Reclaiming the everyday: the situational dynamics of the 2011 London Riots

This paper examines the situational dynamics of the 2011 London Riots. The empirical contribution is to challenge the dominant explanation of the riots as an outbreak of ‘criminal opportunism’. I use the Metropolitan Police record of all riot-related crimes in London to test several hypotheses and show that this ‘criminal opportunism’ theory cannot account for the riots’ spatial patterning. This opens space for alternative explanatory mechanisms. I then use video footage and testimonies of events on the ground to examine the interactions which made up the London Riots. These suggest that the riots were, in part, a way for people to stake a claim to the public spaces in which they lived, to reclaim the everyday. Theoretically, this builds on Randall Collins’s ‘micro-situational’ approach to violence but extends it by embedding historical and structural factors into that micro-perspective. Specifically, the emotional dynamics of these riot interactions cannot be understood without acknowledging participants’ pre-existing expectations of the police and of the everyday places of the riot.