Abstract

Riots and Militant Occupations provides students with theoretical reflections and qualitative case studies on militant contentious political action across a range from across Europe to Nigeria, China and Turkey.

This multi-authored, interdisciplinary collection adopts an interpretive and participatory approach to examining meanings, affects, embodiment, identity, relationality and space in the context of riots and protests. The rapidly shifting terrain of riots and occupations has left existing social-scientific theories lagging behind, challenging dominant constructions of agency and rationality. This book will fill this gap, by offering new understandings and critical perspectives on the question of what happens in space, in time and between people, during and after riots.

Weaving together observations, experiences and analyses of riots from participants, theorists and social scientists, the authors craft theoretical perspectives in close connection with researched practices. These perspectives take the form of new theoretical contributions on the spatiality, affectivity and immanent meaning of riots, and grassroots qualitative case-studies of particular events and contexts. Countering the preconceptions of riots as a trail of broken windows, burned dumpsters and angry conservatives, this book aims to demonstrate that riots are fundamentally creative, generating forms of meaning, power, knowledge, affect, social connection and participatory space which are rare, and sociologically important, in the modern world.
Andrew Robinson is a UK-based independent researcher and activist. He authored Power, Resistance and Conflict in the Contemporary World and over 20 articles and chapters.

Alissa Starodub is a Graduate Researcher at the Institute for Social Movements at Ruhr-Universität Bochum, Germany.

This impressive collection of essays draws heavily on narratives by active participants in riots and offers illuminating accounts of the transgressive, resistant actions in such events. Its scope is broad and takes in many protests and locations that are less frequently attended to in academia and, more particularly, it offers a challenge to the ‘northern’ focus of much previous work.