Abstract
Just as with the riots of 1981, the riots of summer 2012 will play a key role in the reshaping of British society. Most analyses frame these events as pathologies of the poor or as contemporary expressions of Mertonian anomie. Drawing on the work of Randall Collins, this article explores the riot as a form of collective action, considers the role of looting and arson within it, and the extent to which the actors involved find themselves part of multiple logics that mutually undermine each other. The analysis highlights the importance of the embodied, mobile, temporal and visual dimensions of the riot, and argues that the social sciences need to develop conceptual tools and methods to both engage with such embodied events and to be part of the social debate about their meaning.
The riots in English cities last August have left many observers at a loss to understand what took place and how to go about exploring the implications. Conservative politicians spoke of a slow-motion moral collapse, the law of the jungle, or a feral underclass, with conservative public intellectuals decrying a ‘Hobbesian nightmare of mutual predation’. Across a range of political currents concern has been expressed about failed socialization, expressed in the term ‘feral families’, with the British Prime Minister pointing to 120,000 dysfunctional families as the source of the riots and the wider malaise they highlighted. Many community activists, while not condoning the violence, framed the events as a response to cuts in government spending, austerity and unemployment. Of particular concern across all these positions was the extent of looting, significantly greater than in previous riots, prompting widespread discussion about materialism and consumerism in contemporary British society.
How the riots come to be understood will play a key role in shaping the political response, from a further militarization of policing and urban security to reshaping social policy. Quite rightly, the social sciences in the United Kingdom have mobilized, determined not to become marginalized in this debate. But the terrain is a difficult one. Riots are a form of collective action, and while theoretically framed empirical studies of collective action are re-emerging in contemporary social sciences, disciplines like sociology still rely heavily upon older methods such as interviews and surveys, and are struggling to gain traction in a social world increasingly shaped by movement, event, sensual experience and communication.
Part of the problem also lies in the extent that the August events appear different to earlier riots that remain very much part of the national consciousness in Britain. The riots that took place in the early 1980s in Birmingham, Brixton, Toxteth and other English cities were manifest responses to discrimination, poverty and the policing experienced by ethnic and racial minorities. These riots were intelligible within the UK ‘race relations’ paradigm that has shaped public policy since the 1970s, and which made sense of the riots that followed, such as in Bradford in 2001. Riots over the past three decades in England have been intelligible as responses to racism, discrimination and police violence. As such, they pointed towards political change.
This time this does not seem to be the case. Zigmunt Bauman (2011), responding to the extent of looting and theft involved, rejects suggestions of revolt and insurrection, while also opposing accounts of moral collapse. Echoing Merton’s reworking of anomie, he argues the 2011 riots are the product of the widening gap between social inequality and an increasingly pervasive and powerful mass consumer culture. For many observers this is the defining characteristic of these events, described by one as ‘shopping with a crowbar’. For Bauman, the riots point to a new product and pathology of modern society – ‘defective consumers’.
Continuity and transformation
Many dimensions of the August events correspond to classical riots. As in almost all the cases referred to above, the 2011 riots began with a protest against police violence, in this case the killing during the attempted arrest of a man travelling in a car in Tottenham, a suburb in north London. This killing led to a protest outside a nearby police station organized by the family and friends of the person who was killed, a protest that gradually expanded as others came to join. Rumours circulated, with accounts of police having planned an execution, of police hiding in bushes waiting for days to undertake the killing, of the car being removed and cleaned before being returned to the scene. The police were part of this, associated with rumours (later accepted as false) that officers had been fired upon.
An experience of being violated by police action lies at the origins of almost all contemporary riots, which are at first experienced as defensive violence by those involved. This clearly occurred in Tottenham. For much of the day the crowd was waiting for police to respond to their demands for information. As the day progressed and other people joined in, occasional objects were thrown at police who responded by pressing forward. This waiting dynamic was transformed when later in the evening a girl believed to be around 16 years old was caught up in a police action. This was filmed and posted to YouTube, and the sense of outrage among those present witnessing a young girl being beaten with batons by several large police officers is palpable. The crowd moved forward to rescue the girl, the waiting was over, and an open conflict between participants and police had begun. The next evening the riots began to spread, first to other parts of London, then beyond.
Randall Collins (2008) explores the dynamics of riots from an interaction perspective, and in important ways the English events correspond with the general patterns he highlights. He argues riots establish a ‘moral holiday’, a free zone in time and space, where individuals feel protected by a crowd and encouraged to engage in normally forbidden acts, in an atmosphere of excitement or exhilaration. These are ‘home turf’ riots, as opposed to riots where one group enters the territory of another (these latter events involving much more serious forms of violence directed against the group that becomes a victim). Collins argues that such events exhibit a sequence of actions. The first step consists of driving out police, or denying them their authority – pelting them with objects, from bricks to Molotov cocktails, has a dramatic quality while physically pushing them back, while attacking police cars shifts the focus from policing officers to attacks on physical objects manifesting authority and power. Action can then move from attacking police cars to other physical manifestations of power. It is from here that dynamics of looting and arson develop.
