In recent decades, the world has witnessed the emergence of several protracted violent conflicts and the eruption of ethnic and communal violence in countries such as Bosnia, Rwanda, and Sri Lanka. Riots and Victims challenges the popular academic interpretation of such events as examples of tribal slaughter or spontaneous eruptions, fueled by historic conflict between religious and ethnic communities. This book examines the origins and consequences of the violence that occurred between the Muslim and Hindu communities in pre-partition Bengal, which ultimately resulted in the creation of Pakistan. Gossman argues that communal violence and communal identity were not merely the consequences of long-term animosities, but rather ploys orchestrated by mid-level politicians for their own advancement and aggrandizement. Riots and Victims introduces new analyses of local violence and identity, and explores issues of far-reaching importance.

Three weeks after Lyndon Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act of 1964, a New York City police officer shot and killed a fifteen-year-old black youth, inciting the first of almost a decade of black and Latino riots throughout the United States. In October 2005, French police chased three black and Arab teenagers into an electrical substation outside Paris, culminating in the fatal electrocution of two of them. Fires blazed in Parisian suburbs and housing projects throughout France for three consecutive weeks. Cathy Lisa Schneider explores the political, legal, and economic conditions that led to violent confrontations in neighborhoods on opposite sides of the Atlantic half a century apart. Police Power and Race Riots traces the history of urban upheaval in New York and greater Paris, focusing on the interaction between police and minority youth. Schneider shows that riots erupted when elites activated racial boundaries, police engaged in racialized violence, and racial minorities lacked alternative avenues of redress. She also demonstrates how local activists who cut their teeth on the American race riots painstakingly constructed social movement organizations with standard nonviolent repertoires for dealing with police violence. These efforts, along with the opening of access to courts of law for ethnic and racial minorities, have made riots a far less common response to police violence in the United States today. Rich in historical and ethnographic detail, Police Power and Race Riots offers a compelling account of the processes that fan the flames of urban unrest and the dynamics that subsequently quell the fires.

This book examines the origins and consequences of the violence that occurred between the Muslim and Hindu communities in pre-partition Bengal, which ultimately resulted in the creation of Pakistan. Riots and Victims introduces new analyses of local violence and identity, and explores issues of far-reaching importance.

This important collection of essays by historians and sociologists focuses on riots in Sri Lanka, Pakistan, and the various regions of India. The contributors discuss the causes of conflict and their effects on the communities in which they occur. The book as a whole is one of the few sociological studies of rioting as an urban phenomenon, and will be of special interest to sociologists, anthropologists, and historians.

The fascinating story of Boston's violent past is told for the first time in this history of the city's riots, from the food shortage uprisings in the 18th century to the anti-busing riots of the 20th century.