The Causes and Consequences of Urban Riot and Unrest
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Annual Review of Criminology
The Causes and Consequences
of Urban Riot and Unrest
Tim Newburn
Department of Social Policy, London School of Economics and Political Science,
Annu. Rev. Criminol. 2021.4:53-73. Downloaded from www.annualreviews.org
London WC2A 2AE, United Kingdom; email: t.newburn@lse.ac.uk
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Annu. Rev. Criminol. 2021. 4:53–73 Keywords
First published as a Review in Advance on
riot, disorder, crowd violence, flashpoints, life-cycle model
July 6, 2020
The Annual Review of Criminology is online at Abstract
criminol.annualreviews.org
This review explores those varied bodies of work that have sought to un-
https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-criminol-061020-
derstand crowd behavior and violent crowd conduct in particular. Although
124931
the study of such collective conduct was once considered central to social
Copyright © 2021 by Annual Reviews.
science, this has long ceased to be the case and in many respects the study
All rights reserved
of protest and riot now receives relatively little attention, especially within
criminology. In addition to offering a critical overview of work in this field,
this review argues in favor of an expanded conception of its subject matter.
In recent times, scholarly concern has increasingly been focused on ques-
tions of etiology, i.e., asking how and why events such as riots occur, with
the consequence that less attention is paid to other, arguably equally impor-
tant questions, including how riots spread, how they end, and, critically, what
happens in their aftermath. Accordingly, as a corrective, the review proposes
a life-cycle model of riots.
53INTRODUCTION
Giving evidence to the Kerner Commission that had been established by President Johnson during
some of the most severe urban rioting in America in 1967, the psychologist Kenneth Clark, said
that he had read the reports of many previous riot investigations and found them to be “a kind
of Alice in Wonderland—with the same moving picture reshown over and over again, the same
analysis, the same recommendations, and the same inaction” [Kerner 1988 (1968), p. 483]. Given
the regularity with which riot commissions in the United States had repeated their diagnoses and
proposed similar treatments, his observation was perhaps unsurprising. Nevertheless, over the
longer-term the social science of the crowd has by no means been characterized by consensus.
Whereas early approaches saw crowd conduct as fundamentally irrational and as a source of great
social danger, modern scholarship has reacted by seeking to highlight the rational elements of
civil disorder, explanations focusing predominantly on underlying social conditions and rioters’
grievances (McClelland 1996).
Before we move on to consider these shifts in more detail, a few words about terminology and
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the focus of this article. Though the title refers to riots, from the outset we must acknowledge
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that the term is far from straightforward, even when based on a legislative definition. In the US
Criminal Code, for example, the basic definition of a riot is “a public disturbance involving (1) an
act or acts of violence by one or more persons part of an assemblage of three or more persons,
which act or acts shall constitute a clear and present danger of, or shall result in, damage or injury
to the property of any other person or to the person of any other individual or (2) a threat or threats
of the commission” of such an act or acts [18 U.S. Code § 2102 (1982)]. In practice, the study of
riots tends to focus on much larger groupings, the actions of which involve a fairly substantial
breakdown of social order. At heart the problem is that riot is an inescapably political term. It is
often used by states or by others in powerful positions to label events of which they disapprove and
consider illegitimate. Equally, those involved in such violent events often resist the labels riot or
rioter, preferring alternatives such as uprising or rebellion, often to convey resistance to authority
they consider to lack legitimacy. It is for this reason that some academics eschew the term riot
altogether (see Tilly 2003).
In truth, there is no agreed-upon scholarly definition of riot. Indeed, given the difficulties in-
volved, much academic work regularly avoids any attempt to either begin with or arrive at one
and this article is no exception. The focus here is on crowd behavior generally and violent crowd
behavior in particular. Attention is paid in the main to those events that appear to have been suc-
cessfully defined as riots; that is, outbreaks of violence that are regularly described in this way
not just by government officials and the police but by other observers including social scientists.
For reasons of space, the review does not cover what is by now a substantial and important lit-
erature on prison riots (Adams 1994, Thompson 2017, Useem & Kimball 1991) but focuses on
more public forms of collective violence. Interestingly, the specific focus on riots is something
of a recent development in social science. Late-nineteenth-century scholarship, although fixated
on the dangers of the crowd, tended nevertheless to focus on crowd behavior more generally. It
was the reaction against such work that led to a greater concentration on the violent crowd and
the decline of interest in crowd more generally (Borch 2012, Reicher 1996b). This, in turn, has
had the effect of privileging certain questions, in particular those concerned with the causes of
violence, and relegating others, especially those focusing on the consequences of the violence. In
response to this, and in the final section of the paper, I outline what I refer to as a life-cycle model
of riots; one that seeks to return academic interest to a broader interest in riots and incorporates
both medium- and longer-term consequences.
54 NewburnEARLY APPROACHES TO THE STUDY OF THE CROWD
It is traditional for reviews of work in this field to begin with the ideas of the French psychologist
Gustave Le Bon, although how original his ideas really were caused considerable dispute from the
outset (Van Ginneken 1985). Indeed, the Italian scholar, Scipio Sighele, a student of Lombroso and
Ferri, went so far as to accuse Le Bon of piracy. This was a period in which there was substantial
concern about the fragility of social order and, consequently, about the power and significance of
crowds. Indeed, Le Bon [1952 (1896), p. 14; emphasis in original] saw them as being of the upmost
historical importance:
While all our ancient beliefs are tottering and disappearing, while the old pillars of society are giving
way one by one, the power of the crowd is the only force that nothing menaces, and of which the
prestige is continually on the increase. The age we are about to enter will in truth be the ERA OF
CROWDS.
