Alcohol, drugs, and narcotics consumption are only the most banal forms. Riots, ‘rodeos’ and excessively risky behavior, and finally excessive TV viewing are all part of such self-destructive behavior” (emphasis mine).63
Despite the fact that his 2006 article seems to be a relational analysis of riots as forms of collective action provoked by police violence, Lapeyronnie fails to trace these dynamics either in the conclusion to the article or in his 2008 book.64 Instead he returns to the same neofunctionalist analysis that dominates his earlier work: residents of the banlieues appear to have a singular set of emotional and mental processes.65 He says,
Through the emotion that is felt, the individual directly demonstrates his attachment to the “us” and the solidarity which connects him to those who share the same feeling, the same mindset. For a moment, he distances himself from the triviality of his own reality in order to submit himself to a “force” completely outside of himself. Because of the riot, the affirmation of “self” melts into the affirmation of “we.” The individual charges himself with an energy which allows him to move to action, a sort of electricity, says Durkheim, an “emotional energy” which is also moral for him since it is strongly linked to the attachment to life or to respect.66
But residents of large urban areas do not all know each other or share similar characteristics. The reification of such spaces deflects attention from the real “relationship of controller and controlled,” as Robert Sack cogently notes.67 In contrast to those who see conflicts between police and minorities as the results of dysfunctional pathologies, alternative cultures, and/or the misinterpretations of events, I argue that such conflicts are embedded in the larger structural dynamics of, and resistance to, exploitation and categorical inequality. As Elizabeth Wood so eloquently puts it, “[T]he values, norms, practices, beliefs and collective identity … evolved in response to the experience of the conflict itself.”68
Still, many ethnographers depict the plight of banlieue and minority youths with sensitivity and empathy. David Le Poutre, Stéphanie Beaud, Michel Pialoux, Michel Kokoreff, and Christine Bachman describe a host of serious problems that minority youths in banlieues confront, including poverty, unemployment, poor housing, discrimination, and humiliating encounters with teachers, police, and other state officials. Kokoreff, for instance, writes of the negative, deleterious role played by the police in the banlieues: “The urban police no longer appear as a cause of peace; on the contrary, they arouse fear. The principal tool of the forces of order is the identity check, which systematically heightens tension instead of relieving it.”69
French Studies of Police
Most French specialists on policing articulate an interactive model similar to that of David Waddington. Sophie Body-Gendrot, for instance, rejects studies whose subtext is that “large immigrant families concentrated in public housing estates are, themselves, the source of the problems”70 and yet argues that police “are tired of being humiliated, sneered at and physically attacked by disenfranchised youth.”71 Similarly, Roché describes numerous incidents of police abuse but concludes, “In my view, a police action alone cannot explain a riot. Riots are only the pinnacle of a perennial conflict between particular groups of young men and police…. From one side to the other, insults fly, blows or more are exchanged, and masculine intimidation becomes part of the routine. Relationships are particularly poor with youth of foreign origin. [One study suggests that] youth of North African immigrant backgrounds see the police as a rival gang, as a racist force.”72
Laurent Bonelli, Laurent Mucchielli (at times with Marwan Mohammed or Abderrahim Ait-Omar), Farhad Khosrokhavar, and Didier Fassin have been the sharpest critics of both the politics of crime control and police conduct in poor minority banlieues.73 Bonelli argues that the “culture of results” encourages police to look for crimes rather than prevent them. Perpetual identity checks lead to escalating conflict: “Each victory for one side is a defeat for the other.” When a young boy dies during a police operation or is shot by the police, “the neighbourhood burns.”74 Khosrokhavar points out that Muslim youths are far more likely to be imprisoned than white French for the same behavior or crime.75 Marwan Mohammed and Laurent Mucchielli point out that most riots in France over the past twenty-five years have been confrontations between banlieue youths and police and that police intrusions and violence rank top place among the fears and complaints of minority youths.76 The political elites are largely to blame. They deliberately foster panic during election campaigns and then deploy police against banlieue youths under the guise of controlling crime.77
Didier Fassin’s engrossing and elegant ethnography of the French police stands alone.78 Fassin challenges the Flashpoint paradigm commonly used by French scholars. It is not the actions of minority youths that provoke police violence, he contends, but rather the discourse and actions of French political elites, who have deliberately stoked racial fears and encouraged police to act like occupying armies in poor banlieues:
Among the hundreds of such incidents I witnessed, almost the only ones in which the individuals concerned displayed insolence involved youngsters from middle-class or wealthy backgrounds, particularly students who evidently had no experience of this kind of situation and seemed unaware of the potential consequences of their behavior. Yet in none of these cases—which were anyway quite infrequent, since these groups rarely face such procedures—did the officers seek to escalate the tension in order to provoke a scene that could later be set down as insulting and resisting the police.
Conversely, when checks were carried out in the projects or on the streets of the city, young people, mostly of working-class background and non-European origin, almost always kept a low profile, only speaking when they were asked a question, not reacting to the abusive or racist comments and aggressive or humiliating treatment some officers subjected them to, simply presenting their papers and submitting to the body search. Accustomed to and even blasé about these repeated irritations, knowing quite well what would happen if they protested, they appeared to be waiting until the bad moment passed, silent, expressionless, for the only way not to lose face in this confrontation was not to enter into any transaction with the police.79
Fassin attributes the 2005 riots and nearly every major urban disturbance from Watts to London over the past fifty years to racial profiling and police aggression in “disadvantaged neighborhoods, usually leading to the death of youth belonging to a racial or ethnic minority group.”80
Comparative Studies
There are relatively few systematic cross-national and comparative studies of riots. Three of the strongest such approaches are those of Loïc Wacquant, Janet Abu-Lughod, and Michael Katz.81
Wacquant’s scathing discussion of the link between neoliberalism and mass incarceration and his devastating critique of Chicago school analyses of urban poverty alone make his work worth reading. But his explanation for riots is less convincing. The American riots of the 1960s and the French riots in 2005 were the results of diametrically opposite processes, he insists. American riots were “propelled from outside by the crumbling of the caste system”; French riots were the result of the slow decomposition of working-class neighborhoods from within. The first was caused by “the restructuring of urban capitalism and the policy of social regression of the federal government set against the backdrop of continued ostracization of African Americans,” and the second “by the triangular relationship between the state, social classes and the city.”82
Banlieues, Wacquant claims, are antighettos, places of integration and state intervention. In the United States we have “racial cloistering,” whereas in France the comparable pattern is one of “ethnic dispersion and diversity.”83 “Twenty-five years after the great race riots of 1965–1968, African
