive characteristics.

The riots of 2011 arguably represent the most significant civil disorder on mainland Britain in at least a generation. Over four days there were five deaths, injuries to dozens of police officers and civilians, and damage to property running into the tens of millions of pounds. Commentators writing in the aftermath of the riots have pointed both to what are taken to be unusual aspects of the 2011 disorders – the role of gangs, the nature and extent of looting, the and use of social media among others – as well as some of the parallels with previous riots. In placing the 2011 riots in their recent historical context this article outlines a model for structuring comparative analysis of disorder and then moves on to consider some of the similarities between 2011 and riots in the post-war period, concluding by identifying four significant points of departure.

New York’s Tompkins Square Park, a 10.5 acre public space on Manhattan’s Lower East Side, has a long history of civil disorder, elaborated through public memory more than through actual fact. The park’s conversion into a military drill ground for New York’s wealthy and powerful Seventh Regiment in the years after the Civil War was driven by elite anxieties about protest and urban disorder that were amplified by growing class and ethnic hostilities and a changing social order. Despite the fact that park commissioners found other, more suitable locations for a drill ground site, state legislators with ties to Tammany Hall pushed through legislation that led to the park’s destruction. But within 15 years, popular neighborhood protest would see the park restored to its original use as an urban gathering place and social center, a change that foretold an evolution in elite understanding of the uses of public space and the beginning of the city’s Small Parks Movement.

This article discusses the forms of urban violence which inflamed over 300 sensitive neighbourhoods in France in November 2005, referred to by the media, politicians and researchers as 'riots'.1 This choice of word is not without consequences. The term riots, associated with cities, evokes the racial riots in American cities during the 1960s and those in Los Angeles in 1992, images of which have been seen all over the world. This article argues that the reference to riots is inappropriate in the French case, it is structured according to the questions that President Lyndon Johnson asked Judge Otto Kerner when he appointed him as the Head of the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorder in 1967: What happened? How did it happen? Why did it happen? What can be done? It concludes with a discussion as to what is specifically French in these outbursts. Language: en

Commentaries on recent political developments in the sub-Saharan region run the gamut from giddy Afrophilia to gloomy Afropessimism. Early assessments were hopeful, seeing the peaceful electoral displacement of authoritarian regimes in countries like Benin and Zambia as harbingers of "political renewal" and a "second liberation."' A critical backlash soon followed in the wake of a series of disputed elections in places like Angola and Kenya. At best, analysts pondered thoughtfully about the sustainability of multiparty competition under conditions of ethnic fragmentation and elite corruption2 or, at worst, lapsed into apocalyptic warnings of impending civil disorder in the wake of the "stalling . . .winds of change."3 In my view, analysts should not rush to judgment but instead adopt a detached and broadly comparative view of what is essentially a mixed situation of democratization in Africa. As David Peterson suggests, "democratic development will not be a uniform, linear process":4 even in democratizing countries, transitions

Central amongst the many issues raised by the inner-city riots and picket-line violence of recent years, is the question of the methods of policing violent crowds, especially the introduction of paramilitary equipment and tactics.1 The control of violent crowds is a task which the police have repeatedly, albeit intermittently, been called upon to fulfil ever since their inception (Critchley, 1978; Emsley, 1983; Miller, 1977; Vick, 1985). It is also a task that poses a dilemma for the police, significantly challenging the twin bases of their legitimacy: impartiality and restrained use of force (Miller, 1977; Reiner, 1985). This is because the circumstances surrounding the policing of public disorder invite allegations of bias and brutality (Waddington and Leopold, 1985).

FRANCE is, at the present moment, the weakest link in the European security system, because Communism is not merely a potential but an actual danger to the regime. That is not to say that a Communist coup d'etat on the Czech model is likely. But the circumstances are such that, if the parties now governing France do not find some way of ensuring greater governmental stability, Communism cannot be prevented from creating a climate which could easily lead to civil disorder, or dictatorship, or both. It is important, in discussing Communism, to be as factual as possible, to try to give precise answers to precise questions. Communists themselves -and fellow-travellers-so often distort the facts and obscure the true issues. The three questions which most British people would like cleared up are, first, exactly how strong is the Communist Party? Secondly, why is it so strong, what is the nature of the appeal that it makes to the French citizen? And thirdly, what is France doing about it, and is it enough? The basic facts in answer to the first question are readily available. Out of an electorate of 25 millions, 5 millions voted Communist at the election, in June I95I. Of every hundred French electors, twenty-four did not vote, seventeen voted for General de Gaulle, twelve for the Socialists, ten for the Right, nine for the progressive Catholics, or Mouvement Republicain Populaire (MRP), eight for the Radicals, and twenty for the Communists. The Communists refer to themselves as le fremier parli de France. That claim is justified in the sense that it is the party which has the largest number of votes. General de Gaulle's party, which comes second, polled only just over 4 million votes. Owing to the electoral system, however, the Communists have fewer seats than either the Gaullists or the Socialists. In the country the political division is quadripartite, just over one quarter of the votes going to the Communists, another quarter to the other two leftwing parties, the Socialists and the MRP, and just under a quarter going to the Gaullists on the one hand and to the Radicals and the parties of the Right on the other. In the Assembly, on the other hand, the division is hexagonal, the Gaullists as the largest party having about I20 members, the MRP and the Radicals round about 90 each, the Right about I00, the Socialists I07, and the Communists io6. The electoral law was described by one correspondent as 'the least honest in French history', which is a strong condemnation. In the sense that it reflects the voting strength less accurately than any of the recent systems, this is so, although the I919 system

