Rioting in the UK and France - A Comparative Analysis

The French riots of October-November 2005 were described by one commentator as 'France's Hurricane Katrina' and by another as a 'tsunami of inchoate youth rebellion'. What began, innocuously enough, as an apparently routine encounter between police and teenage youths in the north Parisian banlieue (suburb) of Clichy-sous Bois first developed into tragedy as two of the youths were electrocuted white in the process of running away from officers, and thereafter into rioting which spread beyond Paris into other major French cities with similar concentrations of ethnic minority youth. Further rioting - though not on the same scale as in 2005 - occurred subsequently in 2006 and 2007. In the last three decades, the UK has witnessed its own counterparts to the French riots. Recurring confrontations in the 1980s, involving police and African Caribbean youths were followed, in 1991 and 1992, by clashes between police and young men on white, working-class council estates. In 2001, there were further riots in the former.mill towns and cities of Oldham, Burnley, Bradford and Leeds. The central protagonists in these disorders were the police and British-born youths of Bangladeshi and Pakistani heritage. A final major riot occurred in 2005 in the Loiells area of Birmingham, where there was conflict between South Asian and African Caribbean youths, following allegations that a young African girl had been sexually assaulted. This book combines incisive analyses of the events in France, their antecedents and aftermath, with careful reconsideration of the British riots along with comparative case studies from Germany and the United States. Drawing upon the expertise of contributors based in both France and the UK, it comprises a highly coherent, theoretically rich and thematically comprehensive collection of chapters which provides a comparative basis for understanding urban riots and deciding how best to tackle the underlying social issues involved.