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Le Bon challenged many prevailing orthodoxies, including those that held that crowd members
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tended to be mentally deranged, criminal, or drawn from the very lowest social strata. Neverthe-
less, he viewed them as dangerous, not least because of the way in which the individual conscious
personality could be subsumed by the collective mind. Irrespective of who the individuals were
who made up the crowd, the power of this collective mind would make “them feel, think and act in
a manner quite different from that in which each individual of them would feel, think and act were
he in a state of isolation” [Le Bon 1952 (1896), p. 27]. Much influenced by Tarde’s work on imita-
tion, Le Bon saw the individual within the crowd as suggestible and sentiments within crowds as
contagious; indeed “contagious to such a degree that an individual readily sacrifices his personal
interest to the collective interest” [Le Bon 1952 (1896), p. 30]. As a consequence, he argued, there
was something atavistic about the crowd, its actions often characterized by “impulsiveness, irri-
tability, incapacity to reason, the absence of judgement and of the critical spirit, the exaggeration
of sentiments” [Le Bon 1952 (1896), pp. 35–36]. Cultured individuals would become barbarians
in a crowd, descending “several rungs in the ladder of civilization” [Le Bon 1952 (1896), p. 13].
His hope was that his work and that of others would facilitate the control of crowds (Moscovici
1985) and though now largely discredited, he was hugely influential, “cast[ing] his shadow over the
political events of the entire first half of the twentieth century and even beyond” (van Ginneken
1992, p. 187).
The popularization of elements of Le Bon’s ideas outside Europe owed much to the influence
of Robert Park. Better known within criminology for his association with the urban sociology of
the Chicago School, as a student in Germany at the beginning of the century Park had written a
thesis entitled “The Crowd and the Public.” Although unpublished for some decades, Park’s in-
terest in collective behavior continued, and in his textbook with Ernest Burgess (Park & Burgess
1921, p. 381) he defined it as “the behavior of individuals under the influence of an impulse that is
common and collective, an impulse, in other words, that is the product of social interaction.” In-
fluenced also by Tarde, Park saw the crowd as being less critically divided and more homogeneous
than the public.
The influence of the Chicago School developed further through the work of Herbert Blumer—
for many “the most influential crowd sociologist of the twentieth century” (McPhail 2006,
p. 433)—in which he advanced a more elaborated version of elements of Park’s approach based on
a fivefold model of collective behavior by an active crowd. These stages, which involved the iden-
tification of an exciting event, milling behavior, the emergence of a common object of attention,
and fostering of common impulses, were held to develop as a consequence of a series of circular
www.annualreviews.org • The Causes and Consequences of Riots 55reactions in which excitement and social contagion help foment elementary collective behavior.
Although much more advanced than Le Bon’s approach, it nevertheless promoted the view that
individual consciousness was submerged within the crowd, limiting rationality, with suggestibil-
ity leading to the spread of group behavior via processes akin to contagion. Park’s and Blumer’s
views mirrored elements of Le Bon’s approach but also departed from it. Where Le Bon had seen
crowds as “the wrecking crews of history” (Leach 1986, p. 106), the Chicago sociologists took a
more progressive view, viewing them as the basis for potential institutional and social change. As
Blumer put it, “crowd behavior is a means by which the breakup of the social organization and
personality structure is brought about, and at the same time is a potential device for the emer-
gence of new forms of conduct and personality” (Blumer 1969, p. 77). Perhaps the most serious
criticism of Park and Blumer’s work, and arguably the most surprising given the general nature of
the Chicago School, is that their theoretical writing in this field was characterized by an almost
complete absence of empirical data (McPhail 1991).
The beginnings of a change of approach to collective behavior can perhaps first be seen in the
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work of the American psychologist Floyd Allport. Rejecting the idea of a group mind, and expla-
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nations at the level of the group rather than the individual, Allport focused on what he took to
be the innate human responses that drive all conduct: underlying instincts, governed by learned
behaviors. In such a view collective behavior is in large part a reflection of these common drives
and finds expression in common circumstances. Rather than irrational suggestibility, collective
behavior was based around the impression of universality; the belief that others share one’s views.
The mass, however, tends to produce an exaggerated response; as Allport (1933, p. 295) famously
put it: “The individual in the crowd behaves just as he would behave alone only more so.” Whereas
earlier views viewed the individual as being submerged within the collective, thereby giving vent
to instinctual behavior, Allport’s psychology viewed the collective as enabling the accentuation or
exaggeration of individual conduct. For Allport the focus is on the characteristics of the individual
rather than the power of the crowd over the individual. Nevertheless, what Le Bon, Park, and All-
port all shared was the view that crowd behavior should be understood as primitive and relatively
uncontrolled.
THE TURN AWAY FROM THE IRRATIONAL
Something of a break came in the shape of Turner & Killian’s (1987) emergent norm theory
which recognized the heterogeneity of the crowd and acknowledged that people within crowds
may act on the basis of a variety of motivations. The focus of their work was “those forms of
social behavior in which usual conventions cease to guide social action and people collectively
transcend, bypass, or subvert established institutional patterns and structures” (Turner & Killian
1987, p. 3). Such collective behavior was to be distinguished from more routine stable forms of
group activity that were governed by traditional norms. They argued that communication—often
rumor—concerning changes in the normative order are a common provocation to collective con-
duct. In such circumstances, people come together for a range of reasons and do not, at least
initially, share clear goals. Guides to action are formed through interaction and, crucially, “emer-
gent norms develop and change through [a] keynoting process” (Turner & Killian 1987, p. 10).
Out of the multiple options for action, the one that tends to prevail is that which has the great-
est latent support (based on the pre-existing latent tendencies of the crowd). The development
of emergent norms—broadly understood as an understanding of what is happening and what to
do about it—means some “shared redefinition of right and wrong in a situation supplies the jus-
tification and coordinates the action in collective behavior” (Turner & Killian 1987, p. 7). Crit-
ics of such an approach point both to the problem of explaining how crowd behavior changes
56 Newburnquickly—i.e., where there is, in principle, insufficient time for new norms to emerge—and what
is, in the end, a somewhat desocialized theory of the crowd.
An early attempt to provide a systematic approach, and one based on the view that collective
behavior could be analyzed using the same categories as conventional behavior, came from Neil
Smelser (1963), although even he was subsequently criticized for his alleged failure to move suffi-
ciently beyond a LeBonist bias [see Currie & Skolnick 1970 as well as Smelser’s (1970) rejoinder].
