ABSTRACT
The aim of this chapter is to provide a framework to allow a comparative analysis of public disorder, sometimes involving hyper-connected actors.
As noted, there are different interpretations of the significance of public disorder, of its objectives, and the responses given to specific instances of public disorder. For the purposes of my analysis, the assessment of these interpretations is as important as the detailed description of what happened. Three kinds of interpretation of social disorder should be distinguished: interpretation by the media, interpretation by governments and political groups, and interpretation by researchers. The interpretations are not always distinct categories, as one source may borrow from the other, creating overlap. For instance, the media’s choice to call a great variety of social disruptions ‘riots’ is deliberate. The use of the term simplifies the coverage of some forms of public disorder. It instantly brings images and representations formed in the accumulation of contentious pasts that become increasingly appropriated by a wide public familiar with such images and representations. Yet for a researcher like Charles Tilly (2003: 18), the term riot ‘embodies a political judgment rather than an analytical distinction. Authorities and observers label as “riots” the damagedoing gatherings of which they disapprove, but they use terms like demonstration, protest, resistance, or retaliation for essentially similar events of which they approve’. Researchers use ‘riots’ for its common and immediate understanding, but such use is not always appropriate. Participants never call themselves rioters. For many residents of Egypt, Tunisia, and Libya, the disorderly events that resulted in injury and physical damage were not an ‘Arab Spring’ but rather a cold winter; it was a description that made sense only to Western outsiders. The same observation applies to the use of the term ‘war’ in the case of terrorist attacks in New York and in Paris. There is no identified army of Jihadists, and they do not come from a specific state. As their attacks are unconventional and may never end, it is doubtful whether we can use the term war. Such an expression was used by head of state,
G. W. Bush, in the United States, in order to provide the rationale for formal permission to launch a military intervention in Iraq in the name of legitimate defence (see chapter 6).
