‘Could the August riots have been predicted?’

A University of Manchester team researching urban violence has developed a new method which can help city authorities to assess the conditions where conflict could potentially tip into violence. Participatory Violence Appraisal (PVA), used in Kenya and Chile, could have helped to anticipate the 'tipping points' that led to last summer's riots in cities across the UK, say the team based at the University's Global Urban Research Centre (GURC) . The project challenges stereotypes of causes of violence, such as poverty, youth bulges and political exclusion, finding that it often arises through sudden, discontinuous tipping points, sometimes building into 'chains'. Standard data, they argue, usually focus on crime but do not address gender-based violence - which is often invisible - or ethnic, political and economic violence which are often accepted as 'normal'. A common set of factors, they also say, identify when otherwise well run civil mechanisms, which manage day to day conflict, cannot cope and different forms of violence emerge. GURC Director Professor Caroline Moser, who led the study, said: "Urban violence is an increasingly significant but much misunderstood global phenomenon. "But there are no blueprints for when conflict tips into violence; each situation has different underlying causes and our research is about trying to understand them.