Smelser’s model of collective behavior looked to a variety of external influences—structural strain,
generalized beliefs, precipitating factors and social control—as determinants of such conduct. As
he put it, his “master proposition [was that] . . . people under strain mobilize to reconstitute the
social order in the name of a generalized belief” (Smelser 1963, p. 387). Although the model was
broadly structuralist in approach, it nevertheless proceeded from a normative position that in-
terpreted collective behavior as a challenge to existing social conditions and led critics to accuse
him of adopting a “managerial or administrative perspective on collective action . . . [carrying] the
implication that collective behavior is something requiring ‘control’ or ‘containing’” (Currie &
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Skolnick 1970, p. 42).
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Also critical of emergent norm theory for its assumption of the crippled cognition of crowd
members was Richard Berk, who proposed a rational-calculus theory in which crowd members
were viewed as being akin to classic utility maximizers (Olson 1965). Berk’s (1974) model involved
a series of steps, including seeking information; predicting events on the basis of such informa-
tion; establishing options; listing preferences according to anticipated outcomes; and, finally, de-
ciding on a course of action. Deciding to act rests on a calculation of a combination of outcome
assessments and the likelihood for support for action. At heart, Berk’s approach was individualis-
tic, consequently limiting the potential insight into the social nature of collective action (Reicher
1984). Berk’s work was very much of its time and is one of the more radical attempts to high-
light the rationality at the heart of collective conduct. Other influential social scientists helping
effect this reorientation of approach included John Lofland (1981) and Charles Tilly (1977). Tilly
(1978, p. 7) defined action as “people acting together in pursuit of common interests” and he and
Lofland encouraged an approach to historical research that focused on the ways in which oppor-
tunity structures, group interests, power structures, and systems of repression shape the possible
forms of mobilization and influence the employment of different repertoires of action to stake
their claims (see Lofland 1985).
The decisive shift away from an emphasis on the irrational was influenced by two main factors:
the political and sociological response to the American urban riots of the 1960s and the emergence
of a new social history, a history from below, or grassroots history (Hobsbawm 1998, Lynd 2014),
that sought to rescue the actions of those involved in collective conduct such as machine-breaking
and food riots from what E.P. Thompson (1968, p. 13) called the “enormous condescension of
posterity.” In addition to Thompson and Charles Tilly, the seminal figures in this movement were
George Rudé and Eric Hobsbawm. In many respects, it was Rudé who led the way1 (Wilkinson
2009). Arguing that “no historical phenomenon has been so thoroughly neglected by historians
as the crowd” (Rudé 1964, p. 3), Rudé’s studies of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century England
and France countered the view that crowds were composed primarily of the criminal and the
marginal and challenged the inclination of historians to “take refuge behind such omnibus and
prejudicial. . .labels as ‘mob’, illustrating by contrast the part played by rural craftsmen and indus-
trial workers, as well as by women, and that crime and riot, far from being inseparable companions,
were only occasional and somewhat uneasy bedfellows” (Rudé 1964, p. 203).
1 Despite what some see as an absence of critical assessment of his work (Holton 1978).
www.annualreviews.org • The Causes and Consequences of Riots 57Hobsbawm & Rudé’s (1969) study of the Captain Swing machine-breaking riots of the 1830s
in England, for example, found them often quite highly organized, characterized by considerable
ceremony, and involving much greater symbolic than physical violence. Far from being irrational
outbursts, “behind these multiform activities, the basic aims of the laborers were singularly con-
sistent: to attain a minimum wage and to end rural unemployment. To attain these objects, they
resorted to means that varied with the occasion and the opportunities at hand” (Hobsbawm &
Rudé 1969, p. 195). As Hobsbawm (1971, p. 111) famously observed in Primitive Rebels: “The
classical mob did not merely riot as a protest, but because it expected to achieve something by its
riot. It assumed that the authorities would be sensitive to its movements, and probably also that
they would make some sort of immediate concession; for the mob was not simply a casual collec-
tion of people united for some ad hoc purpose, but in a recognized sense, a permanent entity, even
though rarely permanently organized as such.”
Rather than the conduct of some disorganized rabble, the mob or the dangerous classes, the
new social history produced a picture of working people, shopkeepers, and laborers drawn from
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local communities and integrated into common customs, norms and expectations. In his path-
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breaking study of the food riots in eighteenth century England, E.P. Thompson (1971) argued
that the activities of the rioters were underpinned by a notion of a moral economy. These out-
breaks of destruction, rather than being simple, spasmodic reactions to hunger, were almost always
underpinned, he argued, by some underlying, legitimizing notion (Thompson 1971, p. 78):
By the notion of legitimation, I mean that the men and women in the crowd were informed by the
belief that they were defending traditional rights or customs; and, in general, that they were supported
by the wider consensus of the community. On occasion this popular consensus was endorsed by some
measure of license afforded by the authorities. More commonly, the consensus was so strong that it
overrode motives of fear or deference.
In this particular case, according to Thompson, the “central action. . .is not the sack of granaries
and the pilfering of grain or flour but the action of ‘setting the price’” (Thompson 1971, p. 108).
In short, conflict was less a consequence of hunger and more a collective expression of what was
believed to be a moral and political right (Tilly 1977) at a time when the practices of a broadly
paternalistic preindustrial society were giving way to the increased influence of laissez-faire indus-
trial capitalism. Far from displaying irrational violence, the bread rioters displayed “a pattern of
behavior of which a Trobriand islander need not have been ashamed” (Thompson 1971, p. 131).
