This book analyses the waves of protests, from spontaneous uprisings to well-organized forms of collective action, which have shaken European cities over the last decade. It shows how analysing these protests in connection with the structural context of neoliberal urbanism and its crises is more productive than standard explanations. Processes of neoliberalisation have caused deeply segregated urban landscapes defined by deepening social inequality, rising unemployment, racism, securitization of urban spaces and welfare state withdrawal, particularly from poor peripheral areas, where tensions between marginalized youth and police often manifest in public spaces. Challenging a conventional distinction made in research on protest, the book integrates a structural analysis of processes of large scale urban transformation with analyses of the relationship between 'riots' and social movement action in nine countries: France, Greece, England, Germany, Spain, Poland, Denmark, Sweden and Turkey.

A timely and incisive examination of contemporary urban unrest that explains why riots will continue until citizens are equally treated and politically included In the past few decades, urban riots have erupted in democracies across the world. While high profile politicians often react by condemning protestors' actions and passing crackdown measures, urban studies professor Mustafa Dikeç shows how these revolts are in fact rooted in exclusions and genuine grievances which our democracies are failing to address. In this eye-opening study, he argues that global revolts may be sparked by a particular police or government action but nonetheless are expressions of much longer and deep seated rage accumulated through hardship and injustices that have become routine. Increasingly recognized as an expert on urban unrest, Dikeç examines urban revolts in the United States, United Kingdom, France, Sweden, Greece, and Turkey and, in a sweeping and engaging account, makes it clear that change is only possible if we address the failures of democratic systems and rethink the established practices of policing and political decision-making.

Offers a rich description of the impact of the 1960s race riots in the United States whose legacy still haunts the nation.

In July 1964, after a white police officer shot and killed an African American teenage boy, unrest broke out in Harlem and then Bedford-Stuyvesant. Protests rose up to call for an end to police brutality and the unequal treatment of Black people in a city that viewed itself as liberal. A week of upheaval ensued, including looting and property damage as well as widespread police violence, in what would be the first of the 1960s urban uprisings. Christopher Hayes examines the causes and consequences of the uprisings, from the city’s history of racial segregation in education, housing, and employment to the ways in which the police both neglected and exploited Black neighborhoods. While the national civil rights movement was securing substantial victories in the 1950s and 1960s, Black New Yorkers saw little or uneven progress. Faced with a lack of economic opportunities, pervasive discrimination, and worsening quality of life, they felt a growing sense of disenchantment with the promises of city leaders. Turning to the aftermath of the uprising, Hayes demonstrates that the city’s power structure continued its refusal to address structural racism. In the most direct local outcome, a broad, interracial coalition of activists called for civilian review of complaints against the police. The NYPD’s rank and file fought this demand bitterly, further inflaming racial tensions. The story of the uprisings and what happened next reveals the white backlash against civil rights in the north and crystallizes the limits of liberalism. Drawing on a range of archives, this book provides a vivid portrait of postwar New York City, a new perspective on the civil rights era, and a timely analysis of deeply entrenched racial inequalities.

"For many, the appearance of Occupy Wall Street seemed so sudden and so surprising it seemed to have come out of nowhere. But Occupy Wall Street was in some sense not unusual: it was part and parcel of a long history of riot, revolt, uprising, and sometimes even revolution that has shaped the city and the larger histories and geographies of which it is part. The history of New York is, in significant part, a history of revolt. Many citizens, activists, and scholars know pieces of that history, but nowhere has it been put together in something close to its entirety. The effect is that each revolt or uprising seems almost sui generis, always surprising, disconnected from both its long- and near-term history and social geography. Revolting New York brings together the historical geography of revolt in New York in its fullness, from the earliest uprisings of the Munsee against Dutch occupation of Manhattan to Occupy. All in a style accessible to a broad as well as academic audience The book will show that there is a continuous, if varied and punctuated, history of rebellion in New York that is at least as vital as the more standard histories of formal politics, planning, economic growth and restructuring that largely define our consciousness of New York's evolution and the structuring of life within it" --

