Though the title refers to riots, from the outset we must acknowledge that the term is far from straightforward, even when based on a legislative definition. Whereas early approaches saw crowd conduct as fundamentally irrational and as a source of great social danger, modern scholarship has reacted by seeking to highlight the rational elements of civil disorder, explanations focusing predominantly on underlying social conditions and rioters’ grievances ( McClelland 1996).īefore we move on to consider these shifts in more detail, a few words about terminology and the focus of this article. Nevertheless, over the longer-term the social science of the crowd has by no means been characterized by consensus.

Given the regularity with which riot commissions in the United States had repeated their diagnoses and proposed similar treatments, his observation was perhaps unsurprising. Giving evidence to the Kerner Commission that had been established by President Johnson during some of the most severe urban rioting in America in 1967, the psychologist Kenneth Clark, said that he had read the reports of many previous riot investigations and found them to be “a kind of Alice in Wonderland-with the same moving picture reshown over and over again, the same analysis, the same recommendations, and the same inaction”.

Riot civil unrest tank