| Summary: | <p>Past attempts to explain riots have foundered on problems that are as mu
conceptual as empirical. Failures to understand what should constitute a 'cause' of a
riot and the nature of social mobilisation implicated in the process of rioting have led
to the easy misappropriation of rioting in academic discourse as the historical event
becomes a rhetorical symbol.</p>
<p>Attempting to provide the best possible description to serve as the raw materials
for explanation, Home Office data is here combined with local source material to
demonstrate that the disorders involved a wide range of behavioural repertoires that
were not distributed evenly between old and young, black and white, 'locals' and
travellers to the disturbance. Dominating the most serious riots and at the heart of
most other disorders was a clash between black people and the police which was just
one manifestation of a deeply rooted historical conflict. Notions of the 'average
rioter' and the mistaken assumption that rioting is a generic form of behaviour
confused understanding of events and contributed to a 'moral panic' which further
clouded common perception of the 1981 riots in London</p>
<p>Three case studies examine the detailed context and local history behind thse
clashes. The collective violence of 1981 is best understood in terms of the
reproduction and transformation of the police/paliced power relation; in particular the
challenges to this relation that were tied to specific ‘front lines’ of conflict. This link
between the rejection of the policing prerogative and the symbolic reading of
particular 'senses of place’, between actions and locales, can be stated theoretically in
a reconciliation of dramaturgical analysis with spatial semiolgy.</p>
<p>It is thus possible to see the rioting as unsurprising in its historical and
geographical context but at the same time spontaneous, the riots constituted a
collective rejection of a particular social order but the rioters were not part of a
deindividuated mob, scotching suggestions of conspiratorial planning, revolutionary
strategy and crowd irrationality. The purposive nature of human behaviour is retained
whilst allowing scape for the unacknowledged conditions of action and a strong notion
of the determination of social action.</p>
<p>Analysis of the newly introduced consultative machinery in London confirms that
this conflict is not susceptible to resolution by discussion. The salient characteristics
of the groups themselves assure that even the most astute individuals must operate
within a bureaucratic structure that can offer only occasional palliatives to a tragic
social schism.</p>
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