Riots Essay ⋆ Essays on Controversial Topics ⋆ EssayEmpire

Riots arise when groups of people are committing, or may be about to commit, a variety of violent and/or unlawful acts in relation to an apparent grievance or complaint, and/or out of opposition to some form of authority or practice. Riots have occurred for many reasons: from poor working conditions, substandard living quarters, state domination and coercion, taxation, conscription, conflictual race relations, religious conflict, and the outcomes of sporting events. Sometimes riots are distinguished by type: race riots, police riots, prison riots, student riots, “hooliganism,” and mass street fighting. Generally, a riot is known by acts of violence, property damage, arson, looting, assault, and even murder.

Riots are different from civil disobedience, as the latter is often directed at solving problems through nonviolent means. However, civil disobedience can transform into rioting. Riots can be distinguished from panic brought on by sudden terror or disturbances like disaster situations, such as a fire. Riots can also be distinguished from mobs. Mobs are crowds whose behavior is directed toward a specific, violent end, such as the mob violence of lynchings during the 19th and 20th centuries in the United States. Riots are also different than mass hysteria whereby people respond in similar patterns, such as the Salem witch trials or the “red scare” of McCarthyism.

Different kinds of explanatory and conceptual theories regarding riots have been introduced, developed, and fallen out of favor over the years. One of the earliest explanations for riots was “breakdown theory.” This perspective held sway from the genesis of sociology under Auguste Comte to the functionalism of Emile Durkheim, Talcott Parsons, and Neil Smelser, from the Chicago school of sociology of Robert Park and Herbert Blumer, and to the European tradition of Gustave LeBon and Gabriel Tarde. The “breakdown” approach explains riots as the result of various social mechanisms failing to restrain the masses.

LeBon’s explication of breakdown theory was slightly more specific. Introduced in 1895, “contagion theory” proposed that crowds exerted a hypnotic influence and that the frenzy of the crowd was supposedly contagious like a disease. This resulted in irrational, emotionally charged behavior constitutive of a riot. There are several problems with this theory. First, contagion theory presents individual rioters as completely irrational. Second, riots are seen as instigated and guided by sole individuals. Third, the theory grew out of elite responses to mass upheaval and social change and thus framed riots as illogical and inappropriate threats to the social order.

Developed by Ralph H. Turner and Lewis M. Killian in the late 1950s, “emergent-norm theory” argues that a combination of like-minded individuals, the anonymity provided by a crowd, and shared emotion lead to riots. This approach is couched within the symbolic interactionist framework that posits that people come together with specific expectations and norms, but in the interactions that follow in the development of the riot, new expectations and norms emerge, allowing for unexpected behavior. Rather than viewing riots as entities governed by randomness and primal “ancestral savagery” (LeBon), Turner and Killian saw riots as rational and norm governed. In trying to recuperate validity from “breakdown” theories due to rising critiques, Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky offered “prospect theory” in the late 1970s. This idea maintains that people make decisions to revolt or riot based on their surmise of possible gains or losses from their status quo. The theory argues that the prospect of losses looms as a greater force than possible gains. However, the theory fell out of favor in the 1970s due to its inability to explain riots as they were unfolding.

A new perspective arose in the 1970s called “resource mobilization.” This paradigm argued that riots occurred not from societal breakdowns but from groups vying for political positioning. This became the dominate theory of explaining riots by the 1980s. Its chief proponent was Charles Tilly, who argued that solidarity (i.e., networks and identity) within groups rather than insufficient social integration provides the necessary preconditions for riots. Resource mobilization theorists also tend to emphasize riots’ “positive attributes” for bringing about social change.

In the early 1990s, Ernest Bormann developed “convergence theory.” This paradigm argues that a riot is not an emergent property of the crowd but is a result of like-minded individuals converging in a single area. In other words, a crowd riots not because the situation encouraged or enabled violence, but because people who desired violence came together in the crowd. The primary criticism of convergence theory is that there is a tendency for people to do things in a crowd that they would not do on their own. Crowds have an anonymizing effect on people, leading them to engage in behavior only “normal” within the setting of a riot.

Recently, David Snow et al. advanced a new version of breakdown theory that incorporates ideas from prospect theory and cultural theory (drawing largely from the notion of “habitus” vis-a-vis Pierre Bourdieu). The synthesis states that riots are more likely to occur in conditions of social breakdown when (a) losses are experienced as deeply felt deprivations in social actors’ lives, and (b) when social actors’ confidence in the accustomed routines of “normal” social life that provide a satisfying or retributive future is undercut.

In studies of riots as social problems, the following are often considered of great import: context (urban versus rural conditions), questions of a level of “critical mass,” the presence of pre-protest organizations, the role of counter-hegemonic ideology, lack of authoritative or official responsiveness, social cohesions and network solidarity, perceived threats and/or grievances, failures in the social order to provide to its citizenry, quality and quantity of social deprivation, and other factors such as political, religious, racial, economic, gender, sexual, or other actions deemed to directly “spark” rioting.

The worst riot in U.S. history, with respect to lives lost (more than 100), was the “New York Draft Riot” that occurred from July 13 to July 16, 1863. Also known as “Draft Week,” the riot was composed of a series of violent disturbances in New York City that was the culmination of discontent with new laws passed by Congress to draft men to fight in the ongoing Civil War. In the 20th century, the 1992 Los Angeles riots lasted 6 days; many regard them as the worst in recent U.S. history. Examples of other riots across the globe are the Sydney riot of 1879, over an international cricket match in Australia; the 1967 Hong Kong riots that took place over a labor dispute between pro-communist leftists and supporters of British colonial rule; the Stonewall riots in 1969 in New York City between police officers and members of the lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer community; the Brixton riot of 1981 in London, involving a confrontation between police officers and a spontaneously forming crowd; and the 2005 Paris incident in which the death of two teenage boys of African descent at the hands of French police sparked a riot that spread to major cities all over France and even to Belgium and Germany.

Bibliography:

Baldassare, Mark. 1994. The Los Angeles Riots: Lessons for the Urban Future. Boulder, CO: Westview.
Hughey, Matthew W. 2006. “The 1992 Los Angeles Riots.” Pp. 376-85 in An Encyclopedia of American Race Riots, edited by W. Rucker and J. U. Upton. Westport, CT: Greenwood.
LeBon, Gustave. [1895] 1947. The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind. London: Ernest Benn.
McPhail, Clark. 1991. The Myth of the Madding Crowd. Chicago: Aldine.
Useem, Bert. 1998. “Breakdown Theories of Collective Action.” Annual Review of Sociology 24:215-38.

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