Looking for an introduction to the topic of race-related urban riots in the United States? Or maybe a through overview of several key sequences of urban unrest in the American twentieth century? Then you've come to the right place (space?) in Janet Abu-Loghod's new book of riot case studies. On the prowl for a penetrating, novel analysis or a theoretical advance in theories of racial rebellion and urban politics? Hoping for clear pointers to public policy initiatives that will prevent future rioting? You'll likely be disappointed.

Back jacket puffery aside, Abu-Loghod's book delivers something worthwhile to the riot literature: an organization of the stories of several key uprisings in three of America's biggest and most important cultural hubs: Chicago, New York, and Los Angeles. For once, these riots are laid out—front to back—and placed in "space," meaning the historical, demographic, economic, and racial and ethnic political context that birthed each riot and conditioned its trajectory and aftermath. Bravo! Any person bent on studying and understanding American rioting, and indeed its modern racial context, can get a good education in the basics from Race, Space, and Riots. Years of studying these riots and the literature (fragmented, according to Abu-Loghod), leads me to the conclusion that the author fundamentally gets it right. She places due emphasis on the role of the police—both in terms of the acute flashpoints and the longer-term relationships with the community. She appropriately treats economic conditions as an underlying stage set for rioting rather than acute conditions used to motivate immediate action. And she recognizes that access to political power conditions the response to grievances and the silencing of minority agendas, even if direct indicators of representation do not immediately predict riots.

And yet, there are, as with any book, shortcomings. Perhaps my greatest disappointment after the promise of the introductory sections was that, save a few details about the riot sequences themselves, I did not learn anything new about these riots or the contexts in which they occurred. Indeed, the fundamental issues the author identifies and explicates are all quite well known to those who have made it their business to study riots. We've long known, and it is well-documented in the literature, that police behavior and police and community relations are the grenade pin that uncorked incidents of this class of racial rioting. Likewise, the role of economic conditions has long been implicated and presented as a cause (more and less successfully depending on the approach taken toward its immediacy). There is no new evidence presented here that either strengthens or weakens earlier claims about these core processes.

And in fact, some of the attempts to bring evidence to bear on these questions fall fairly flat because the author often makes leaps from elements of relatively sparse case studies to conclusion without really convincing the reader. One of many examples that could be cited: When setting up the 1863 New York City draft riots to be used as a contrast to later riots, Abu-Loghod concludes that whites did not systematically seek out blacks to victimize in the riot, but rather simply attacked who they happened upon. She bases this conclusion on the observation that blacks were primarily attacked in zones where they represented very small proportions of the population. If whites really wanted to go after blacks, the reasoning goes, they'd have gone to more heavily black areas where they'd have many more people to punish. Maybe…but I doubt it. Earlier crowd and collective violence analysts have established two key things. First, rioters riot where they are—they are not likely to travel substantial distances to attack either people or structures. The principles of gathering processes fundamentally condition this likelihood. Second, scholars have also established that crowds use rational processes when they select victims. In this instance, the attackers did, in fact, pick blacks to be victims. And, they picked them in places where it was relatively safe to do so. In addition, many riots during that era occurred as whites tried to push blacks back out of their turf—therefore it is much more likely, using that logic that white rioters would select those who had invaded white territory—that is, those who are living in predominantly white areas. The failure to thoroughly think through these kinds of issues and appreciate prior empirical work damages the veracity of the main claims of the book which—even if correct, as I think they are—often rely on evidence that has a similarly conjectural feel.

In the end, Abu-Lughod leaves us to take an awful lot on faith, a faith that is undercut not just by sketchy detailing of her cases, but also by the frequent editorial peppering accomplished through the use of parenthetical asides, tough-in-cheek commentary, and creative use of quotation marks and exclamation points. When an author influences the reader's view with comments like: "This dense 362-page study [the Walker Report] was produced with a massive and, we can only assume, well-paid staff" [my emphasis, p. 106], one can only wonder where the research ends and the assumptions begin.