Rather than consider looting an expression of privatized greed or individualism, sociological studies approach looting as a spontaneous form of social organization. Collins (2008: 247) argues that looting manifests the same organizational structure as other forms of crowd violence, with a small elite at the front, a group of ‘half-committed’ supporters ready to be swept up in the events, and a wider group of onlookers (he identifies these three tiers across most forms of collective violence). Looting, Collins argues, requires facilitators who are prepared to step forward to smash windows or prise open grills. They may then move on to the next window, often without entering the store they have smashed open. Facilitators realize, argues Collins, that while many people may be prepared to step into a store to steal, far fewer are prepared to smash open a window.
Charles Tilly considers looting as the degeneration of a collective action into an opportunistic search for private gain. He quotes the memoirs of African American students who participated in the Civil Rights movement, who went to the streets in search of ‘true revolt’ only to be disappointed at finding looters (2003: 148). Echoes of similar disappointment are evident in responses to the 2011 riots. Zigmunt Bauman describes looters as involved in ‘a (misguided and doomed) attempt to join, if only for a fleeting moment, the ranks of consumers from which they have been excluded’ (2011). Collins doesn’t deny this dimension, but he argues that it is a flawed account of what is happening. He insists looting is the way that a riot can achieve mass participation. It allows a riot to constitute itself in time and space. Looting is a ‘mass-recruiter and momentum sustainer’ – without it, the riot would come to an end once the police chose to withdraw as a way of managing events. Looting, argues Collins, is a means through which people can participate – it is an ‘act of mass solidarity’. From a Durkheimian perspective it is a ‘symbolic expression of membership’. Collins rejects the Hobbesian account of looting, noting that looters exhibit a high degree of social solidarity towards each other, where in an environment where law and order has been abolished looters are almost never robbed or set upon by other looters. At the same time he cautions against too homogeneous an account of looters, suggesting that here too we encounter different waves: professional criminals; youth gangs looking for fun and plunder; and finally ordinary residents, many of whom will take things of little or no value.
This certainly fits the events in England, where people were charged with theft of items ranging from ‘ten packs of chewing gum’ to sweets or a bottle of water. Other thefts were more focused, evident in the looting of electrical stores and street fashion, with vans involved in removing goods. The solidarity Collins speaks of was certainly present in these events. Looters generally manifested ‘civil inattention’ to each other as they walked away laden with goods. While there were examples of goods being taken from looters by others, these were quite rare – generally the looters exhibited more deference towards each other than the crowds competing for goods on the opening day of department store sales. At times journalists found themselves unable to film events due to the action of observers, who while not looting themselves would express their solidarity by blocking journalists’ attempts to report events by standing in the way of cameras. But while not a Hobbesian world, there is no doubt that predatory dimensions were present. These were essentially directed towards people judged as not participating, such as passers-by dragged from motor bikes, or in the widely reported case where an injured international student was robbed by people purporting to help him.
The English riots were ‘home turf’ actions, as opposed to incursions into the territory of another in order to expel that other. This meant generally that when shopkeepers demonstrated their intention to defend their stores, looters would move elsewhere. In the small number of cases where actual violence was directed at those defending shops, a different logic is at work. Such actual violence directed at shopkeepers reflects intercommunal tensions and an attempt to develop a different kind of riot, one involving incursive violence. In some of the cases where this occurred the results were tragic. What is striking is how marginal this violence was, and where it did occur, it did not generate a dynamic or resonance.
Recognizing different logics of riot not only helps us understand looting and violence directed at people, but also the practice of arson. In incursive riots, arson is an instrument to expel, a means to bring about the removal of a group through the destruction of their homes. In other forms of riot, arson takes on a different intent. In France in October 2005 a wave of burning cars swept French cities, part of a dynamic that began when two young men died while fleeing a police identity control in Clichy-sous-Bois, a suburb in northern Paris. These deaths had prompted protest marches, at first locally and then nationally, with events escalating in response to the police reaction, which included firing tear gas into a mosque during prayers, and to that of the then Interior Minister, Nicolas Sarkozy, who referred to the young people involved in these events as scum (racaille) and thugs (voyous), calling for their suburbs to be cleaned out with a high pressure water-hose. Arson emerged as a central form of protest in this period, reaching a peak in late October with over a thousand cars being torched each night across the country (Kokoreff 2008).
Collins argues that arson plays a key role in riots, with fire generating a centre of attention, a focus – ‘there is nothing that demands attention more urgently than a fire, especially when it is close by’ (2008: 247). Setting fire to cars or buildings amplifies the intensity of an event – it obliges a response from authorities, it accelerates the speed of the riot, and it demands that everyone in the vicinity become part of the event in some way or another. The principal effect of fire, as opposed to looting, is to demand attention not only from outsiders but also from those in the neighbourhood.
