期刊名称：Contention: The Multidisciplinary Journal of Social Protest
电子版ISSN：2330-1392
出版年度：2015
卷号：2
期号：2
页码：5-22
出版社：Punctum Books
摘要：After a brief account of what happened, the question is posed of whether the idea of moralpanic is the most revealing approach with which to understand the riots. Before answering,the question of how novel were the riots is addressed in relation to policing, social media, riotareas, the rioters, rioting behaviour, the State’s response and the reaction of communities. Theelements of a dynamic, grounded explanation are then tentatively offered, followed by an attemptto situate this explanation within the context of the contemporary lives of disadvantaged youthlacking both political support and an economic future. The conclusion returns to the question ofmoral panic. It suggests that since most of what happened had clear precedents in the series ofurban riots since the 1980s, there is plenty of evidence to support the idea that the constructionsof the 2011 riots are best understood as a moral panic. However, the small indications of newdevelopments, namely, the sheer vindictiveness of the state’s post-riot response – hunting downthe rioters, harsh sentencing, naming juveniles – as well as the spread of rioting to new areas andthe practice of communities ‘fighting back’, are important to explore for what they reveal about thepresent neo-liberal conjuncture. They seem to be morbid symptoms of an apparently intractableseries of crises characterised by, among other things, an unprecedentedly grim situation for poor,unemployed, disaffected youth living in deprived areas
