How crowd violence arises and how it spreads

Drury, John; Ball, Roger; Neville, Fergus; Reicher, Stephen; Stott, Clifford

Abstract

This chapter critically reviews theory and research on the emergence and spread of crowd violence. The chapter is divided into two parts, the first focused on violence within crowd events, and the second concerned with the spread of conflict between events. Early accounts in psychology and sociology shared the view that violence was inherent in crowds, but were unable to explain the social form of that violence. Modern theoretical frameworks have focused on normative patterns in crowd conflict, and have sought to account for the fact that most crowd events are not violent. The question of the spread of rioting across locations has a more recent history. Powerful mathematical models, developed first by sociologists and then criminologists, have been able to identify clear temporal and spatial patterns, demonstrating that riots influence each other, over and above key predictors such as deprivation. Yet when attempting to explain the mechanism of this spread, social scientists have either fallen back into irrationalist psychology (“contagion”) or merely re-described behaviour through use of “rational actor” models. The chapter describes research on patterns of crowd conflict across diverse events suggesting that shared social identity specifies appropriate conduct (and hence explains common limits) and is the basis of changes in relations between crowd members and out-groups (hence explaining empowered action and psychological change). Shared social identity and collective empowerment in relation to out-groups are also argued to be mechanisms through which violence spreads between events.

Citation

Drury, J., Ball, R., Neville, F., Reicher, S., & Stott, C. (2020). How crowd violence arises and how it spreads. In The Handbook of Collective Violence (175-187). Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780429197420-17

• Publication Date: Apr 22, 2020
• Deposit Date: May 26, 2023
• Pages: 175-187
• Book Title: The Handbook of Collective Violence
• ISBN: 9780429197420
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.4324/9780429197420-17