Activism and Collective Violence: Šluknov Riots in 2011

This thesis is focused on the issue of violence in civil society. Using Charles Tilly's political theory, it attempts to point out that the emergence of collective violence can be well understood by tracing small scale causes (mechanisms), rather than large causes (poverty, extremism etc.). This argument is empirically studied in the context of anti-Roma riots that took place in Šluknov Hook, Czech republic, in the year 2011. The research is based on a broad concept of civil society, which doesn't assume fixed division between civil and uncivil subjects, but works with a number of actors, whose identity is unstable and their acting strategy fluently changes from nonviolent to violent and contra. The data show, that radical actors are generally more prone to use force. However, Tilly's theory provides opportunity to explain their influence on majority through the dynamics of relationships that is studied in this paper. The catalogue of events was created on the basis of news and document analysis and the incidence of theoretically defined mechanisms is identified by process tracing method: Boundary activation between us and them (mainly network-based escalation, signaling spirals), polarization, competitive display, selective retaliation, containment, monitoring, certification/decertification and..