In the 2011 riots some of the Blackberry Messages (BBMs) circulating manifest an awareness of this dimension of arson. One BBM calls on people from north London to meet at a station, calling on recipients to ‘bring your ballys [face covering/balaclava] and your bags trollys, car vans, hammers the lot! ... Whatever ends your [sic] from put your ballys on link up and cause havoc, just rob everything. Police can’t stop it. Dead the fires though!!’ The call for hammers, trolleys, masks and vans indicates a more premeditated logic than a riot and, significantly, the originator of the message is calling on those who receive it to not light fires. The context of this message suggests that the demand to ‘dead the fires’ is not to ensure the safety of the local neighbourhood but to minimize possible attention.
This message, with its appeal to people from ‘whatever ends your from’, also captures another important dimension of these riots. The riot is an event that allows groups to move outside a territorial logic that otherwise facilitates but constrains their action. A recurring theme in BBMs is ‘everyone from all sides of London’ or ‘everywhere’, with appeals to people to ‘start leaving ur yards’ (http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2011/aug/08/london-riots-tottenham-duggan-blog#block-61). While there is little in London that corresponds to the classical gang organized around clear hierarchy, territory and its defence plays a key role in structuring the worlds of marginal young people (Goldson 2011), with many living in worlds shaped by borders dividing zones of security from zones of insecurity. The events of August allowed a new ‘everyone’ to come into being, an imaginary collective no longer contained in their ‘yards’.
Multiple logics
Part of the difficulty of making sense of these events lies in the multiplicity of logics at work, not only at the level of the collectives that came into existence but also at the level of individual experience. This is illustrated by one participant who, when interviewed, at first describes his looting as a successful attempt to seize the opportunities available to him: ‘There’s so many people, you’re one in a thousand people who could get caught’. When asked if he had any bad feelings about his involvement, he replies ‘No, cos I’m watching my plasma that I just got. It’s like Christmas came early’. This suggests a calculating and predatory approach to the world, one widely seen as mirroring sections of the finance industry, equally considered to have trashed the country. But this same person describes going out and attempting to get a job and being rejected: ‘They’re not giving us the opportunity to work hard and show them that we can do it, we can work hard. … But they don’t want to give us that chance. Right now it looks like there ain’t a future for young people, that’s how I see it. The government, they’re not helping no one, except the rich people, they don’t care about us, they just leave us on the blocks to do whatever we do.’
It is difficult to know whether this young person started to speak of himself as an excluded potential young worker simply as a result of the interview dynamic, or whether he actually has been involved in a struggle to find work. This involves, nonetheless, an attempt to articulate themes of justice and injustice. What is striking is the extent to which these remain fragmented and incoherent, in ways mirroring wider tensions within contemporary culture (Dubet 2006). The difficulty in making sense of the events is also captured by a young masked man in Manchester, who when asked why he was involved in the riot responded: ‘Mate, to piss the police off, you get me. You don’t know what the police are like bro’. God, er, I can’t explain, I don’t have the words for it … I’ve come out for money. This is our payback, because they can’t do nothing to us today.’
Studies of contemporary urban poverty do not point to a unified experience but suggest instead a world where actors are trapped in an unstable tension made up of social logics taking the form of social disorganization, stigmatization and exclusion (McDonald 1999; Dubet 1987) leading to forms of violence that lack direction and objective. It is clear that the recurring references to police in the accounts of those involved highlight the extent to which the police are not so much a social opponent as the ‘symbol of an order’ (Dubet 1987: 156), while the accounts of many highlight the extent to which for many young people the police are the principal institution through which they encounter the wider society (Kokoreff 2008). As a result it is not surprising that the riot does not possess a social or political project but is instead an embodied event in which the different logics at work appear to undermine each other and leave the participants in a situation captured by the masked man who says with such intensity: ‘I can’t explain it’.
In ways that remain to explore, the August riots possess similarities with the Temporary Autonomous Zone of the global justice movement and the flashmob. These use similar communications technologies, and both are engaged in spatial practice. Both point to social and political life being shaped more by events than by organizations, and to the increasing importance of embodied experience as opposed to articulated discourse. While the riot highlights critical transformations of contemporary urban life, it also poses urgent questions about violence, responsibility, and community. How these questions are answered will be a critical factor shaping the current reconfiguration of British society, just as were the responses to the riots of the 1980s. As such it is critical that the social sciences be part of this debate. Developing the conceptual and methodological tools to explore such events – in their embodied, mobile, temporal and visual dimensions – may be a condition for the continued existence of these disciplines in a world where it is not only rioters but also social scientists who are forced to say: ‘I can’t explain it’.