Are riots more than just breakdowns of order? Are rioters just violently and chaotically disrupting the status quo or are they individuals acting together in a surprisingly orderly manner? In Disruptive Order, Nona Martin Storr and Virgil Henry Storr argue that riots are rule-governed, self-generating, emergent phenomena. Viewing riots as what they call “tensive emergent orders” offers a grammar for discussing riots that foregrounds the motivations and actions of individual rioters, the tacit rules that rioters follow, and the socio-political causes and consequences of riots . Applying this grammar to the 1942 riot that occurred in the Bahamas, Storr and Storr demonstrate how the 1942 riot was not just a momentary outburst but a watershed event in the country’s history, ushering in far-reaching socio-political changes. As we move into an era of frequent extreme protests, Disruptive Order urges us to rethink why the threatened and marginalized sometimes speak through riots and gives us a framework to assess the impact of their speaking in this way.

Nona Martin Storr is Senior Affiliated Scholar at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University. Her scholarly work has focused on the political and social histories of disadvantaged communities. She holds a PhD in History from George Mason University and a MA in Public History (with an emphasis in oral history) from Loyola University Chicago. Her writings on riots have appeared in the Journal of Caribbean History, Island Studies Journal, and Space and Culture.

Virgil Henry Storr is Don C. Lavoie Senior Fellow in the Mercatus Center's F.A. Hayek Program in Philosophy, Politics and Economics and Professor of Economics at George Mason University. Storr’s previous books with Palgrave Macmillan include Do Markets Corrupt Our Morals? and Community Revival in the Wake of Disaster.