The Dark Side of the Spectacle: Terror in Norway and the UK Riots

In studies of the spectacle of terror in Norway and the UK riots in summer 2011, I highlight the roles of media spectacle and crises of masculinity in these eruptions of social violence, although I suggest multicausal explanation and do not wish to offer reductive analyses. The study breaks with a tendency of US and other Western media that associate terrorism with al-Qaeda and Islamic jihad and argues that there are many branches of domestic terrorism and eruptions of societal violence, two examples of which I explore in this study.