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This article formulates a theoretical framework that helps to explain the origins of prison riots. Our explanation builds on existing theories, taking the integrative theory outlined by Useem and Kimball (1989) as a starting point. It shows how a variety of causal factors interact to create an institutional environment in which routine incidents can develop into full-fledged riots. We illustrate our framework with an analysis of the Strangeways prison riot in Manchester, UK (1990).

Although social scientists have sought to understand riots in terms of social structure, few causal explanations have withstood the tests of ongoing empirical examination. In America, presidential commissions sought to put the black urban riots of the mid‐sixties in a similar context. Despite the laudable attempts at deriving benign policy implications from such explanations, the commissions' explanations were no better than the social science of the time. Understanding the causal basis of riots has been elusive, but our understanding of riots as problems of crisis management has been far more reachable. A comparison of two Los Angeles riots, Watts 1965, and the Rodney King riots of 1992, shows that the intensity, spread and duration of the riots were a function of crisis paralysis. We might not know, in any scientific sense, what causes riots but we appear to know a great deal about the consequences of not appropriately preparing for or managing riots. These are the lessons of both Los Angeles riots.

The paper explores the discourses surrounding the 'riots' of 2001 as a reflection of contemporary understandings of raced/ethnic, gendered and generational identities, and changing discourses about race and ethnicity in Britain. The paper examines these themes in relation to current academic theorizations of culture, identity and difference. Finally, the paper explores the implementation of these understandings in current government policy papers and practices around 'community cohesion' and 'citizenship'. It argues that each of these arenas employs very static and bounded notions of 'community', 'culture' and 'identity' which deny the complex formations of lived identities and obscures ongoing relations of power and disadvantage. This has clear implications for the future of multicultural policy, citizenship education and social justice.

This article offers an alternative framework for understanding 'communal' conflict in India. Largely because recurring sectarian conflicts involve groups whose boundaries are demarcated by religion, most scholars have focused their attention on either specific religious doctrines or the policy of secularism to explain the phenomenon. In this article it is argued that significance of religion, secularism or anti-secularism has been overemphasized in the interpretation of communal conflict in India. The concept of 'racialization' is deployed to argue that in India communal identities have in fact been 'racialized' and recurring conflicts share striking structural and ideological similarities with racial conflicts in other parts of the world. A historical narrative of the political process of 'racialization' of identities in India is offered with the aim of re-thinking existing explanations of such conflicts.

This research considers the bureaucratic politics of recent riot crisis management and urban policy in Britain and the United States.1 The bureaucratic politics model is evaluated and a tentative framework for its development as a way of analysing governmental responses to urban riots is proposed.2 The links between crisis management in riots and wider urban policy are identified as being important in developing an understanding of the nature of post‐riot policy responses within the context of the broader political environment.

Recent monographs on Russian social development have raised a number of hypotheses regarding our general understanding of processes of political and social change. In his volume on the early history of Russian workers Reginald Zelnik, for instance, proposes that moderate labor unrest reinforced traditional repressive patterns, while extreme conflicts motivated innovative reform. In the work of Robert E. Johnson and of Victoria Bonnell we find the suggestion that workers in small-scale enterprises and artisan shops were often more radical and organized than those in larger industrial enterprises. The fragmented and antagonistic nature of Russian society, with multiple splits of both an intergroup and intragroup nature, has been noted in the work of both Roberta Manning and Allan Wildman. Diane Koenker, focusing her research on the period of the 1917 revolutions, has brought out the moderating and integrating effect of the urban setting on Russian workers. These are only a few of the many thought-provoking hypotheses that have been raised.

Cover -- Half Title -- Title Page -- Copyright Page -- Dedication -- Table of Contents -- List of Tables -- List of Abbreviations and Acronyms -- Foreword: Hong Kong Political Activism Rediscovered -- Acknowledgments -- Introduction: Hong Kong-Rethinking Political Activism -- 1. A Critique of the Claims of Political Indifference -- The Traditional Argument of Political Apathy -- Surveys on Political Attitudes -- A Critique of Siu-kai Lau's Concept of Political Aloofness -- Conclusion -- 2. An Alternative Understanding of Political Participation -- A Critique of the Orthodox Definition -- Toward a Contextual Understanding of Political Participation -- An Informed Definition of Political Participation -- Conclusion -- 3. A Multiple-Case Interpretive Approach -- Historical Nature of the Study -- Collective Dimension of Public Action -- Contextual Understanding of Events -- Alternative Interpretation -- The Question of Generality -- A Multiple-Case Interpretive Approach -- Conclusion -- 4. Rebutting the Minimal Political Participation Claim -- A Chronology of Significant Political Events -- Statistics and Major Events of Political Participation -- A New Comparison of Political Participation -- Conclusion -- 5. Rediscovering Politics: Hong Kong between 1949 and 1959 -- The Campaign for Rent Control -- The Campaign to Change the Marriage Laws -- The Tramway Workers' Labor Dispute of 1952 -- The 1956 Riots -- The Campaign to Remove a Marriage Ban on Nurses at the Tung Wah Group of Hospitals -- An Overview -- 6. Rediscovering Politics: Hong Kong in the 1960s -- The 1964 Campaign against Telephone Rate Increases -- The 1966 Star Ferry Riots -- The First Campaign for Chinese as an Official Language -- An Overview -- 7. Rediscovering Politics: Hong Kong in the 1970s -- The Campaign for Equal Pay for Nurses -- Defend the Diaoyutai Islands Movement of 1970.

