ABSTRACT
Ever since urban riots began to occur in France in the late 1970s, the collective violence involved has been consistently attributed to ‘youth gangs’, thus ensuring a police hegemony over the way that the rioting is both perceived and responded to. Thanks to the negative connotations attached to the concept of the ‘gang’, it was possible for such riots to be conveniently interpreted via establishment discourse as the aggregated activities of individual rioters with definitions of criminality obscuring any underlying protest, and any possible scrutiny of relevant social issues giving way to a fixation on penal issues (Le Goaziou and Mucchielli 2006). This image of the gang evokes a classic image of a hostile and disorganised mob and excludes any acknowledgement of collective rationality. Indeed, it profiles the typical rioter as a nihilistic individual, characterised by violence, youth and alienation. However, the discipline of sociology has consistently shown that gang life should not be typified as universally transgressive and/or deviant. In the United States of America, for example, Martin Sanchez-Jankowski (1991) employed a study of several dozen gangs to highlight the political aspects of their collective life and the various forms of exchange and social brokerage engaged in with different types of public institutions.
