Third, it is an excessive indulgence of their evil wills. Once the bad side of the human spirit is unrestrained, people will spare no energy in reveling, and they take pleasure in destroying and looting.
The chaos in Britain could be seen in the same light as the Greek strikes and the Egyptian and Tunis riots - all of them are essentially street politics, which has been played out in the context of high inflation and high unemployment rates. Under the British system, although mass events like these riots may recur, the society in general will return to normal after ordinary people's release of dissatisfaction.
In a harmonious and flexible society, conflicts, clashes and anomies are treated with tolerance. So rather than regarding these social phenomena as completely negative, we cannot simply ignore their positive social functions. Britain's Prime Minister David Cameron blamed the riots on street gang members and opportunistic looters and failed police tactics at the start of the rioting. He denied that government austerity measures or poverty caused the violence in London and other major English cities.
However, community leaders and rioters themselves said the violence was an expression of the frustration felt by the poorest inhabitants of a country that ranks among the most unequal in the developed world.
While London and the UK will return to normal soon enough, whether Mr Cameron's verdict is true or whether the rioters' reactions are the results of deeplying economic and social problems remains to be seen.
Zhanguoshu Senior Reporter at People's Daily The chaos is quickly spreading, but why do the so-called "gentlemen" always get into this? A decade after the riots, so little has been learned. Published: 3 Aug Published: 1 Aug Key voices reflect on events that sparked civil unrest affecting a generation of young people. Published: PM. Conditions that led to riots still exist today, experts warn. A decade after Tottenham burned, social alienation means riots could happen again David Lammy.
Published: 28 May Published: 24 Apr Mark Duggan shooting: family settle high court claim against Met. Published: 10 Oct Good Dog review — tapestry of Tottenham life on the eve of riots 4 out of 5 stars. But such a triggering incident could just be a pretext. But attitudes expressed afterwards could be a consequence of taking part in the riot and rather than a cause. Our study, by contrast, measures police legitimacy from surveys conducted before the riot, which sampled the entire population.
This finding holds even after taking into account many other social, economic, and political factors. We challenge the accepted sociological wisdom that rioting is not associated with poverty. In London, rioters tended to come from the poorest neighborhoods, as measured by unemployment, adults lacking educational qualifications, workers in the lowest-paid occupations, overcrowded housing, and so on. How do we reconcile this finding with studies of American riots in the s, which reject poverty as an explanation?
Most of the analyses considered variation among cities, rather than variation within a city. In addition, in the United States at that period, black people were overwhelmingly poor, which makes poverty and ethnicity very hard to disentangle. What did you conclude from your study as to why the London riot took place in some areas of London but not in others?
Overall, three major factors explain geographical variation. First, rioters came from areas where people felt less respected by the police. Second, they came from poor neighborhoods. This last finding surprised us. We interpret it in terms of social cohesion: more diverse neighborhoods are less cohesive, and so adults are less able to prevent youth from rioting. This interpretation is supported by the fact that rioters were less likely to come from areas with many charitable or nonprofit organizations, which is another measure of social cohesion.
American cities have ghettos, where most residents are black and poor. So while we find that variations in police legitimacy across London help to explain rioting, these were variations around a relatively high level of legitimacy. What, if any, are the similarities and differences between the London riot and the recent riots in Ferguson, Missouri in the United States?
The riots in Ferguson also began with protest against the shooting of a young man by the police. But these riots manifested a stark racial divide: the rioters were almost entirely African American.
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