“Not since Angela Davis’s 2003 book, Are Prisons Obsolete?, has a scholar so persuasively challenged our conventional understanding of the criminal legal system.” —Ronald S. Sullivan, Jr., Washington Post From one of our top historians, a groundbreaking story of policing and “riots” that shatters our understanding of the post–civil rights era. What began in spring 2020 as local protests in response to the killing of George Floyd by Minneapolis police quickly exploded into a massive nationwide movement. Millions of mostly young people defiantly flooded into the nation’s streets, demanding an end to police brutality and to the broader, systemic repression of Black people and other people of color. To many observers, the protests appeared to be without precedent in their scale and persistence. Yet, as the acclaimed historian Elizabeth Hinton demonstrates in America on Fire, the events of 2020 had clear precursors—and any attempt to understand our current crisis requires a reckoning with the recent past. Even in the aftermath of Donald Trump, many Americans consider the decades since the civil rights movement in the mid-1960s as a story of progress toward greater inclusiveness and equality. Hinton’s sweeping narrative uncovers an altogether different history, taking us on a troubling journey from Detroit in 1967 and Miami in 1980 to Los Angeles in 1992 and beyond to chart the persistence of structural racism and one of its primary consequences, the so-called urban riot. Hinton offers a critical corrective: the word riot was nothing less than a racist trope applied to events that can only be properly understood as rebellions—explosions of collective resistance to an unequal and violent order. As she suggests, if rebellion and the conditions that precipitated it never disappeared, the optimistic story of a post–Jim Crow United States no longer holds. Black rebellion, America on Fire powerfully illustrates, was born in response to poverty and exclusion, but most immediately in reaction to police violence. In 1968, President Lyndon Johnson launched the “War on Crime,” sending militarized police forces into impoverished Black neighborhoods. Facing increasing surveillance and brutality, residents threw rocks and Molotov cocktails at officers, plundered local businesses, and vandalized exploitative institutions. Hinton draws on exclusive sources to uncover a previously hidden geography of violence in smaller American cities, from York, Pennsylvania, to Cairo, Illinois, to Stockton, California. The central lesson from these eruptions—that police violence invariably leads to community violence—continues to escape policymakers, who respond by further criminalizing entire groups instead of addressing underlying socioeconomic causes. The results are the hugely expanded policing and prison regimes that shape the lives of so many Americans today. Presenting a new framework for understanding our nation’s enduring strife, America on Fire is also a warning: rebellions will surely continue unless police are no longer called on to manage the consequences of dismal conditions beyond their control, and until an oppressive system is finally remade on the principles of justice and equality.

This lucid and wide-ranging survey is the first study in English to identify a distinctive urban phase in the history of the early modern crowd. Through close analysis of the behaviour of protesters and authorities in more than fifteen seventeenth-century French cities, William Beik explores a full spectrum of urban revolt from spontaneous individual actions to factional conflicts, culminating in the dramatic Ormee movement in Bordeaux. The 'culture of retribution' was a form of popular politics with roots in the religious wars and implications for future democratic movements. Vengeful crowds stoned and pillaged not only intrusive tax collectors but even their own magistrates, whom they viewed as civic traitors. By examining in depth this interaction of crowds and authorities, Professor Beik has provided a central contribution to the study of urban power structures and popular culture.

The author argues that urban locations are ideal for technological, economic, and social innovation.

An invaluable resource that documents the Black Power Movement by its cultural representation and promotion of self-determination and self-defense, and showcases the movement's influence on Black communities in America from 1965 to the mid-1970s. Unlike the Civil Rights Movement's emphasis on the rhetoric and practice of nonviolence and social and political goal of integration, Black Power was defined by the promotion of Black self-determination, Black consciousness, independent Black politics, and the practice of armed self-defense. Black Power changed communities, curriculums, and culture in the United States and served as an inspiration for social justice internationally. This unique two-volume set provides readers with an understanding of Black Power's important role in the turbulence, social change, and politics of the 1960s and 1970s in America and how the concepts of the movement continue to influence contemporary Black politics, culture, and identity. Cross-disciplinary and broad in its approach, Black Power Encyclopedia: From "Black Is Beautiful" to Urban Uprisings explores the emergence and evolution of the Black Power Movement in the United States some 50 years ago. The entries examine the key players, organizations and institutions, trends, and events of the period, enabling readers to better understand the ways in which African Americans broke through racial barriers, developed a positive identity, and began to feel united through racial pride and the formation of important social change organizations. The encyclopedia also covers the important impact of the more militant segments of the movement, such as Malcolm X and the Nation of Islam and the Black Panthers. Gives students and general readers a comprehensive overview of the Black Power Movement and an understanding of its importance within the turbulence and politics of the 1960s and 1970s in the United States as well as in the context of modern-day civil rights Provides insight into important concepts such as Black self-determination, Black consciousness, independent Black politics, and independent institutions Features contributions from premier Black Power scholars as well as Black Power activists Offers topical and biographical entries, a timeline of events, and a bibliography of key print and nonprint sources of additional information

From Egypt to South Africa, Nigeria to Ethiopia, a new force for political change is emerging across Africa: popular protest. Widespread urban uprisings by youth, the unemployed, trade unions, activists, writers, artists, and religious groups are challenging injustice and inequality. What is driving this new wave of protest? Is it the key to substantive political change? Drawing on interviews and in-depth analysis, Adam Branch and Zachariah Mampilly offer a penetrating assessment of contemporary African protests, situating the current popular activism within its historical and regional contexts.