Collective Violence as an Interaction Ritual Web

• In Event: Peace, War, and Social Conflict Panel Session: Culture and Conflict

Abstract

This article advances a micro-sociological theory of riots as interaction ritual webs, addressing the gap between situational theories of violence and large-scale episodes of collective unrest. Building on interaction ritual theory and the sociology of emotions, I argue that riots emerge through recurrent sequences of interactional situations—storytelling, gathering, collective locomotion, and standoff—each of which transforms emotional energy and reorganizes participants’ strategic options. Using comparative narrative analysis of more than fifty riots and near misses in South Asia, the study shows how repeated traversal of these situations enables participants to overcome confrontational tension/fear, producing violence not as spontaneous eruption but as an emergent outcome of cumulative interactional processes. The model revises existing forward-panic explanations by demonstrating how longer-duration events depend on networks of linked rituals rather than single episodes of dominance. Conceptualizing riots as webs of
interaction rituals highlights the contingent decision points through which escalation occurs, the role of habituated users of violence, and the mechanisms by which crowd fracture and remobilization sustain violence across time. The framework connects micro-level emotional mechanisms to meso-level diffusion and offers a new analytic vocabulary for studying collective violence beyond structural correlates or forward panic explanations.

Author

• David C. Sorge, Bryn Mawr College