In addition to the new social history, the other crucial influence on the reorientation of aca-
demic thought in this period was the American urban ghetto riots that occurred primarily in the
mid- to late-1960s and the civil rights movement that helped frame much of the official under-
standing of the violence that occurred (Garrow 1978). From Harlem in 1964, to Chicago and
Watts in Los Angeles in 1965, to Atlanta, Newark, and Detroit in 1967, the scale of the violence
and destruction was often vast. Thirty-four people died in the disorder in South Central Los
Angeles (Abu-Lughod 2007), 26 died in Newark (Mumford 2007), and 43 died and almost 700
were injured in Detroit (Fine 2007). One estimate suggested that in 1964–1968 there were a to-
tal of 329 riots in 257 cities, with more than 220 people killed, the majority being black citizens
(Graham 1980). In the aftermath of the Watts riot, Governor Reagan appointed a commission of
inquiry—known as the McCone Commission after its chair, John A. McCone, a former head of
the CIA. The McCone Report, in contrast with almost all riot analyses that followed, referred to
the outbreak of violence in South Central Los Angeles as a “spasm,” with the rioters “caught up
in an insensate rage of destruction” (McCone Comm. 1965, p. 1), and an “explosion—a formless,
quite senseless, all but hopeless violent protest—engaged in by a few but bringing distress to all”
58 Newburn(McCone Comm. 1965, pp. 4–5). It was widely criticized for its failure to understand local commu-
nity experiences and grievances (Blauner 1966, Calif. Advis. Comm. US Comm. Civ. Rights 1966,
Scoble 1968) and to engage critically with the questions being raised by the civil rights movement.
Consequently, the report came to be seen as “the apotheosis of the conservative view, or ‘riffraff
theory’” (Graham 1980, p. 15):
Put bluntly, “Violence in the City” [the title of the McCone Report] claimed that the rioters were
marginal people and the riots meaningless outbursts. The rioters were marginal people, according
to the McCone Commission, because they were a small and unrepresentative fraction of the Negro
population, namely, the unemployed, ill-educated, juvenile, delinquent, and uprooted. What provoked
them to riot were not conditions endemic to Negro ghettos (police harassment and consumer exploita-
tion), but rather problems peculiar to immigrant groups (resentment of police, insufficient skills, and
inferior education) and irresponsible agitation by Negro leaders. Also, the riots were meaningless out-
bursts, according to the McCone Commission, not simply because there was no connection between the
Negroes’ grievances and their violence, but also because the rioting was unwarranted. (Fogelson 1967,
pp. 338–39)
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By contrast, for Fogelson (1967, p. 339) and other critics, “the rioting, and especially the looting
and burning, were articulate protests.” In fact, the Los Angeles rioters were highly selective in
the focus of their activities, the primary target of their looting and destruction being “white-
owned stores which charged outrageous prices, sold inferior goods, and applied extortionate credit
arrangements” (Fogelson 1967, p. 353; see also Davis 1992, Feagin & Hahn 1973). Although it
was of course possible to exaggerate the extent of the selectivity of the rioters’ targets in the Watts
and later disorder, “in view of the ferocity of the riots, what is remarkable are not the exceptions
but the overall pattern and pervasive and intense sense of consumer exploitation underlying it”
(Fogelson 1970, p. 151). The patterning of looting regularly found within civil disorder is one of
the clearer, but far from the only, examples of the scripted and dramaturgical dimension of riots.
Public protest has a choreography that is often clear and gives structure to behavior but remains
little analyzed (Snow et al. 1981), for example, styles of dress, locations in which to meet, and
symbols that designate a particular culture of protest [such as the mass burning of cars in French
rioting (Fassin 2013)] or that indicate attachment to a cause and solidarity in the face of police
violence [such as the yellow umbrellas in recent Hong Kong protests (Lee & Sing 2019)].
Subsequent riot inquiries took a very different line from McCone. Key among these was the
Presidential Commission of Inquiry, which was chaired by the Governor of Illinois, Otto Kerner;
set up by Lyndon Johnson in the midst of the Detroit riot; and established the dominant narrative
of the period. Dismissing “riff-raff” theories and other means of marginalizing the significance
of the disorder, the Commission famously concluded that, “Our nation is moving toward two
societies, one black, one white—separate and unequal” [Kerner 1988 (1968), p. 1]. White institu-
tionalized racism was identified as the primary determinant of the disorder: “What white Ameri-
cans have never fully understood—but what the Negro can never forget—is that white society is
deeply implicated in the ghetto. White institutions created it, white institutions maintain it, and
white society condones it” [Kerner 1988 (1968), p. 2]. Underpinning the disorder, the Commis-
sion argued, was a “reservoir of grievances,” varying from city to city, but in general relating to
“prejudice, discrimination, severely disadvantaged living conditions and a general sense of frustra-
tion [among African-Americans] about their inability to change those conditions” [Kerner 1988
(1968), p. 117]. The outbreak of violence was preceded by some precipitating incident or trigger,
often minor and of a type that might occur with relative frequency without provoking violence.
In the Kerner model, therefore, “the prior incidents and the reservoir of underlying grievances
contributed to a cumulative process of mounting tension that spilled over into violence when the
final incident occurred” [Kerner 1988 (1968), p. 118].
www.annualreviews.org • The Causes and Consequences of Riots 59The Kerner Report had a huge impact, its various editions selling more than two million copies
before the end of the decade, with one commentator describing it as having become “a basic docu-
ment in the platform of American liberals for social reform, a catalogue and a program of solutions”
(Kopkind 1971, p. 378). Furthermore, the Commission’s report “presented—and legitimized—a
specific view of the riots and a particular understanding of America that now constitutes the stan-
dard approach to the treatment of social ills” (Kopkind 1971, p. 379). In doing so the Commission
steered a middle ground: upsetting the President through its failure to sufficiently acknowledge
the impact of his Great Society program (Gooden & Myers 2018, Graham 1980) while also antag-
onizing its Vice Chairman, Mayor John Lindsay of New York, who, notwithstanding his impact
in stiffening the Commission’s summary report (Lipsky & Olson 1968), nevertheless felt the final
report was “wishy-washy” (Kopkind 1971, p. 389). By the end of the 1960s, the established view
from Kerner and subsequent reports, such as Skolnick’s to the Violence Commission established
the following year (Skolnick 1969), was to present riots “fundamentally as acts of political protest by
angry ghetto blacks” (Graham 1980, p. 16; see also Fogelson 1971). In Skolnick’s (1969, pp. xix–xx)
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words:
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[M]ass protest is an essentially political phenomenon engaged in by normal people; that demonstrations
are increasingly being employed by a variety of groups, ranging from students and blacks to middle-class
professionals, public employees and policemen; that violence, when it occurs, is not usually planned, but
arises out of an interaction between protesters and responding authorities; that violence has frequently
accompanied the efforts of deprived groups to achieve status in American society; and that recommen-
dations concerning the prevention of violence which do not address the issue of fundamental social and
political change are fated to be largely irrelevant and frequently self-defeating.
