Riot Unrest And Protest On The Global Stage

Riots accompany major social transformations. In a time characterised by neo-liberalism, globalisation and shifting global power balances, riots serve as frequent reminders of this state of affairs. In this collection, leading international scholars consider how the 'stage' of unrest has altered profoundly, exploring the changing dynamics, interpretation and global potency of unrest. Considering the various aspects of this newly emerging landscape, this volume explores rioting in a diverse range of countries and contexts from riots in the UK, Germany and France to global events including food riots and the #Occupy movement. It challenges criminology to take a truly global perspective on unrest and protest, considering these in light of the social and economic transformations of our time. Bringing together world-class experts from around the globe, this collection provides the most up-to-date, comprehensive and interdisciplinary discussion of riots and rioting to date. -- Provided by publisher.

In this collection, leading international scholars examine riots and protest in a range of countries and contexts, exploring the major social transformations of rioting and the changing dynamics, interpretation and potency of unrest in a globalised era.

This is an open access book. The start of the 21st century has seen the world shaken by protests, from the Arab Spring to the Yellow Vests, from the Occupy movement to the social uprisings in Latin America. There are periods in history when large numbers of people have rebelled against the way things are, demanding change, such as in 1848, 1917, and 1968. Today we are living in another time of outrage and discontent, a time that has already produced some of the largest protests in world history. This book analyzes almost three thousand protests that occurred between 2006 and 2020 in 101 countries covering over 93 per cent of the world population. The study focuses on the major demands driving world protests, such as those for real democracy, jobs, public services, social protection, civil rights, global justice, and those against austerity and corruption. It also analyzes who was demonstrating in each protest; what protest methods they used; who the protestors opposed; what was achieved; whether protests were repressed; and trends such as inequality and the rise of women’s and radical right protests. The book concludes that the demands of protestors in most of the protests surveyed are in full accordance with human rights and internationally agreed-upon UN development goals. The book calls for policy-makers to listen and act on these demands.

This book examines how movements from below pose challenges to the status quo. The 2010s have seen an explosion of protest movements, sometimes characterised as riots by governments and the media. But these are not new phenomena, rather reflecting thousands of years of conflict between different social classes. Beginning with struggles for democracy and control of the state in Athens and ancient Rome, this book traces the common threads of resistance through the Middle Ages in Europe and into the modern age. As classes change so does the composition of the protestors and the goals of their movements; the one common factor being how groups can mobilise to resist unbearable oppression, thereby developing a crowd consciousness that widens their political horizons and demonstrates the possibility of overthrowing the existing order. To appreciate the roots and motivations of these so-called deviants the author argues that we need to listen to the sound of the crowd. This book will be of interest to researchers of social movements, protests and riots across sociology, history and international relations.

The years 2008 to 2013 saw a new generation of political protestors take to the streets. Riots disrupted many Western cities and new protest movements emerged, keen to address a bleak context of economic collapse and austerity politics. In this groundbreaking new study, Winlow, Hall, Briggs and Treadwell push past the unworldly optimism of the liberal left to offer an illuminating account of the enclosure and vacuity of contemporary politics. Focusing on the English riots of 2011, the ongoing crisis in Greece, the Indignados, 15M and Podemos in Spain, the Occupy movement in New York and London and the English Defence League in northern England, this book uses original empirical data to inform a strident theoretical critique of our post-political present. It asks: what are these protest groups fighting for, and what are the chances of success? Written by leading criminological theorists and researchers, this book makes a major contribution to contemporary debates on social order, politics and cultural capitalism. It illuminates the epochal problems we face today. Riots and Political Protest is essential reading for academics and students engaged in the study of political sociology, criminological theory, political theory, sociological theory and the sociology of deviance.

This multidisciplinary collection of essays by leading international scholars explores many pressing issues related to global crime. The book opens with essays that look across this diverse terrain and then moves on to consider specific areas including organised crime, cyber-crime, war-crimes, terrorism, state and private violence, riots and political protest, prisons, sport and crime and counterfeit goods. The book emphasises the centrality of crime to the contemporary global world and mobilises diverse disciplinary positions to help understand and address this.

Thousands of people in dozens of countries took to the streets when world food prices spiked in 2008 and 2011. What does the persistence of popular mobilization around food tell us about the politics of subsistence in an era of integrated food markets and universal human rights? This book interrogates this period of historical rupture in the global system of subsistence, getting behind the headlines and inside the politics of food for people on low incomes. The half decade of 2007–2012 was a period of intensely volatile food prices as well as unusual levels of popular mobilization, including protests and riots. Detailed case studies are included here from Bangladesh, Cameroon, India, Kenya and Mozambique. The case studies illustrate that political cultures and ways of organizing around food share much across geography and history, indicating common characteristics of the popular politics of provisions under capitalism. However, all politics are ultimately local, and it is demonstrated how the historic fallout of a subsistence crisis depends ultimately on how the actors and institutions articulate, negotiate and reassert their specific claims within the peculiarities of each policy. A key conclusion of the book is that the politics of provisions remain essential to the right to food and that they involve unruliness. In other words, food riots work. The book explains how and why they continue to do so even in the globalized food system of the 21st century. Food riots signal a state unable to meet a principal condition of its social contract, and create powerful pressure to address that most fundamental of failings. .

This book analyses the waves of protests, from spontaneous uprisings to well-organized forms of collective action, which have shaken European cities over the last decade. It shows how analysing these protests in connection with the structural context of neoliberal urbanism and its crises is more productive than standard explanations. Processes of neoliberalisation have caused deeply segregated urban landscapes defined by deepening social inequality, rising unemployment, racism, securitization of urban spaces and welfare state withdrawal, particularly from poor peripheral areas, where tensions between marginalized youth and police often manifest in public spaces. Challenging a conventional distinction made in research on protest, the book integrates a structural analysis of processes of large scale urban transformation with analyses of the relationship between 'riots' and social movement action in nine countries: France, Greece, England, Germany, Spain, Poland, Denmark, Sweden and Turkey.