This paper is not an attempt to produce any fresh theoretical insights into the field, or to describe my own research. Nor do I wish to review the historical evolution of the field and report on its current status. Such tasks have already been undertaken by Wolfgang and Ferracuti (1967) in regard to criminal violence as a whole and by a number of others (Empey, 1967; Geis, 1965; Hardman, 1967; Short, 1963; Tomkins, 1966) in regard to those forms of adolescent violence identified with gang or sub-cultural delinquency. Writings in the latter tradition—that of gang or sub-cultural delinquency—have dominated sociological interest in adolescent violence and vandalism. In certain respects, research in this tradi tion has become somewhat repetitive in the last few years. This is not to deny the quality of many such studies (see, for example, Klein, 1969; Lerman, 1967; Short and Strodtbeck, 1965; Short, 1968) but, with few exceptions, they have gone along the same directions laid down originally by Thrasher and given theoretical depth through the advances made by Cohen and Cloward and Ohlin. In this country, the work of Downes ( 1966a) stands alone in the sixties as a mainstream contribution to this tradition and, com pared to America, this period has been notable for the virtual absence of any genuinely sociological work on delinquency. What has happened—and this is only slightly more obvious in Britain than in America—is that sociologists in this field have been left behind by two major developments. The one is the construction and consolidation of the interactionist approach to deviance and the other is the emergence of civil disorder, revolts and protest move ments in America, centred around the anti-war cause, students and the Negroes. To the extent that any sociological theories of adoles cent group violence and vandalism have become established at all—

Lyndon B. Johnson was the thirty-sixth president of the United States; J. Edgar Hoover was merely the sixth director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI). If the two men had been prizefighters, they would have been in different weight classes and they would never have fought. But they were politicians, not prizefighters. And when they clashed during the 1960s over ways to respond to the civil disorders that swept the urban North, the director won and the president, surely one of the most adept politicians ever to occupy the Oval Office, lost., For Hoover, a fixture in American politics since he organized Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer's famous raids in 1919-1920, the riots offered a series of bureaucratic and political opportunities. He welcomed the law-and-order climate of opinion that developed in the wake of rioting in New York in 1964, Los Angeles in 1965, and especially Newark and Detroit in 1967. Law and order meant more agents and more money, and therefore a more powerful base from which he could advance his bureaucracy's larger political objectives. Johnson, on the other hand, was threatened by the new climate of opinion. For the president, law and order signified the efforts of his Republican party adversaries to mobilize the "white backlash" vote. He believed, White House Special Counsel Harry C. McPherson wrote, that the words "law and order" were simply the new "code words for racism."2

The rash of riots in U. S. cities during the nineteen-sixties has prompted at least two parallel and somewhat related questions. Initially many observers have been led to ask: Why do some incidents provoke the outbreak of violence while others do not? An equally significant inquiry that has received less attention might be phrased as follows: Why do some municipal governments respond to riots by attempting to reduce the grievances that may have spawned violence, while others take little or no ameliorative action? The latter query will form the primary focus of this research note. The capacity of political structures to resolve local complaints may be both a contributing factor and a product of urban violence. In an analysis of the underlying conditions of 76 American race riots between 1913 and i963, Lieberson and Silverman commented on "the com, munity failure to see the riot in terms of institutional malfunctioning or a racial difficulty which is not met-and perhaps cannot be-by existing social institutions."1 Subsequent research by Bloombaum, which attempted to employ multiple scalogram analysis to establish dimensions in their data, also yielded results that were "generally consistent with the theory of institutional breakdown held by Lieberson and Silverman."2 The extent to which local governments are able to respond adequately to public dissatisfaction, therefore, may play a crucial role in the eruption of racial violence. Riots also may have a major impact on the performance of urban governments. Greenstone and Peterson, for example, found a direct correlation between the dispersion of political power and the use of federal anti-poverty funds in the nation's four largest cities before the outbreak of civil disorder. After the Watts riot of 1965, however, Los Angeles, which previously had received the least OEO grants per poverty-stricken family, suddenly soared to the top of the list in the Der * Harlan Hahn is Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of California, Riverside, and the author of forthcoming books on the police and on Urban-Rural Conflict: The Politics of Change. 1 Stanley Lieberson and Arnold R. Silverman, "The Precipitants and Underlying Conditions of Race Riots," American Sociological Review, Vol. 31, 1965, p. 898. 2 Milton Bloombaum, "The Conditions Underlying Race Riots as Portrayed by Multidimensional Scalogram Analysis: A Reanalysis of Lieberson and Silverman's Data," American Sociological Review, Vol. 33, 1968, p. 90.