ABSTRACT
This chapter reviews theory and research on the emergence and spread of crowd violence. It focuses on violence within crowd events, and deals with the spread of conflict between events. Shared social identity and collective empowerment in relation to out-groups are also argued to be mechanisms through which violence spreads between events. The “violent crowd” was the social problem that prompted the first wave of crowd psychology in late nineteenth-century Europe. Methodological as well as conceptual development was required to explain the dynamics of crowd violence. The English riots of 2011, involved an estimated 20,000 people, with more than 4000 arrests and costs of up to £500 million. The wave of riots was the largest in the UK since the 1980s and the most prolonged and widespread in London since the 1780 Gordon riots. The topic of violence has historically dominated, and distorted, scholarly accounts of crowd behaviour, from its origins in late nineteenth century France.
