CCIG Forum 25, Mediating and (de)politicizing the 2011 riots

Mediating and (de)politicizing the August 2011 riots

Defective consumers, violent thugs or shoplifters with a cause?

During the August 2011 riots across the UK not only opportunistic media commentators and politicians were quick to utter their opinions about the causes of the violent destruction and the character of the rioters themselves; everyone seemed to have an opinion and these were quickly disseminated across YouTube, Twitter, BBM and the alike. With a few months now having passed by, how do we navigate through all these and how do we take a few steps back to encourage further reflection?

Although the riots were allegedly triggered by the police shooting of Mark Duggan, David Cameron declared without hesitation the following week that ‘these riots were not about race’. His explanation instead insisted that the riots signalled the ‘moral collapse’ of a ‘broken society’ whose ‘children without fathers’ and ‘communities without control’ he intends to cure with quite a conservative therapy of ‘discipline, duty and decency’. Similar-minded journalists specified how the ‘young thugs’ (The Telegraph, August 12) were driven by a ‘nihilistic grievance culture’ and the ‘propaganda’ of rappers inviting them to embrace a ‘gangster lifestyle’ (The Prospect, August 8and 17).

Commentators somewhat more to the left cited on the other hand the humiliating stop and search operations the police inflicts on black youths in disproportionate numbers as well as the recent government cuts to benefits and social services, felt most severely by the ‘already marginalised’, as the principal reasons for the riots (The Guardian, October 16). Nevertheless, some on the left condemned the riots as ‘mindless violence’ (liberalconspiracy.org, August 9), while others celebrated them as the awaking of an apathetic underclass, arguing that riots are ‘always a protest by the excluded and the poor against the conditions forced on them by the rich and powerful’ (counterfire.org, August 9).

Despite their multiplicity, we would like to propose that the innumerable comments and opinions on the August 2011 riots largely coalesce around the dichotomy of two well-known discursive strategies, aiming either at the criminalization or the victimization of the rioters. While these two strategies in effect differ from one another in regards to the level of contextualization they imply, as well as the connections they draw on and allow for, both together seem to prefigure and shape the public debate. As the quotes above illustrate, the public debate on the riots in turn heavily touches upon the three issues CCIG is centered around. In this Forum we therefore seek to use the riots in August 2011 as a prism in order to discuss arising questions of Citizenship, Identity and Governance.

The CCIG Postgraduate Research Programme together with the Publics Research Programme would like to invite you to join in and engage in the conversation around the following (and hopefully many more) questions: In how far do we agree with Zygmunt Bauman who reads the riots as the appropriation of the ‘right to go shopping’ by defected consumers, but not as political acts of deprived citizens? What are the means and connections which would be necessary in order to bring people to political voice? What are dominant labels and corresponding identities ascribed to the rioters and their ‘community’ in the media? How were alternatives voices and narratives on the riots silenced and marginalised? What are the governmental strategies that the dominant labels and representations of rioters justify and call for? What are the alternatives we have to offer and how can we promote these?