2011 English riots

""Following up to the fruitful and interdisciplinary discussions At the first „Riot!“ workshop in  December 2013, where we discussed a broad range of research projects (MA and PhD  theses), engaging with the topic of riots and rioting in different geographical and historical  contexts, from squatting movements in Potsdam in the 1980s and 1990s, to urban uprisings  in Manchester, Paris and Stockholm, to food riots in Burkina Faso and 18 th  century slave  insurrections in the Caribbean, we are glad to announce that a second workshop will take  place in late February. 

If you want to present your own work, please indicate the topic so we can include it in our  programme. For all presentations, please prepare a handout or a draft paper and send it to  us by the 21 st  of February, so we can circulate it among all participants. Presentations and  handouts can be in English or German. 

In case you have any questions, please do not hesitate to contact us.  We are looking forward to hearing from you! 

Janna Frenzel (jannafrenzel@gmx.de)
Philippe Greif (phi.greif@googlemail.com)  ""

""The purpose of this paper is to comment on one of the developments arising from the 2011 summer riots in England, where a website was set up so that the public could identify those involved and report them to the Police. The use of modern technology to identify insurgents could be a response to the lack of working censuses in many areas where stability operations are conducted, seen by some observers as a major weakness.
The central idea is to tell friend from foe, or in classical Maoist terminology, fish from the water, using some of the widely available tools which, on the other hand, seem to have been used to spread the violence in the UK.
The use of a website to spread pictures of violent incidents and have the perpetrators identified by the population would be a way to plug a gap in police capabilities, since the British authorities are unlikely to have the necessary manpower and knowledge to do so on their own.
This is why we can talk of "decentralized intelligence collection and analysis."""

""Anfang August 2011 kam es in mehreren Städten Englands fünf Tage lang zu massiven Ausschreitungen von randalierenden Jugendlichen. Auslöser dieser Unruhen war der Tod eines 29 jährigen Schwarzen, der von der Polizei erschossen wurde.
Im Verlauf der folgenden Tage breiteten sich die Unruhen von Tottenham ausgehend über weitere Londoner Stadtviertel und zahlreiche andere Städte Englands aus. Bei solchen Ausschreitungen handelt es sich weder um ein neues Phänomen noch ist die Debatte um gewaltbereite Jugendliche, die ganze Stadtviertel demolieren und in Brand setzen, neu. Die sozio-politischen Konflikte in den französischen Vorstädten, die spätestens seit dem November 2005 europaweit für urbanes Chaos, Angst vor Verbrechen,"Rassenprobleme" und die negativen Folgen der Deindustrialisierung stehen, eskalierten in den vergangenen Jahren mehrfach in massenhaften Ausschreitungen zwischen Jugendlichen und der Polizei.
Der aktuelle Forschungsstand zu urbanen Jugendaufständen zeichnet sich unter anderem dadurch aus, dass geschlechtersensible Analyseansätze einen bisher lediglich marginalen Eingang gefunden haben. Über die gelegentliche Feststellung hinaus, dass es sich bei "den Jugendlichen" mehrheitlich um männliche Jugendliche handelt, wird nicht die Frage gestellt, wie diese Aufstände als kollektive Handlungspraxis mit Männlichkeit als geschlechtlicher Konstruktion in Zusammenhang stehen. Entlang der Leitfrage, auf welche Weise die Faktoren Männlichkeit, Adoleszenz, Ethnizität, soziale Benachteiligung und ein konflikthaftes Verhältnis zur Polizei in den Aufständen zusammenwirken, soll im vorliegenden Artikel diskutiert werden, inwiefern die kritische Männlichkeitsforschung zu einer umfassenden intersektionalen Analyseperspektive auf urbane Jugendaufstände in Europa beitragen kann. ""

This article addresses ‘resilience’ as ‘governmentality’. Three key ‘forms’ of resilience are identified: organisational, technological and community. A focus on community resilience shows that both positive and negative forms of governmentality are possible. The positive aligns well with progressive approaches to participatory governance. The negative, emerging from the prioritisation of organisational and technological concerns, aligns well with state-centric and neoliberal tactics of crime control and citizen responsibility. This article interrogates the tension between positive and negative forms of resilience as governmentality through the lens of the UK riots in 2011.

"From Facebook, Twitter, BlackBerry and gossip to hard facts, research and empirical investigation, this outstanding collection looks at the nature and causes of the English Riots of 2011 one year after they occurred. Though worrying in their nature, speed and scale, the book points out that rioting is nothing new - even if technological advances have altered their ‘organization’, the way in which the police respond and the incessant nature of media coverage. From ‘moral panics’ to ‘broken Britain’ and anxieties about youth crime, the book looks at various flashpoints of the riots such as the killing of Mark Duggan by police marksmen, the widespread looting, the political and criminal justice responses and a growing discontent about the current neoliberal order. The book rejects Coalition Prime Minister David Cameron’s much-publicized assertion that these events were ‘criminality, pure and simple’, just as it counters attempts to lay blame on sections of the community or ‘outsiders’. Looking at phenomena such as ‘shopping for free’ and the idea that the lawlessness represented some kind of instant carnival, it concentrates on how order was restored and individuals fast-tracked via police cells and courts into harsh sentences as well as issues of marginality, hopelessness, political and economic corruption and media distortions. Wide-ranging and expert in its analysis, it also considers the modern-day global context for riots as well as comparing Brixton 1981 and other iconic events of the past.

Further highlights include: the role of new social media in terms of recruitment, resistance, and surveillance; the role of the urban street gang; gender, racialization, resentment, post-riot rhetoric and the profiling the 2011 rioters. It looks at how the riots spread to other cities in the UK including Manchester, Liverpool and Birmingham - as well as examining events and attitudes in places such as Spain, Greece, and those of the Arab Spring. Asks Who, When and Why?; Includes first-hand accounts from 2011 rioters, victims and the public; Applies historical, cultural, structural and social perspectives to the English Riots of 2011; Considers the aftermath of the riots and the wider picture of global social unrest.
"