The city and collective violence

The focus of this chapter is on crowd or collective violence, sometimes referred to, broadly speaking, as rioting. Work in this field has a lengthy history, one which grew out of nineteenth-century concerns with collective behaviour, the potential for revolution and, initially at least, focused on the supposed irrationality of crowds. More recently, such approaches have been superseded by work that has highlighted the patterns, structures and rationality of crowd violence, often viewing it through the lens of political protest. Having examined the broad contours of the history of work in this field, the chapter offers a general approach to thinking analytically and comparatively about the study of contemporary urban collective violence.