The view that riotous collective behavior was quite highly structured, was attuned to the redress
of specific grievances, and had targets of violence that were often limited and logical (Currie &
Skolnick 1970) slowly became dominant. That such explanations paralleled those utilized by Rudé,
Hobsbawm, and others in relation to riots in earlier eras was occasionally made explicit. Allan
Silver (1968, p. 148) suggested the urban disorder of the 1960s appeared “to be shaping itself
into modern equivalents of the traditional forms of riotous protest: a self-conscious drama that
substitutes shops, consumer goods, police, and white passers-by for granaries and grain-carts, tax
officials, local notables, and townhouses.” In many respects, by the end of the 1960s, the gen-
eral approach of the new social history and what Silver referred to as the diagnostic sociology of
Kerner and other inquiries had formed a general approach to collective violence that focused on its
“meaningful and patterned character” and laid stress on its “socially caused, uncollusive character”
(Silver 1968, p. 150).
CONTEMPORARY APPROACHES
Little has occurred since to disturb this dominant scholarly viewpoint, one that takes the structural
problems facing communities in which riots occur and the grievances such problems give rise to
as the primary motivational explanation for the behavior of rioters. In his analysis of recent riots
in England, France, and America, Wacquant (2008, p. 24) puts it typically forcefully, arguing that
they “constitute a (socio)logical response to the massive structural violence unleashed upon them by
a set of mutually reinforcing economic and socio-political changes.” It is an approach that posits,
more or less straightforwardly, that violence from above begets violence from below. The under-
lying conditions—inequality, exclusion, racism, state violence, and so forth—give rise to tensions
and grievances that may, under certain circumstances, explode into collective violence. The ex-
planatory approach generally uses the metaphor of a flashpoint or spark, viewed as the necessary
60 Newburningredient that sets alight the underlying tinder. As the Kerner Commission put it, “As we see it,
the prior incidents and the reservoir of underlying grievances contributed to a cumulative pro-
cess of mounting tension that spilled over into violence when the final incident occurred. In this
sense the entire chain—the grievances, the series of prior tension-heightening incidents, and the
final incident—was the “precipitant of disorder” [Kerner 1988 (1968), p. 118]. In a similar vein,
in his report into the Brixton riot in south London in 1981 Lord Scarman (1981) identified one
particular arrest made by police officers as being the spark. As he put it, “Deeper causes undoubt-
edly existed, and must be probed; but the immediate cause of Saturday’s events was a spontaneous
combustion set off by the spark of a single incident” (Scarman 1981, p. 37).
One of the best-known analytical models in this field, and one that utilizes this metaphor,
is David Waddington’s flashpoints schema, developed with a range of colleagues (King &
Waddington 2005, Moran & Waddington 2016, Waddington et al. 1989). The model has six levels
of analysis, set out in its original formulation as a set of concentric circles ranging from the macro
to the micro and including the structural (the material circumstances of different social groups,
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their relationship with the state, and how such factors relate to conflict), political/ideological (the
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relationship between dissenting groups to political and ideological institutions and how they are
treated by those institutions), cultural (different social groups’ understandings of the social world
and their place in it), contextual (the long-term and more immediate backdrop to relationships—
for example, between particular groups and the police—within which disorder occurs), situational
(the spatial and social determinants of disorder), and interactional (the dynamics of interaction
between police and protestors). It is at this latter level that flashpoints (single or multiple) are
found. To the original six levels of analysis, Moran & Waddington’s (2016) revised model adds a
seventh, institutional/organizational level to better account for the importance of understanding
such matters as traditions and philosophies of policing, systems of accountability and so forth. As
Waddington (2008) acknowledges, it is not just the immediate factors that may act as the source
of grievance and frustration but longer-term historical experiences and folklore that may inform
and shape such matters as, for example, relations with the police. He quotes Keith’s (1993, p. 169)
observation that “trigger events are not epiphenomenal or incidental to the development of vio-
lence. They provide a key element in the signification of action, the meaning of the riot set against
its spatial and social context.”
The flashpoints model has been used by its originators, and numerous others, as the basis for
the analysis of a range of riots and other forms of crowd conduct (Body-Gendrot 2012, 2013;
Moran & Waddington 2015, 2016; Waddington 1992, 2010). It has also been subject to a certain
amount of criticism, including suggestions it flattens out the complexity of such events, imposing a
false level of coherence (Bagguley & Hussain 2008) and that it tends to underplay the fluid ways in
which disorder develops over time and in space (Otten et al. 2001). More trenchantly, a namesake
of the originator of this model, P.A.J. Waddington (1991), has been critical both of claims linking
factors such as poverty and antipolice sentiment to riots and, more particularly, the flashpoint idea
at the heart of such explanations. In relation to the latter, his argument is that the time-lag between
a so-called flashpoint and subsequent riot reduces its explanatory utility, such that flashpoints can
never be defined in advance, only retrospectively. He goes on to suggest that in both its popular
and academic form, so dominant has such an approach become since the late 1960s and “so widely
and uncritically accepted in academic and related circles that it now occupies the position of a
received wisdom” (Waddington 1991, p. 221). Indeed, Waddington (1991, p. 244) goes on to argue
that this is more a reflection of political positions than empirical reality: “despite pretensions to
the contrary [it] might better be seen as justifying or excusing the riots, and apportioning blame
and responsibility to groups other than rioters. In short, it might be regarded, not as analysis, but
as advocacy.”
www.annualreviews.org • The Causes and Consequences of Riots 61Waddington’s criticisms have met with robust rejoinders (see, for example, Waddington 1998).
