After the riots which swept through the French banlieues in 2005 a group of British academics, led by David Waddington and Mike King from the UK, organised a series of meetings with researchers and academics in France in order to exchange experiences of their own riot-torn towns and cities, to discuss possible remedies and to reanalyse and re-theorise their own understandings of riot in the light of each other's experiences and analyses. In England, the explosion of anger which led to weeks of unrest in three Northern English towns were still fresh in the collective memory and the events in France, involving that nation's own minority ethnic youth appeared to offer some important parallels and shared points of departure. This book is a result of their deliberations. The British contributors set out to offer to their French counterparts the benefit of insights and understandings forged in the UK's much longer history of studying the frustrations and fears of excluded and racialised ‘others’ and their infrequent, yet dramatic, resort to collective and sometimes destructive protest and action on the streets. This edited collection is organised into four parts: the first of which ‘sets the scene’ for this collective endeavour, the second and third explores the British and French experiences of 2001 and 2005 respectively and the last attempts to draw conclusions from the information and analyses offered in the preceding chapters and also includes a discussion of the absence of riot within the German immigrant experience.

While the events themselves invite comparison in their apparent similarities in both the background and persistence of segregation, marginalisation and othering of migrant communities, together with the manifestation of anger and protest which spilled out on to the streets within both France and Britain, the differences this volume reveals are also significant. With Sarkozy in the political driving seat, the events in France took place against a backdrop more akin to the period of Thatcherism in Britain in which whole communities were excluded from economic and political consideration. The anger which exploded across French cities in 2005 in which young minority populations railed against the state ― in the guise of the police ― raise more echoes with the British unrest of the early 1980s, which were also a widespread cry of rage against openly racist and hostile institutions of the state. The events of 2001 in northern England, however, more specifically blew apart the myth of inclusion, respect and support for diversity claimed by New Labour for a multicultural Britain under its governance. When challenged by the rise of right-wing extremism and the march of proto-fascism against religious and cultural tolerance, the institutions of the state were shown to be lacking yet again, affording little protection to communities under both ideological and actual siege (Amin, Reference Amin2003; Burnett Reference Burnett2004). These contrasting backdrops, however, have created the conditions under which violent protest has occurred. As a consequence, it is necessary that analyses of riot must go far beyond the trigger events of the days or weeks preceding and the social and economic conditions prevailing in the areas in which they occur to look at the systemic processes of economic and political decision-making which allow anger and social frustration to build so acutely and to be felt so deeply within particular neighbourhoods. We persist however, and this collection is no exception, in looking down to try to unravel the peculiarities of circumstance that lead to unrest, to consider the reactions of the poor and the angry to their marginalisation. The forces which lead to the creation of unwanted, surplus populations, and which subsequently cast them as disloyal, different and disorderly are not currently questioned so closely.

There is much in this collection which is informative, interesting and engaging and it offers some fascinating insights into the approach of the French political and research communities around issues of diversity, citizenship and multiculturalism, thereby offering a useful tool for comparative analysts in this respect alone. Whether the book achieves its goal in informing and further advancing theoretical and practical analyses of its main subject area, however, is less clear. In its endeavour to explain and compare the British and French experiences many of the contributions presented can tend to resort too much to description, and, while this is necessary and also illuminating, no doubt to readers on both sides of the Channel, it does not result in the opening up of the subject to shared understandings. Additionally, the contrast in theoretical and research standpoints apparent between Part 2, the British and Part 3, the French, remains in the end quite stark and little can be done at this point to bring the two ‘sides’ together. This is as much a consequence of philosophical and political positions, which separate British from French understandings of the salience of multiculturalism and citizenship, as it is to the particular research methodologies and prior approaches drawn upon and utilised in each contrasting section.

It is clear, however, from this volume that future cross-national collaborations would be beneficial and that this particular collection is the start of a process that should be supported and continued into the future. Indeed the last chapter begins, although in my opinion too tentatively, to point to some more fundamental issues, to take the reader beyond the local and particular detail and circumstances of ‘riot’ to ask greater questions of the material presented in preceding chapters. This is where future research and deliberation should begin, raising its eyes from the ground to look up to power, to expose the reasons why and the mechanisms by which it creates so much social harm and to challenge its supposed wisdom. Through this process we will become better able to prevent further unrest and to begin to put in place the changes needed to properly include highly marginalised populations in the political, economic and social life of all our nations.