Waves of Unrest

This chapter uses the 2011 English riots as a test of the Elaborated Social Identity Model (ESIM) and a lens for understanding how unrest spreads across communities. Beginning in Tottenham, it shows how the failure to engage with Mark Duggan’s family and community after his shooting created a vacuum of dialogue that escalated into confrontation and collective empowerment. As police appeared disempowered, solidarity grew, grievances crystallised, and unrest spread from protest to riot and from Tottenham to other boroughs and cities. This chapter advances ESIM by moving from single-event dynamics to mechanisms of diffusion. Drawing on Drury et al.’s three-pathway model, it identifies strategic spread (convergence to new sites, as in Enfield), cognitive spread (shared identity and resonance, as in Brixton), and spread through policing itself (anticipatory deployments producing self-fulfilling prophecies, as in Hackney). It also shows how dialogue and trust, as in Leeds, could block escalation. The riots are reframed not as failures of police robustness but of legitimacy, engagement, and proportionality. Political responses, however, reduced events to “moral decline” and launched behavioural programmes such as Troubled Families, ignoring structural drivers. This chapter argues for a depoliticised analysis of riots as patterned outcomes of intergroup dynamics that can be understood, anticipated, and managed.