The marginalized and the rioters
The recent rioting in France, and in the past in the UK, set me wondering ifrioting and looting are more likely to be done by groups that feel themselves to be marginalized.
There is an important qualification. Feeling marginalized raises the odds of joining a riot. It does not explain who loots, or when.
The current European wave makes the point. On October 17th some 550,000 people marched in France against the cost of living by the Interior Ministry’s count, and the processions were mostly calm. The violence and looting broke out on the margins, in cities from Limoges and Lyon to Marseille and Paris.
In Paris, masked crowds in black hoodies forced open shop shutters and cleared out cigarettes, sunglasses, clothes, jewellery and food. In Milan, rioters looted luxury stores in the Via Montenapoleone district. Hundreds of thousands shared the grievance. A small, organized fringe did the damage. And they went for designer goods, not bread.
British history tells a similar story. The 1981 Brixton and Toxteth riots grew out of real grievance, particularly over policing, as the Scarman Report acknowledged. The 2011 riots began with a police shooting in Tottenham but quickly became something else. Ministry of Justice data showed rioters were disproportionately young, male, from deprived areas, and around three-quarters already had a caution or conviction.
The LSE and Guardian interviews found anger at police, but also plain opportunism with free trainers available and the belief that no-one would be caught. The 2024 disorder after Southport drew on a different group with a different grievance, immigration, often in left-behind towns. Again, many of those charged had prior records.
So the pattern is fairly consistent. Marginalization supplies the tinder. But the spark is usually a trigger event, and the fuel is a pool of young men with weak ties to work and family and some prior experience of crime. What turns protest into looting is perceived impunity. When police hold back, as they did in London in August 2011 and in Paris last fortnight, looting spreads quickly. When arrests and swift sentencing follow, it stops. The rapid court processing in 2011 and 2024 had a marked deterrent effect.
Some scholars stress shared group identity and grievance as the driver, and see ‘opportunism’ as too dismissive. Criminologists focused on deterrence reply that most marginalized people never riot, so grievance cannot be the decisive variable. The evidence supports both up to a point. But only one of these factors can be changed in the short term.
Grievance may explain why people take to the streets. It rarely explains why they leave carrying a flat-screen television.
Madsen Pirie