ABSTRACT
This chapter examines large-scale visible disturbances that recently occurred in the public spaces of Western cities. It examines their potential local and global linkages and points out a diversity of claims and situations, revealing both their specificities and their commonalities. The first set of case studies concerns France and England, where wide-scale clashes opposing police and youths respectively in 2005 and in 2011 were broadcast all over the world and received a planetary echo due to the media and the social media (which includes Facebook, Twitter, and Blackberry messenger). Unlike the global violent black bloc and their likes described in the previous chapter or the European terrorists analyzed later in chapter 7, the participants in these events were frequently local actors and not globally connected. It is intriguing to grasp then why their actions received a global echo.
