Issueless Riots

Abstract

Recent work on collective violence has produced a needed corrective to the one-sided image of riotous crowds held by earlier theorists. But we have failed to give adequate attention to instances of rioting crowds where protest, ideology, and grievance are relatively absent. The exclusive contempo rary focus on protest riots (however interesting and accessible) may obscure certain general predisposing factors, psychological states, social processes, and consequences found in the most diverse types of riot. It may also inhibit the comparative analysis of different types of violent outbursts. Certain di mensions that can be used to characterize riots are reviewed and a typology of forms of riot is developed by combining two of them: whether a generalized belief is present and whether the riot is instrumental in helping solve a group's problem. Some hypotheses and three types of riots are discussed: (1) instrumental riots in which a generalized belief is present, as in the eighteenth and nineteenth century European food and industrial riots studied by Rudé and Hobsbawn; (2) riots in which a generalized belief is present but which are not instrumental in resolving a group's problems, such as most pogroms and communal riots, (3) issueless or unprincipled riots, in which a generalized protest belief is absent and which have slight implications for social movements and change.