“We’ve got an eco-friendly government,
they preserve our natural habitat,
built an entire Olympic Village around where we live without pulling down any flats.”

– From “Ill Manors by Plan B

Sometimes the cause of what is happening in the present lies not in the past but in what is expected to happen in the future. The riots that occurred in Paris in the June and July of 2023 were ostensibly sparked by the shooting and killing of a 17-year-old French boy of Algerian and Moroccan descent, Nahel Merzouk, by a policeman during a routine traffic stop in the banlieue of Nanterre. In fact, the civil unrest happened because in 2024 Paris is scheduled to host the Summer Olympics. The idea may seem counter-intuitive: surely what happened immediately preceding the hostilities was the provocation? The truth is that the Summer Olympics and the events leading up to it create the conditions for riots.

News reports and opinion pieces have compared the situation in France to the Black Lives Matter protests in the US in the wake of the choking and murder of George Floyd by a member of the Minneapolis Police Department. In both cases a member of the police killed an ethnic minority without just cause; in both cases the act of killing was filmed by onlookers and shared widely on social media; and in both cases the inciting incident led to long overdue conversations about police brutality and systemic racism. There is, however, a more appropriate precedent for what happened in France that took place across the channel 12 years before.

In 2011, one year before the London 2012 Summer Olympic Games were due to be held, there were riots in Tottenham Hale following the shooting and killing of Mark Duggan, a 29-year-old black British man, by a member of the Metropolitan Police. In the following days the unrest spread to other regions of the capital and then to large cities around the UK such as Manchester, Birmingham and Bristol, just as the violence in Paris proliferated to other urban areas in France like Marseille, Lille and Strasbourg.

The 2011 riots took place on the watch of the coalition government of the Conservative and Liberal Democratic parties, led by Prime Minister David Cameron and Deputy PM Nick Clegg respectively, as they embarked on a campaign of austerity in response to the great financial crisis of 2008. In the London Borough of Haringey, which includes Tottenham Hale, youth project funding was cut by 75% and eight of its 13 youth clubs shut. At the same time, the government were spending exorbitant amounts, much more than was initially budgeted for, on the Olympics and their intangible benefit of ‘legacy’.[1]

The riots in France took place following similar moves to cut public spending by President Emmanuel Macron’s Government, including a pension reform bill raising the retirement age from 62 to 64 that led to months of protests. Finance Minister, Bruno Le Maire, meanwhile, has ordered each ministry to cut 5% of their budget and freeze 1% of their spending. These moves contrast with the extreme levels of expenditure on an Olympics that has already come in over budget: the cost to the taxpayer of the games rose to €4.4bn at the end of 2022 from around €3.3bn when the bid was made in 2017.

Both riots occurred against a background of cuts to public spending and overspending on an event that lasts 17 days. They happen because poor people see the vast sums of money that Olympic hosts spend on infrastructure and related costs, which usually come in wildly over-budget, and realise the stark contrast it makes with how little investment they receive in their communities.[2] As Andrew Zimbalist points out in his book, Circus Maximus: The Economic Gamble behind hosting the Olympics and the World Cup:

“While hosting a sport mega-event is hardly a seminal force behind a country’s inequality, there is little question that it contributes to and reinforces existing patterns of inequality. That the Olympics and World Cup are so heavily publicized and so visible only increases the likelihood that wasteful spending will catch the attention and scorn of the population.”

This creates a tinderbox primed for civil unrest and the match that lights it could be anything that reinforces this narrative of inequality: in the case of the London and Paris riots, it was the shooting and killing of a person of colour by a member of the police. Rather than looking for the cause of the violence, France is adding artificial intelligence programs to its network of surveillance cameras.

The reason these incidents created riots rather than protests can be found in psychology. Studies have found that what fuels normative collective action (action that is socially acceptable such as peaceful protests) is anger and a belief that things can be changed, while the emotions behind non-normative collective action (action that is socially unacceptable such as riots) are contempt and hatred and a belief that things will not change.[3] The inciting incidents in both cases were more likely to arouse contempt and hatred as racists, murderers and the system that enables them are not thought of as changeable.

The two intervening Summer Olympic games are exceptions for different reasons. Tokyo 2020 did not happen until 2021 because of the Covid-19 pandemic and took place behind closed doors. As this BBC article notes, although Japan is not a country known for protest, there was still a petition against the Olympics that gathered 420,000 signatures, one survey found that 70% of Japanese people wanted the games cancelled or delayed, and hundreds still protested the opening ceremony from outside the Olympic Stadium in spite of strictly imposed quarantine regulations.

