HOW CONFLICT ESCALATES - THE INTERGROUP DYNAMICS OF COLLECTIVE FOOTBALL CROWD VIOLENCE

In recent years, the debate on football crowd violence has concentrate d on the violent dispositions of participants - and particularly on th e nature and origins of conflictual norms held by 'hooligan' fans. In this paper, we challenge this tendency. We argue that the 'hooligan' p erspective is limited in its ability to explain how conflict generalis es during crowd events, the precise conditions under which it originat es, and the form that it takes. In order to account for these phenomen a it is necessary to broaden the scope of enquiry so as to include the police as well as fans. Using events involving England fans at the 19 90 world cup (Italia 90), we propose a model in which the nature of gr oup norms and group conflict are a consequence of the developing inter actions between England supporters and the Italian Caribineri. The ass umption, on the part of the police, that all fans were potentially dan gerous and their treatment of fans as such led, over time, to a situat ion where fans who initially eschewed violence, came into conflict wit h the police. The example both illustrates the value of an analysis of collective football violence in terms of developmental inter-group dy namics and suggests how the assumption that fans are inherently danger ous may become a self-fulfilling prophecy.