ABSTRACT
Riots are not emotional outbursts with universal characteristics across time and space. The very forms of riot vary significantly, from disciplined crowd take-overs of food markets, to ritual machine breaking by Luddites under masked leaders, to the dark saturnalia of American lynching and vigilantism, to rare revolutionary assaults on bastions of authority like the Bastille, to the alienated ghetto riots of the 1960s. Riots are complex forms of social/political behavior set in historical contexts comprising distinctive social networks, conflicts, and ideologies that create and equip the opposing collective actors and thus shape both the incidence and dynamics of riots. Social scientists have often been preoccupied with motivations for action, forgetting to ask whether people have the means to act and the opportunity to act on those motivations (Tilly, 1978). In turn, the opportunity to act is very much influenced by the actors’ tactical calculations about the probable gains and costs of action, which incorporate estimates of their resources and attitudes as compared with those of their opponents. So a riot is a moment in a matrix of past relations, present calculations, and projections of the future. Within that moment, or sequence of moments, is a new frontier for research and analysis: the only partly calculable dynamics of riot. For whereas the social matrix of conditions and relationships may set limits and possibilities, the particular path of violence is the result of interaction-interaction between potential crowd members, and between rioters, their targets, would-be intermediaries, and the forces of “order.”