Rio de Janeiro, however, is an exception because two years before it staged the Summer Olympics, Brazil hosted the FIFA World Cup. This had the effect of bringing forward the civil unrest by two years. In the June and July of 2013, the year before the football tournament took place, protestors in Sao Paolo took to the streets to protest an increase in the price of public transport, a demonstration that rapidly escalated across the country and included pockets of violence in Rio de Janeiro and clashes with police during the final of the FIFA Confederations Cup. Further protests took place throughout the 2014 World Cup itself. In 2015 and 2016, millions of Brazilians took to the streets to call for the impeachment of President Dilma Rousseff, and her predecessor and chief of staff, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, over the Petrobras scandal that saw both Rousseff and da Silva, as well as a number of other politicians, accused of receiving bribes in exchange for favourable construction contracts.

Interestingly, the reasons given for participating in the protests in Brazil in 2013 and France in 2023 are the same. One 19-year-old from the Rocinha favela in Rio de Janeiro, Oscar José Santos, said at the time, “We are here because we hate the government. They do nothing for us.” In 2023, the BBC reported that a middle-aged woman who lives on the Frais-Vallon estate in Marseille, Mado, said that “For the politicians we are nothing. We are really nothing.”

When people feel that the government and politicians are doing nothing for them; when they feel like they are really nothing; at the same time as those in power are splashing out on an ephemeral sporting occasion, the chance of the people turning violent increases. Perhaps nothing illustrates how closely the two are interconnected than when the façade of the Aubervilliers Aquatic Training Centre was damaged as a result of nearby buses being set on fire during the 2023 riots in France.

So long as the governments and politicians representing the host cities and countries care more about their reputation and legacy than serving the needs of their citizens, there will always be discontent, protests, petitions, riots and all manner of civil unrest beforehand. The circumstances that make these protests more likely to become violent are a high level of inequality in a concentrated space, the greater potential for an action that highlighting this inequality that provokes hatred and contempt among the populace such as the killing of a person of colour by the police, and a historical predisposition of the place to civil unrest.

The Summer Olympics scheduled for 2028 are in Los Angeles, a city where these ingredients are already present and likely to mix. The only mitigating factor is that LA has claimed it will be the ‘no-build’ Olympics and use existing infrastructure, as they did in 1984, rather than building new facilities. Unfortunately, as the campaign group NOlympicsLA have pointed out, this promise does not preclude building hotels that replace rent-controlled properties and defending the investment through a manufactured potential hotel room shortage. If nothing is done to assuage the concerns of Angelenos, then prepare yourself for the LA Riots of 2027.

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[1] (In “Going for Gold: The Economics of the Olympics”, Robert A. Baade and Victor A. Matheson note that: “The 2012 London organizers originally won the bid in 2005 with a cost estimate of £2.4 billion, which was revised upward within two years to £9.3 billion. Then, when the final costs came in at a mere £8.77 billion, the organizers laughably claimed the event had come in under budget.”) Baade, Robert A., and Victor A. Matheson. “Going for the Gold: The Economics of the Olympics.” The Journal of Economic Perspectives, vol. 30, no. 2, 2016, pp. 201–18. http://www.jstor.org/stable/43783713.

[2] One study by Guillaume Dezecache, James M. Allen, Jorina von Zimmermann and Daniel C. Richardson published by the Royal Society used a virtual game to investigate the psychology behind riots. Putting participants in competing teams that were tasked with constructing parks, it found that:

“…the experience of being treated with inequity can lead to acts of collective aggression in a disadvantaged group, associated with reports of being unfairly treated together with one’s own team. In our experiment, hostile behaviour took the form of damaging another team’s park. This behaviour was also detrimental to the individuals themselves, as they were spending time vandalizing the opposition rather than improving their own park, or simply doing nothing.”

Dezecache, Guillaume, James M. Allen,, Jorina von Zimmermann, and Daniel C. Richardson. “We predict a riot: inequity, relative deprivation and collective destruction in the laboratory” Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, Volume 288, Issue 1959

[3] For more on this see “Explaining radical group behaviour: Developing emotion and efficacy routes to normative and nonnormative collective action” Tausch N, Becker JC, Spears R, Christ O, Saab R, Singh P, Siddiqui RN. Explaining radical group behavior: Developing emotion and efficacy routes to normative and nonnormative collective action. J Pers Soc Psychol. 2011 Jul;101(1):129-48. (https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/21500925/) and Eric, et al. “Explaining Normative Versus Nonnormative Action: The Role of Implicit Theories.” Political Psychology, vol. 37, no. 6, 2016, pp. 835–52 http://www.jstor.org/stable/44132930