Thursday, June 27, 2013
2.22 (Binnengasthuis)
Ever since the 2005 violent riots in the suburbs of French cities, there has been a growing body of scholarship on the reasons behind the rise of an alienated urban under-class in France and the particularities of the French case. However, little attention has been paid to the variation in violent outbreaks among localities with similar demographic and socioeconomic characteristics within France. For instance, during the 2005 events the city of Marseille and certain Parisian quartiers with substantial presence of poor youth of immigrant origin remain silent. For this paper I compile a new dataset of the incidence of the 2005 riots at the communes of Ile-de-France (including the City of Paris proper and the metropolitan Paris area) using local newspapers and police records. I then make use of local-level variations to test deprivation-based theories of riots against political explanations related to local representation and sociological explanations highlighting local social capital. Furthermore, I treat the 2005 riots as a dynamic phenomenon and conduct protest event analysis to test for diffusion processes and the effect of different responses of the political and police authorities as the riots unfolded. The paper aims to contribute to the study of French riots through an original and systematic investigation of micro-events and through the careful testing of competing sociological and political theories of riots as protest events against the state.
