Abstract
When politics fail, the streets take over. The book Riot, Unrest and Protest on the Global Stage, edited by David Pritchard and Francis Pakes, helps us understand how the modern world is affected by rioting and protest movements. It reveals the connection between social order perceived as unjust and collective agency at the edge of legal frameworks. Rioting – as a language of violence – appears as one of the mechanisms nowadays to put pressure on the power structures to achieve desired changes. But it was not always like that. For instance, in 18th and 19th-century Britain rioting was the only tool ‘for the poor, with no vote’ and served as the only ‘legitimate weapon of protest’ (Chapter 5 by Nadine El-Enany). After hundreds of years of political transformations and democratization, rioting still, at times, seems to be the only language available for some socially disadvantaged groups or societies as a whole (e.g., the Arab Spring) in pursuing changes, in dealing with injustice, or for expressing frustration. Or as Steve Hall and Simon Winlow, depicting riots and protest through the political prism, state: ‘over the past 200 years we have travelled from the era of pre-political negativity through an era of political positivity to enter a post-political interregnum characterised by disavowed capitulation of neoliberalism’ (p. 105). To some extent rioting, social unrest, and protests serve as a tipping point to measure how critical the level of social discontent and discord within a society is.
The majority of protest movements (especially riots) described in the book have a local character. They sacrifice the comfort of everyday life and in most cases attempt to destabilize the status quo or future change in the space to which they are bound: in urban or rural settings (e.g., as the food riots in Chapter 13 by Raj Patel or the land-grab riots in Chapter 14 by Francis Pakes), community or national contexts (e.g., Bristol’s Tesco riots in Chapter 3 by Matt Clement, #IdleNoMore in Chapter 16 by Konstantin Kilibarda, Occupy in Chapter 12 by David C Brotherton, the Arab Spring in Chapter 15 by Roxane Farmanfarmaian). All these contexts have been skillfully embedded by David Pritchard and Francis Pakes into the frame of ‘the global stage.’ In the global village – where spatial proximity loses its relevance – mutual ‘inflammation’ by ideas, agency, and actions seems to play a key role in the persuasion of change at different levels of a given society (e.g., British, Egyptian, Canadian) or the global society (from the Arab Spring to Occupy, from Occupy to #IdleNoMore). Riots and protests can be provoked by rising social inequalities and cuts in social spending, the commodification of politics and the increasing influence of multinational corporations, debt crises and austerity measures, oppressive regimes, or hundreds of years of colonization. The list is endless, and no society or government – sociodemocratic, liberal oriented, or authoritarian – seems to be immune to outbreaks of collective anger. This legitimate collective anger serves as energy for transformation (p. 10), when rioting appears as the ‘diplomacy’ of unheard and abandoned groups of the population (p. 8).
As rioting and protest draw public attention through violence, they immediately confront the legal order and the police, which intend to protect it. Thus, criminology seems to be an appropriate tool for analyzing and understanding these phenomena. Focusing on criminology, the volume – made up of the contributions of 18 authors – manages, nevertheless, to create an interdisciplinary dialogue that benefits from insights from political science, sociology, geography, law and development studies, and social policy.
Each chapter has a unique approach to the subject of the volume. Each chapter focuses on a selected case study. The first half of the volume draws attention to rioting and protest movements in the UK (e.g., the English riots in 2011) and then Europe (e.g., immigrants’ ghetto riots in France, May First riots in Germany, anti-austerity unrest in Greece). The second half shifts the focus to Africa (Egypt, Tunisia) and North America (Canada, the United States). I should mention the theoretical and methodological diversity that the authors apply in explaining rioting, unrest, and protest: from Marxist theory of class struggle to intersectionality to explain the driving forces of modern riots (Steve Hall and Simon Winlow, p. 105); theories of the welfare state to analyze the interconnections between welfare systems and protest eruptions (David Pritchard, p. 191); postcolonial theory to illustrate the contrast between power structures and an oppressed group (e.g., Canadian indigenous population) seeking justice through protest (Konstantin Kilibarda, p. 301); and political opportunity theory to understand how changes occur within given circumstances (Roxane Farmanfarmaian, p. 280). In turn, the methodological range illustrates which empirical instruments are suitable to investigate these – at first sight – ‘disobedient’ subjects of research: ethnography for analyzing motivations, emotions, behavioral patterns of riot actors or observers (Laura Naegler, p. 153); textual analysis for investigating how riots can be embedded in popular culture (Diana Bretherick, p. 52); the historical reconstruction method for drawing parallels between rioting in the past and present (Nadine El-Enany, p. 93); longitudinal analysis for investigating causality among cuts in social budgets, rising inequalities, and social unrest (David Pritchard, p. 210); and structural analysis for unfolding the difference among political, proto-political, and anti-political riots (Fabien Jobard, p. 136).
The diverse set of approaches described in the book offer the reader a complex view of the subject. Using the causes and the participants’ motivations and outcomes, the authors present a multidimensional vision of riots and protests: from ‘the thrill-seeking activities of young people’ (p. 152), to ‘a first act of gaining a political voice’ (p. 133), to ‘a civilised reaction against worsening conditions . . . of living’ (p. 36), to ‘an act which severely challenges the dominant social order’ (p. 165). The individuality of chapters allows one to read them separately. But what makes the given volume so strong is the synergy of disciplines, various approaches, theoretical frames, and methodologies, all of which contribute to the comprehensive understanding of rioting, unrest, and protest.
In spite of the large number of chapters and the authors’ differences in how they address the main subjects, the edited book gives a coherent impression. Riot, Unrest and Protest on the Global Stage would be beneficial for those who teach undergraduates and postgraduates in criminology or the sociology of protest. Even though the volume aims for a readership acquainted with these disciplines, it will be informative for anyone interested in the contemporary development of protest movements and rioting.