Riots and Political Theory: A Reading List

For the last five years I have been reading fairly broadly in the academic literatures around riots and political violence more generally. My most systematic statement on this topic to date can be found in a working paper called “Why is there no just riot theory?” My primary puzzle in that paper is with political theory’s tendency to avoid normative arguments about riots despite engaging in normative theorizing about numerous other modes of political violence – from wars to rebellions to assassinations. My hypothesis is this is because riots are extra-institutional in four distinct ways. Riots are extra-public because crowds riot rather than institutionalized groups such as parties or social movements. Riots are extra-state because they violate the state’s monopoly on violence. Riots are extra-legal because they are a form of unlawful assembly. Riots are extra-Parliamentary because they operate outside of the normal legislative process. By considering the justifiable reasons for resisting each of these foundational institutions I propose some provisional criteria for a justifiable riot and argue that political theorists should pay attention to the normative dimension of riots. On the basis of that research I have just been award a British Academy Mid-Career Fellowship to study the normative basis of rioting.

I feel odd about the congruence of the present moment with a research project that I have been working on for years. I’ve long felt that riots are a phenomenon that political theorists need to take more seriously. But in other ways I feel that yet another academic paper offers very little to our contemporary problem. All I really have to offer is what I have learned over my years of researching this topic in the hopes that it will help us all think differently about what a riot is, why and when it might be legitimate or illegitimate, in the hopes that thinking differently about the phenomenon of rioting may help us respond to riots and the grievances they express in different ways. To that end I’ve assembled a preliminary annotated reading list on riots and rioting for anyone who might like to read more about this subject. I am still reading and researching in this area and so invite others to let me know about potential additions to this reading list.

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