Ironically, one of the elements of the flashpoints model that is arguably least well developed is that
of the flashpoint itself (Newburn 2016b). In much of the literature in which this model is used,
there is a lack of clarity as to what constitutes a flashpoint, and what processes are involved—
although this may be an inherently problematic exercise (Waddington 1991). It is here in par-
ticular, however, that I suggest psychological theory has a crucial role to play. In parallel with its
sociological counterpart, contemporary psychological explanation has moved considerably away
from the reductionism of early approaches to the crowd. The social identity model (SIM), the
most persuasive of these social psychological approaches, with its roots in interactionism and social
identity formation, draws on Turner’s (1982, p. 21) observation that social identity is the funda-
mental cognitive mechanism underpinning and enabling group behavior. Based on this, the work
of Reicher (1984, 1987, 1996a, among others) offers a thorough-going theorization of these ele-
ments of crowd conduct. This (elaborated) social identity model takes group action to be based on
social identity rather than individual or personal identity and allows for conceptions of the self to
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be variable and multiform. Rather than a loss of identity as posited in deindividuation approaches
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(Reicher et al. 1995), the “shift from individual to group behavior involves a shift from personal
to social identity and hence the emergence of cultural standards as a basis for behavioral control”
(Reicher 1996a, p. 116).
Reicher illustrates this in his analysis of the 1980 riot in the St. Paul’s district of Bristol,
England. Describing the events as being characterized by “spontaneous social behavior with the
twin characteristics of uniformity across individuals and of clear social limits” (Reicher 1984, p. 17),
he shows how traditional individualistic explanations and even more recent approaches such as
emergent norm theory are inadequate in explaining such patterns. Rather, he suggests, there was
“a match between the social self-definition used by participants and their actions” (Reicher 1984,
p. 18). It is the shape and limits of the actions of those involved in crowd activity that he takes to
illustrate the operation of collective identity. He goes further to argue that there is something dis-
tinctive about such crowds, in that the nature of the circumstances and actions involved “give rise
to a sense of power which allows members to express their identity even in the face of outgroup
opposition” (Reicher 2003, p. 197). Furthermore, and of central importance in understanding how
crowd violence comes to occur, Reicher and others’ research suggests that social identity may be
transformed during the course of such crowd activity with, for example, previously nonviolent
members coming to embrace more aggressive forms of behavior. It is here that the social identity
model offers a basis for the unpacking of the idea of a flashpoint. In a series of studies that focus
on citizen–police interactions, Reicher and colleagues (Drury & Reicher 1999, Stott & Reicher
1998) have illustrated the processes lying behind shifting social identities within crowd activity:
how, for example, perceptions of illegitimate and indiscriminate police action “can be used to ex-
plain how a fragmented mass of demonstrators [come] to form a psychologically homogeneous
crowd” (Reicher 1996a, p. 130) and one that is more prepared to engage in violence. In these
studies, violent conflict tends to emerge as a consequence of gradually escalating and problematic
intergroup dynamics (often between the crowd and the police) and may also be precipitated by
particular symbolic events: most obviously, arrests and other displays of police power, especially
where these are seen as particularly inappropriate. In this context, and borrowing from the SIM,
I take flashpoints to be exceptionally symbolic moments in social interactions that act to focus or
condense particular (oppositional) social identities.
THE LIMITS OF CONTEMPORARY APPROACHES
A combination of structural sociological analysis of the broad conditions that conduce toward
outbreaks of significant social tensions together with social psychological interpretation of the
62 Newburnmeso- and microlevel interactions that may affect social identity and serve to translate anger and
grievance into violence appears to offer a sound basis for an understanding of the etiology of riots.
Furthermore, although they are by no means used in combination in this way, such approaches do
appear to be of increasing influence. Notwithstanding this positive conclusion, I argue that there
are at least two important respects in which academic consideration of riots continues to be too
restricted, both of which stem from the nature and extent of the reaction against the assumptions
of the irrationalism of the crowd in earlier eras. The first concerns the relative invisibility of those
elements of riotous behavior that fit uneasily into accounts that privilege rationality: spontaneity,
emotion, and indeed, all conduct that displays few obvious or immediate instrumental character-
istics. It is by no means my intention to suggest that the understanding of violent crowds can be
reduced to such influences or factors; simply that no account of collective disorder can be fully
realized in their absence. The second arises from the dominance of violence at the heart of social
scientific inquiry. This has had a number of consequences, one of the more important of which has
been to unduly restrict scholarly concerns, in particular diverting the focus away from what occurs
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in the aftermath of violence; in short we pay insufficient attention to the impact or consequences
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of riots.
In an important series of contributions, Borch (2006, 2012) argued that one of the consequences
of the backlash against traditional psychological and sociological portrayals of the crowd was to
diminish interest in the field of study generally. The study of the crowd, he suggested, has been
“exiled to the outermost limits of sociology” as a result of “double discomfort” (Borch 2006, p. 84):
unease with the crowd’s associations with irrationality on the one hand and the growing dominance
of methodological individualism on the other. Read superficially, Borch’s work could easily be
misunderstood as some form of attempt to rebuild Le Bon’s scholarly reputation. In fact, and rather
like Marx (1970) before him, Borch’s argument is that the consequence of the wholesale rejection
of Le Bon’s work has been the emergence of an unhelpful binary opposition of the rational and
irrational in understanding collective conduct with, ultimately, the general expulsion of anything
associated with irrationality from scholarly concern in this field.
