Rioting in the UK and France: a Comparative Analysis

Edited by David Waddington, Fabien Jobard and Mike King
Portland, OR: Willan Publishing, 2009

The term ‘riot’ usually conjures up looters making a muck of urban space with no apparent end goal. But does the term ‘riot’ not draw on numerous stereotypes? Can we differentiate ‘riots’ from ‘protests’? How do police practices and government policy engender such contentious events? Rioting in the UK and France puts public order policing experts in conversation with scholars who study immigration, social movements, and racism to answer these difficult conceptual and political questions.

Rioting in the UK and France is split into three sections that analyze recent riots in Britain, France, and elsewhere. David Waddington and Mike King point out that the riots in the United Kingdom in the 1980s and 1990s were prompted by racial disadvantage, high unemployment, political exclusion and mistrust of police. Virinder Kalra and James Rhodes emphasize the role of the British National Party (BNP) in instigating the 2001 Oldham and Burnley turmoil. Discussing the 2003 and 2005 Bradford riots, Janet Bujra and Jenny Pearce analyze how Far Right activists and the Bradford Anti-Nazi League pushed events toward a militarized response from police rather than “culturally aware attempts at dialogue” (p. 69). Again focused on Bradford, but in 2001, Yasmin Hussain and Paul Bagguley argue the term ‘riot’ is imprecise; it assumes “that riots are composed of a crowd with a singular identity” (p. 71). Beyond instigators and propagators, the crowd also features numerous other participants such as restrainers and helpers. King’s chapter concerning the Lozells turmoil indicates that African-American and South Asian communities antagonized each other, although he hastily refers to this as the “black against black disorder” (p. 101).

Racial disadvantage, unemployment, political exclusion and mistrust of police influenced the French riots as well. Fabien Jobard criticizes police and governmental officials in his discussion of the French riots between 1981 to 2004, citing segregationist housing policies and heavy-handed police responses (e.g. the ‘anti-hot summers operation’ in 1981). Given the poverty caused by deindustrialization, which struck hardest in the immigrant neighborhoods of France’s major cities, Jobard writes “it is reasonable to ask why such large-scale conflictual reactions had not arrived sooner” (p. 37).

Criticizing France’s “right-wing stand on immigration” (p. 131) Renaud Epstein contends that so-called urban renewal operations known as politique de la ville prompted the now notorious 2005 uprisings across France. Hugues Lagrange likewise argues that local economic policies encouraging business to divest from segregated neighborhoods and banlieues are problematic. According to Michel Kokoreff, controlled protests are condoned in France whereas less conventional social movement tactics are immediately discredited as ‘violence’ by opportunist politicians. Separate chapters by Camille Hamidi and Marwan Mohammed argue that conceptualizing such events as ‘riots’ fails to acknowledge immigrant organizers as legitimate political players. Christian Mouhanna contends that the French National Policing system, which discourages community policing initiatives, only exacerbates the aforementioned issues of marginality.

 Writing about Germany, Tim Lukas points to a ‘colour-line’ in police representation that contributes to immigrant mistrust of police. Waddington discusses the fatal police shooting of an African American man in Cincinnati (USA) that generated a 2001 riot as well as the subsequent controversial police project called Operation Vortex aimed at driving poor people from the urban core. The conclusion to Rioting in the UK and France reflects on trends towards the militarization of police as well as the numerous ironies of multiculturalism.

The contributors never fully answer the question of whether we can (or should) differentiate ‘riots’ from ‘protests,’ or whether the term ‘riot’ is analytically useful – the French scholars do a better job of hinting that the term ‘riot’ homogenizes very diverse forms of emotionally-charged demonstrations and contentious group exploits. Rioting in the UK and France will appeal to criminologists interested in public order policing, sociologists who study social movement repression, as well as political scientists concerned with immigration in Western Europe.