>Riots happen when the social contact is broken.

This strikes me as too simplistic solution. I tried to find papers on how demonstrations become riots, but my google.scholar-fu has failed. Anyone got good review papers on this? (If none exist, there is a goldmine there for social scientists.)

Anecdotal, but in my country there's been large scale protests that proceeded peacefully because the police didn't step in to antagonize the people, even if they were in their rights to do so because of the coronavirus measures.

How about picking up a history book.

In 1773, King George was upping taxes while not providing adequate representation. Colonists thought this was an abuse of power, so they robbed and looted a huge boat filled with tea, which set off events that led to the American Revolution. Look it up, I'm sure there's a wikipedia article or something, it's pretty famous event in history.

Good call. This would be the second part to study 'how riots escalate to revolution'. First things first; from demonstration to riots. Which book and author would you suggest? (Wiki, I've already read and it had little about the actual mechanism.

They did not rob or loot. They destroyed the tea, and only the tea, which belonged to the East India Company, a defacto arm of the UK government. They did not steal any tea. They did not break anything else.

So, if I just go into a store that sells Armani suits or something, and destroy the suits, but I don't take them.. that's okay. Correct?

Edit, are you also insinuating that's the only 'rioting' they did and then magically the USA just formed out of nothing?

I'm not insinuating anything, or making any value judgements on what is "okay". I'm correcting the record. "Looting" is stealing. They did not loot.

This is HN. You don't need to project motivations on people when pedantry is sufficient.

(Your Armani analogy doesn't work however - a better analogy would be destroying property owned by, say, Halliburton.)

I haven't done as much reading on the subject as I'd like, but I thought "Policing as a causal factor" by Axel Klien (2011) to be interesting. The basic idea was that underlying societal issues are necessary, but the actual civil unrest is usually precipitated by a specific case of police over reach

> Riots happen when the social contact is broken.

Were you saying the same things during the lockdown protests?

I think the social contract for many were broken during lockdown, however the lockdown protests were allowed to continue peacefully. There was no major attempt to forcibly end them and no major case of loss of life or injury to propel the protest into true rioting.

My current mental model is that rioring both needs a reactant, but also a catalyst. Imo there was plenty of reactant sitting the lockdown protests, but no catalyst.

My thinking on the matter will likely change as I learn more.

And to answer your question literally: no, I wasn't really thinking about riots then

The social contract was to isolate to keep us all safe.

The other entry in the social contract is that our leadership should work to keep the country safe, and it failed at the very top.

Does that help clear things up for you?

Did those protests end up in riots?