Public Readings of Urban Riots: Comparing the English riots of 2011 to the Greek December of 2008

The paper explores a specific form of urban violence: ‘riots’. Academic literature on urban riots has long analyzed the causal links that may explain the outbreak of rioting. It has also explored the patterns of different riots. However, the literature is short on linking the attributes of a riot process to its actual public readings. Thus analyses, specifying a series of attributes in a riot that may enhance the reading of the riot as political protest, are rare exceptions. Factors accounting for different public readings of riots are not, however, exclusively ‘external’ to the interactive dynamic of rioting. In order to link public readings of urban riots to their attributes, two cases are selected: the English riots of August 2011 and the Greek December of 2008. The two cases are selected as most different cases because public readings of the riots differed so widely. The English riots were rejected as ‘meaningless violence’, whereas in the Greek case public surveys documented widespread acknowledgement of the riots as ‘social revolt’, even though rioters’ grievances were more profound in the first case. The article tries to pin down the origins of these antithetical interpretations by delving into: 1) the behavioral and spatial patterns of rioting (especially the prevalence of ‘individualistic’ or ‘collectivist’ elements in the multiple episodes of rioting) and 2) the rioters’ social and political identity. As the two cases illustrate, if the behavioral and spatial pattern of rioting favors public readings of the riot as acts of individual profit-seeking, then the riot is more easily dismissed as individual deviance or crime. By contrast, if the public considers that during a riot individual interests are subsumed under the goals of a broader collectivity, it is then more willing to acknowledge the political nature of rioting. Likewise, it is more probable that the public will read rioting as political protest, if the rioters have previously been active in mainstream or contentious politics. Finally, despite the fact that social marginality is linked to acute grievances, the low or marginal social status of rioters does not lead to public acknowledgement of the political nature of rioting. It seems that public evaluations of the political nature of rioting are closely linked to public perceptions about who is entitled to be a political subject and who is not