The danger is that interpretations of disorder become prey to over-rationalization. In this vein,
Marx (1970, p. 24) argued that social science’s great failure was its inability to deal with those ex-
amples of collective violence “where the elements of protest, ideology, grievance, strain, lack of
access to channels for redressing complaints, social change and social movements, are relatively
insignificant factors, if not absent altogether.” Again, there is no suggestion here of a return to
viewing violent crowds as irrational mobs. Rather it is simply to acknowledge that not all riots are
focused, or not primarily focused, on some desire to bring about social or political change. The
problem, Marx (1970, p. 21) suggested, was that the “exclusive contemporary focus on protest riots
(however interesting and accessible) may obscure certain general predisposing factors, psycholog-
ical states, social processes, and consequences found in the most diverse types of riot.” There is a
broader issue here. As Rock (1981) observed: “Riots are written about by those who attach weight
to ideas, intentionality and thoughtfulness, for whom things do not just happen. Riots are seen by
them as part of a scheme: vehicles and signifiers of meaning about the world. A riot thus achieves a
solemnity which is quite imposing. It is made to say so much.” The ever-present risk, he suggests,
is that an excess of significance will be imposed on such social phenomena (see Katz 2016).
Crucial as it is to recognize the importance of the underlying political, economic, and social
conditions underpinning social unrest, it is also vital to acknowledge the seemingly impromptu
and somewhat spontaneous nature of such events (Keith 1993). Doing so requires that greater
attention is paid to the role of emotions than is standardly the case currently. As Elias (1982,
p. 284) argued more generally about social action, approaches that focus on consciousness, reason,
or ideas, “while disregarding the structure of drives, the direction and form of human affects and
www.annualreviews.org • The Causes and Consequences of Riots 63passions, can be from the outset of only limited value” (see also Katz 2002). As I have argued
elsewhere (Newburn et al. 2018, p. 56), participants’ descriptions of what it feels like to be involved
in a riot help shed light on what it means to be involved: “engaging with the emotional experience
of rioting offers another, potentially important means of understanding why riots occur, and why
they occur in the ways that they do.”
The second limitation in current approaches to the study of riots derives from the centrality
of violence in the study of the crowd. Although this might seem an odd observation to make in
the context of riots, we should remind ourselves that classical studies in this field, even though
now discredited in many ways, were focused on collective behavior more generally rather than
riots more narrowly. In the past half century, the field has been dominated to a significant degree
by crowd violence and crowd conflict; the study of the peaceful crowd has taken something of a
backseat (Holton 1978). In some respects one of the greatest influences on this trend has been the
social histories of popular protest discussed earlier. Although such work was in many ways suc-
cessful in countering Rudé’s observation that the study of the crowd had been unfairly neglected,
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it nevertheless cemented a particular approach to such history that privileged the violent crowd.
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At the heart of Rudé’s work was an especially narrow view of the crowd that excluded all manner
of collective action [see Rudé’s (1964, p. 4) own description], and which made Rudé’s claim to be
studying the crowd in history “little short of pretentious” (Harrison 1988, p. 11). Nevertheless this
conception of crowd, which conflated protesting or rioting crowds with crowds in general, became
well-established and fairly standard in historical studies. The irony of this was that although Rudé
sought to challenge much of Le Bon’s work on the irrationality of crowds, and did so very success-
fully, he also reinforced this conflation. He may have “established the ‘respectability’ of the mob,
but it was a mob just the same” (Harrison 1988, p. 12).
This narrowing of focus has had a number of consequences. The tendency to separate the
study of violent crowds from other forms of collective activity means that the cross-fertilization
that would potentially result from a wider, more inclusive approach to collective behavior is un-
derutilized. The fact that the literatures on riots on the one hand and on social movements on
the other now proceed relatively independently of each other is an illustration of this ongoing
separation.2 Arguably, this separation has also limited comparative study in this field, in particular
restricting potentially instructive comparisons of riotous locations with places that are (relatively)
riot-free. The fact that the underlying conditions that tend to be associated with the existence of
riots only rarely give rise to disorder illustrates why there is potentially much to be gained from
studying not only the presence of violent disorder but also its absence (Newburn 2016b, Ray 2014).
In this context, the protests that spread across America in the aftermath of the death of George
Floyd in 2020 varied greatly. Some became violent, while many others did not. When violence
did break out it differed in its origin, nature, intensity, and extent. Understanding these patterns,
how and why violence occurs, spreads, and stops, as well as the forms it takes, are matters of great
consequence.
Asking how order is maintained, and what mitigates the risks of large-scale violence, potentially
has much to offer the study of disorder. The few attempts to study the absence of avoidance or
rioting may be broadly subdivided three ways. The first attempts to understand periods of relative
calm within jurisdictions that have a history of rioting. Michael Katz (2012), for example, argues
that the relative absence of urban rioting in the United States in the decades that followed the
disorder of the 1960s could be explained in part by the new ecology of urban power that reduced
2 For example, with the exception of discussion of policing, references to riot or collective violence barely
appear in either the Blackwell Companion to Social Movements (Snow et al. 2007a) or della Porta & Diani’s
(1999) Social Movements: An Introduction.
64 Newburnboundary challenges or ethnic conflicts and deflected civil violence as well as by the selective
incorporation of African Americans and through the emergence of new forms of control that
helped undercut possible protest. Second, and somewhat in parallel, Lukas’s (2009) comparative
analysis points to the existence of local initiatives and broader Federal programs that have helped
Germany avoid the levels of civil disorder found in neighboring European nations such as France.
Finally, there have been small-scale attempts, using the spread of riots as a focus, to ask why
some locations are affected by rioting, whereas others remain (relatively) peaceful (Mitchell 2011).
The absence of rioting in Marseille during the extraordinarily widespread rioting in France in 2005
was linked in one account to a variety of factors ranging from its specific form of cosmopolitanism
and lower social and ethnic polarization to the impact of the systems of informal social control
derived from the influence of organized crime groups (Schneider 2014). In this vein, in a study of
two locations where riots might reasonably have been anticipated during the disorder in England
in 2011, Newburn (2016b) used elements of Waddington’s flashpoints model, together with the
SIM, to show how matters at the contextual and interactional levels appeared to be crucial in
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avoiding escalating violence, not least via initiatives to improve police–community relations, the
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adoption of flexible but firm policing tactics, and, crucially, the availability of, and willingness to
trust, local community representatives and others on the ground as mediators and peacemakers
when serious rioting looked likely.
