Riots and Political Protest: Notes from the post-political present

The years 2008 to 2013 saw a new generation of political protestors take to the streets. Riots disrupted many Western cities and new protest movements emerged, keen to address a bleak context of economic collapse and austerity politics.

In this groundbreaking new study, Winlow, Hall, Briggs and Treadwell push past the unworldly optimism of the liberal left to offer an illuminating account of the enclosure and vacuity of contemporary politics. Focusing on the English riots of 2011, the ongoing crisis in Greece, the Indignados, 15M and Podemos in Spain, the Occupy movement in New York and London and the English Defence League in northern England, this book uses original empirical data to inform a strident theoretical critique of our post-political present. It asks: what are these protest groups fighting for, and what are the chances of success?

Written by leading criminological theorists and researchers, this book makes a major contribution to contemporary debates on social order, politics and cultural capitalism. It illuminates the epochal problems we face today. Riots and Political Protest is essential reading for academics and students engaged in the study of political sociology, criminological theory, political theory, sociological theory and the sociology of deviance.

Simon Winlow is Professor of Criminology at Teesside University and Co-Director of the Teesside Centre for Realist Criminology. He is the author of Badfellas (Berg, 2001) and co-author of Bouncers (Oxford University Press, 2003), Violent Night (Berg, 2006), Criminal Identities and Consumer Culture (Willan, 2008), Rethinking Social Exclusion (Sage, 2013) and Revitalizing Criminological Theory (Routledge, 2015). He is also the co-editor of New Directions in Crime and Deviancy (Routledge, 2012) and New Directions in Criminological Theory (Routledge, 2012).

Steve Hall is Professor of Criminology at Teesside University and Co-Director of the Teesside Centre for Realist Criminology. He is author of Theorizing Crime and Deviance (Sage, 2012), and co-author of Revitalizing Criminological Theory (Routledge, 2015), Rethinking Social Exclusion (Sage, 2013), Criminal Identities and Consumer Culture (Routledge, 2008) and Violent Night (Berg, 2006). He is also the co-editor of New Directions in Criminology (Routledge, 2012).

James Treadwell is a lecturer in Criminology at the University of Birmingham. He is the author of the best-selling textbooks Criminology (2006) and Criminology: The Essentials (2012). He is perhaps best known as an ethnographer, and he has published articles in a number of leading criminology and criminal justice journals.

Daniel Briggs is Professor of Criminology at the Universidad Europea in Madrid. He is the author of Deviance and Risk on Holiday (Palgrave MacMillan, 2013) and Crack Cocaine Users (Routledge, 2012) and co-author of Culture and Immigration in Context (Palgrave MacMillan, 2014) and Assessing the Impact and Use of Anti-Social Behaviour Orders (Policy Press, 2007). He is also the editor of The English Riots of 2011 (Waterside Press, 2012).