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8 - “We All Came Together That Day”

The 2011 English Riots as an Enactment of Solidarity

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  25 November 2019

By
Yasushi Xavier Tanaka-Gútiez
Edited by
Jeffrey C. Alexander ,
Trevor Stack  and
Farhad Khosrokhavar
Jeffrey C. Alexander
Affiliation:
Yale University, Connecticut
Trevor Stack
Affiliation:
University of Aberdeen
Farhad Khosrokhavar
Affiliation:
Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, Paris
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Summary

On August 4, 2011, Mark Duggan, a local resident of Tottenham in north London, was shot dead by the Metropolitan Police Service. In the immediate aftermath of the killing, community members petitioned for an explanation but were met with silence. The authorities’ refusal to provide answers for their actions led to an uprising of the sort that England had not witnessed since the Broadwater Farm Riots in 1985. Spreading like wildfire, the riots reached dozens of areas throughout London and later broke out in England’s major cities such as Birmingham, Manchester, and Liverpool. Over the course of five days, 2,500 shops were looted and £300 million worth of property damage was reported (Roberts 2011). As the media disseminated images of burning buildings and armed youths in hoodies, the nation grappled with narratives about one of the most significant uprisings in recent memory, narratives that presented the riots as acts of unfettered deviance.

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Chapter
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Breaching the Civil Order
Radicalism and the Civil Sphere
 , pp. 210 - 234
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2019

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