Anarchy in the UK: A Short Reading List

Last updated on August 14, 2011

Riot shield used as a tea tray (Image by pixel.eight).

I was busy revising two papers last week in view of (re)submitting them before the semester starts, so I didn’t spend much time on the UK riots. Besides, I didn’t think I had anything smart to say about them and I still don’t, given that my own work on riots has largely been about food riots in developing countries. So I will let others do the talking:

1. Olaf Storbeck has a very good post about the economics of riots, in which he discusses a new working paper by researchers at UPF in Barcelona on the relationship between budget austerity and social unrest.
2. For those who are naïve enough to believe that “it can’t happen here,” Ed Glaeser has a very good Bloomberg column on when, where, and how the crowd takes to the street.
3. Lee Craufurd covers a lot of ground, and he has a good discussion of who the rioters are and of what can be done.
4. Throughout all this, one of the best Twitter feeds to follow has been @seenfromafar, a colleague of mine who knows a lot about ethnicity, identity, and marginalization, and who teaches a course on urban violence. Incidentally, you can also get your ballet fix from her.
5. One of the best things I’ve read on the riots has been Forbes’ Tim Worstall, on why there’ll always be an England.

For further reading on those riots, I suggest Rudé’s The Crowd in History, on the “classical” food riots in France and England in the 18th and 19th centuries; Walton and Seddon’s Free Markets and Food Riots, on the International Monetary Fund’s structural adjustment programs-related riots throughout the developing and emerging world between the 1970s and the 1990s; and Steven Wilkinson’s 2009 review article on riots in the Annual Review of Political Science.

(HT: Marginal Revolution for the first two links.)