Collective Violence and Relative Deprivation Theory. Examining the Correlates of the 2011 England Riots

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Seminar paper from the year 2011 in the subject Sociology - Law, Delinquency, Abnormal Behavior, grade: 1, 0, Eastern Illinois University, language: English, abstract: This study examines the underlying causes of the 2011 England Riots. In order to do so, it proceeds in six steps. The introduction, which lays out the design, merits and limitations of this study, is followed by a brief description of the 2011 England Riots. This description demonstrates that the recent disorders in Britain are a prime example of rioting, and as such pose a perfect test for existing theories which try to explain the occurrence of collective violence. The third section consists of a review of the scholarly literature on the causes of rioting. This review reveals that the single most prominent explanation of collective violence has been relative deprivation theory, which therefore serves as a basis for deriving the hypotheses of this paper. The fourth section lays out the methodology of this study, in order to gain a comprehensive understanding of the unrest and its underlying causes, a dual approach is employed: this paper analyzes both the socioeconomic structure of the neighborhoods in which the riots occurred as well as the background of the rioters that were arrested. The results yielded by this approach are presented in the fifth section. The findings strongly support relative deprivation theory, however, some of the alternative explanations controlled for in this study also seem to have played an important role in the occurrence of the 2011 England riots. This shows that collective violence is a multi-causal phenomenon, one that cannot be sufficiently grasped by resorting to a single explanation. The sixth and final section summarizes the main findings of this study, connects them with the broader theoretical debate and indicates the direction for further research on this topic.