Applying the Flashpoints Model of Public Disorder to the 2001

It is 21 years since the publication of the author’s Flashpoints: Studies in Public Disorder. In this book, and in subsequent publications, David Waddington and his colleagues have outlined and refined the so-called Flashpoints Model of Public Disorder, which has underpinned separate analyses of orderly and disorderly crowd events in Britain, Europe, Asia, Australasia, and North and South America. The model has had its critics and detractors—the most recent being Paul Bagguley and Yasmin Hussain, who level several criticisms at the model in their book, Riotous Citizens: Ethnic Conflict in Multicultural Britain, an analysis of the 2001 Bradford riot. This paper not only addresses these criticisms, but uses Bagguley and Hussain’s own account as the basis of a re-analysis of the Bradford riot in terms of the flashpoints model