Fighting for Their Neighborhood: Urban Policy and Anti-State Riots in France

Why does anti-state, violent rioting take place in advanced democracies? The paper investigates the role of the urban environment in shaping grievances expressed and mobilization/counter-mobilization processes observed during a riotous episode. In particular, I look at large social-housing estates as a propitious urban setting for the eruption and sustenance of anti-state violence. I identify three mechanisms (stigma amplification and inversion, failure of state intervention in the form of everyday administration and emergency policing, and advantages for network activation and resource mobilization among potential rioters) that complement standard explanations of rioting based on socioeconomic and ethno-cultural grievances. I test the theoretical model using a controlled case study of two neighboring suburbs in the North of Paris, with similar socioeconomic, demographic, and political characteristics but different violent outcomes in the 2005 nation-wide wave of French riots. The paper traces the source of local variation to the exogenous presence of large, concentrated social-housing estates in one, but not the other. The analysis here treats anti-state rioting as a form of urban protest and looks at state-society divisions rooted in urban geography and policy that have been overlooked in conventional scholarship on minority mobilization in Europe.