How does one describe history through discontinuities ? While this notion signifies neither rupture, nor fault, discontinuities do, however, introduce a dysfunction in the order of existence. By studying these movements, the power relationships legibly and accessibly appear to the historian. It is possible to find forgotten significance and understanding otherwise lost by doing linear studies of history, which has dominated and was always privileged to that discourse. Working on discontinuities allows one to demonstrate the inverse relationship typical to historical analyses and central to the reflection of the movements in history that is detrimental to a teleological view coming from the past.

Some thirty years ago, the Kerner Commission report explained the outbursts of urban violence in America's Black ghettos as caused by Black deprivation wrought by white racism. In its rendition of the Black experience through four hundred years of American racism and its description of the conditions in the urban ghettos of the 1960s, the report is worthy of the acclaim it has received. In its analysis of the causal factors that led to the riots, the report attempts to appeal to intuition but falls far short of making a case on the basis of any remote standard of causal analysis. Indeed, the report strikingly resembles the academic studies that have invoked relative and absolute deprivation theories to explain the American urban riots of the 1960s and which have repeatedly collapsed under the scrutiny of basic considerations of social science methodology.The causes of riots might as aptly fall into situational explanations, including the pattern of police response, as they fall into theoretical ones. While social scientists debate such issues, policy makers have had to respond to the realities of riots, both in terms of causes and effects.Surprisingly, many policy makers, irrespective of their own ideologies and notions of causes, when dealing with America's urban riots, appear to have come to the same general conclusions about the policies that need to be implemented to prevent future racial crises. Looking at these responses, as well as both the idiosyncratic and common attributes of riots, this paper suggests reconceptualizing and rethinking the nature of riots so as to move toward a better understanding of this type of racial crisis.

This book provides a new approach to the history of social conflict, popular politics and plebeian culture and has implications for understandings of class identity, popular culture, riot, custom and social relations. Above all, the book challenges the claim that early modern England was a hierarchical, 'pre-class' society

Recently in the state of Ohio, there has been a controversy over whether inmates who share cells in state correctional institutions should be of the same race or should be assigned to cells regardless of their race. Some observers have attributed the 1993 riot at Lucasville to attempts to racially integrate prison cells; others reject this claim. There is little understanding, however, of what policies are followed in major correctional institutions in other states. We conducted a national survey of prison wardens at maximum security institutions to learn more about this important policy issue. The findings from this research have yielded some similarities across states. However, the results also indicate that few wardens are aware of the policies in place at other facilities and of policies held by their state departments of corrections.

Focused on the 1964 Panama Canal Zone riots and the political crisis that followed them, this article explores the intersection between imperial legacies and Cold War policymaking. After describing the Panamanian context and the historical causes of the violence, it argues that Lyndon Johnson and his advisers proved incapable of understanding the way that an imperial past shaped the Cold War present. Focused on the need to maintain America's international credibility and concerned with domestic criticism, they viewed Panamanian actions as irrational and irresponsible, considered nationalism only as a cynically wielded political weapon, and determined that any agreement to negotiate would convey a dangerous image of weakness and lack of resolve. They also solidified a way of looking at the world that foreclosed opportunities to work for peace and that eventually led to much greater tragedy.

Since the early nineteenth century, African-Americans have turned to black newspapers to monitor the mainstream media and to develop alternative interpretations of public events. Ronald Jacobs tells the stories of these newspapers, showing how they increased black visibility within white civil society and helped to form separate black public spheres in New York, Chicago and Los Angeles. Comparing African-American and 'mainstream' media coverage of some of the most memorable racial crises of the last forty years such as the Watts riot, the beating of Rodney King, the Los Angeles uprisings and the O. J. Simpson trial, Jacobs shows why a strong African-American press is still needed today. Race, Media and the Crisis of Civil Society challenges us to rethink our common understandings of communication, solidarity and democracy. Its engaging style and thorough scholarship will ensure its appeal to students, academics and the general reader interested in the mass media, race and politics