My presentation will not report new empirical findings, but will reflect on my reading of reports and investigations of riots and protests from the 1964 ‘police car riot’ at the University of California, Berkeley, through the Chicago ‘Days of Rage’ of 1969, and the ‘student riots’ of Paris, May 1968. I will compare and contrast these with accounts of the Brixton, Toxteth and St.Pauls riots in London, Liverpool and Bristol respectively, and perhaps with the urban riots in France during the past decade, making at least passing reference to the US urban riots of the 1970s. I hypothesise that the latter are examples of ‘situational’ political confrontation, arising out of long-standing local grievances rooted in social inequality and racial discrimination, compared with the former which might be better described as ‘deliberately contrived’ confrontations. Both kinds of confrontational protest spring from grievances, and in both cases the violence may be wholly or in part a product of, or at least be exacerbated by, the responses of the policing authorities. But are mediated by local and national political cultures in which the place of and attitudes to political violence vary considerably, influenced, positively and negatively by recent or distant historical precedents. It appears to me that the street violence in Athens in 2008 had something of both, but that is something I would hope to learn more about in the course of the conference.
