Abstract
This article analyses European ‘youth riots’ as a social phenomenon after World War II. It also uses a specific riot – the 1948 Stockholm Easter Riots – in order to discuss the limits and potential of some theoretical assumptions underlying the field of historical contentious politics studies, primarily ‘contentious politics’ and ‘claims’. Using police reports and newspapers, the article shows that the riots were part of a European repertoire of post-war ‘youth riots’, but that they also bear similarities to an older popular repertoire of contention in Sweden. However, the riots do not really fit into the concept of ‘contentious politics’, as this concept is built on ‘claim-making’ as a key aspect and the participants did not make explicit claims. This leads to the conclusion that other theoretical tools, inspired by the concept of ‘moral economy’, are better suited for understanding the motivations of the rioters, whose actions are interpreted as a way of defending a perceived moral right of access to the urban public space.
Highlights
This article analyses European ‘youth riots’ as a social phenomenon after World War II. It uses a specific riot – the 1948 Stockholm Easter Riots – in order to discuss the limits and potential of some theoretical assumptions underlying the field of historical contentious politics studies, primarily ‘contentious politics’ and ‘claims’
A common denominator for many of the most recent studies is that they are influenced by the theoretical field of Contentious Politics Studies (CPS)
Theoretical inspiration from the CPS field plays a great role in the works of, for example, Danish historians Renée Karpantschof and Fleming Mikkelsen, who have studied the changing forms of contentious performances in Denmark over long timescales
Summary
We study the Easter Riots with a twofold ambition. First, we want to analyse youth riots as a social phenomenon of collective contention; an important undertaking in itself, due to the general lack of in-depth research on Swedish as well as European ‘youth riots’. The Stockholm Easter Riots, and the repertoire of ‘youth riots’ in general, were neither irrational nor as impossible to understand as contemporary observers thought It is, hard to describe them as ‘contentious politics’ in the sense that the concept is defined in the field of CPS studies, as they did not really involve ‘claims’, at least not in the narrow sense of the word. Thompson’s concept of ‘moral economy’ and by drawing inspiration from scholars analysing contemporary, ‘claimless’ suburban riots, stressing the importance of perceived spatial rights to the city and of notions of unjust and immoral police actions Such a theoretical course solves some problems, and raises new questions. Engaging in such a dialogue would enable important discussions on what it means to act politically and who should be classified as political actors and who should not, in itself a most political question, important for our understanding of past societies as well as the ones in which we live today
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