The final way in which the contemporary study of riots has been unhelpfully narrowed also
derives in part from the overriding emphasis on violence and, more particularly, from the priv-
ileging of questions of etiology over other concerns. Although the focus on violence is in many
respects understandable, it deflects attention from matters that are arguably of equal importance.
These include questions concerning the spread of riots, in terms of both how violence escalates
beyond its starting point and, as stated above, why some locations are affected and others not.
The sizeable academic scrutiny of the extraordinarily extensive 2005 riots in France, for example
(Body-Gendrot & Savitch 2012, Jobard 2014, Moran 2012, Roché & de Maillard 2009), included
almost no socio-spatial analysis (for a slight exception, see Lagrange 2009). An exception to this
general absence of the spread of protest and disorder, though still in its early stages, can be found
in the work of psychologists studying the diffusion of violence in the 2011 England riots, again
utilizing ideas of shared social identities and collective empowerment as the basis for explanation
(Ball et al. 2019, Drury et al. 2020).
Although it would be unfair to say that scholarly analysis has ignored matters beyond etiological
questions, it is certainly the case that these have dominated discussion. In addition to the relative
lack of attention paid to the processes by which riots mutate and spread once underway, there
has been little analysis of how riots come to an end. Where the focus on violence has had its
most significantly limiting effect, however, is in drawing attention away from what happens in
the aftermath or as a result of riots. What are the implications for those involved in the violence
as perpetrators and/or victims? What is the impact on the localities affected? If commissions of
inquiry are established, what effect do they have on politics and public policy? As Sidney Fine
(2007, p. ix) noted in the introduction to his book on the 1967 Detroit riot, the violence had
“important consequences for the city. . .the state of Michigan, and the nation.” Importantly, by
no means were all of these negative, for as sociologists from Robert Park onward have been keen
to highlight, crowds, including violent ones, may also be vehicles for positive social change. The
deaths of Trayvon Martin in Sandford, FL, in 2012, and Michael Brown in Ferguson, MO, and
Eric Garner in Staten Island, NY, both in 2014, and the protests that followed were crucial to the
rise to the #BlackLivesMatter movement (Lebron 2017, Taibbi 2018). The death of George Floyd
at the hands of a police officer in Minneapolis, MN, in 2020 further stimulated that movement and
widespread pressure for police reform and broader social change. It is to be seen how significant
www.annualreviews.org • The Causes and Consequences of Riots 65any change will be. Assessments of what has happened since the Kerner Report half a century
ago are hardly a cause for optimism (Farley 2018, De La Cruz-Viesca et al. 2018, Loessberg &
Kiskinen 2018), and yet, at least in the midst of the 2020 protests, there is a sense that they may
spark serious reform efforts, and not only in America. Despite the widespread evidence that social
protest can be a transformative vehicle (see, for example, Duberman 2019) it remains rare for a
consideration of the impact of protest, riot, and social disorder to form a significant part of social
scientific inquiry into such phenomena. Given this, I conclude below with a brief outline of what
I refer to as a life-cycle model of riots—one that offers a broad analytical approach to thinking
about these phenomena in the more extended way I have suggested.
CONCLUSION: A LIFE-CYCLE APPROACH TO RIOTS
This life-cycle model (Newburn 2015, 2016a) builds on extant approaches and focuses attention
not only on the economic, social, political, and institutional features of the landscape that conduce
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toward rioting but also seeks to draw attention to the ways in which agents, agencies and institu-
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tions operate once the violence has ceased and what the implications of such social reaction might
be. In Figure 1, I set out the major features of this model, beginning with issues of context and
riot dynamics. Context mirrors some elements of the flashpoints and cognate models, not least
of which are the structural, political/ideological, cultural, and institutional elements influencing
crowd conduct. Crowd dynamics refer to not just those matters that appear to be the more im-
mediate origins of rioting but also the features that influence how disorder matures and spreads
and how extensive it is temporally. Nature focuses on issues of participation and motivation (who
and how many people are involved in the rioting, how they experience their involvement, and the
reasons and rationales for their participation), the ways in which the disorder is policed and people
ordered and controlled, and, finally, what forms violence takes, together with some consideration
of the question of if and how violence mutates. Finally, there are issues of response and impact.
Again, I have separated these into three subdivisions: the political, public, and media responses
that frame violent events; the response of the penal state; and, finally, the economic, political, and
cultural policy responses. In each of these cases, the questions that face us concern not simply the
nature of the responses to violence but the immediate, medium-term, and long-term consequences
of such reactions.
Having devoted the bulk of this review thus far to the more traditional areas of riot analysis, I
finish with a few observations on the final response (and impact) element of what I have called a
riot’s life cycle. My argument is that any full understanding of riots must necessarily incorporate
some analysis of what happens once the violence has ceased while accepting that many of these
features may begin in the midst of the violence. The model divides such responses into three
broad categories, though it makes no assumption that all major responses to riots are contained
within these categories. The first concerns the political, public, and the media responses. How
are riots framed? Indeed, is the term riot used and by whom? How is collective violence talked
about, defined, defended, and attacked by politicians, pundits, and the public? Such issues deeply
affect popular conceptions of disorder and are matters that vary considerably by time and place
or, if one prefers, historically and comparatively. In this regard, however, it is important to recog-
nize that the influence of the reactions to rioting—what politicians, journalists, and others have to
say—often continues long beyond the period of rioting itself, affecting the ways such events are
perceived and how they are responded to. In this context, media framing may have a very signifi-
cant impact on public images of protest, establishing understandings that are both pervasive and
durable (Halloran et al. 1970, Snow et al. 2007b). Political framing can affect almost everything,
including both the penal and public policy responses that I discuss below (Newburn et al. 2018).
66 NewburnYou can also read
