Why Riot? An Expressive Theory of the Justification of Rioting

Political rioting is a durable feature of societies across time, space, and political structure. It is also highly morally contentious. Among those who take rioting to be justifiable, the dominant approach has been to appeal to the ethics of war and its interpersonal counterpart, the framework of defensive ethics, in order to determine which harms rioting may permissibly inflict. I raise several novel problems for this approach and argue that in most cases it is unlikely to succeed. I then propose and develop an alternative analysis, according to which the expressive norms to which rioting as a form of protest is subject may license its characteristic harms directly.