London riots point to wider risks of youth unrest

Young, lacking opportunity, angry at the system and organising phenomenally fast over social media, London's rioters show some of the same characteristics as the pro-democracy demonstrators of the "Arab Spring."
But while those in the Middle East have marched in the hope of positive change, Britain's violence has been almost nihilist, focussed on looting and a quick burst of the sort of publicity and power inner-city youth feel they have long been denied.
Across the world, the financial crisis may leave a whole generation of young people with opportunities that fall well short of their aspirations, perhaps to the point where they might even abandon hope for the future at all.
The sort of near-spontaneous riot that began in Tottenham on Saturday is far from new. Similar grievances helped kindle unrest in Paris's poor peripheral suburbs in 2005, "service delivery" riots in poor South African townships and other occasional urban protests from China to Latin America.
But two dynamics in particular may be now acting as a powerful accelerant -- the rise of social media that allow rapid organisation putting authorities on the back foot as well as economic shifts that worsen pre-existing hardships.
In North Africa earlier this year, the last straws were rapidly rising food prices and then anger at authority encapsulated by the self-immolation of a Tunisian vegetable seller. As governments tried to crush the protest with force and Internet controls, they merely fanned the flames.
In Britain, pre-existing social problems were compounded by initial austerity measures -- including shutting down "non-essential" public services such as youth clubs -- and then fury at a perceived attempted cover-up of a police shooting.
In the decades of boom, governments tended to respond to unrest by either ramping up spending on security forces or ploughing money into affected areas afterwards.
For many countries, such approaches are now much more challenging as they also struggle to placate markets demanding austerity. In Greece, Spain, Italy and elsewhere, young people in particular have been at the forefront of protest -- although without the scale of violence and destruction seen in London.
One clear lesson of the "Arab Spring," it seems, is that crushing unrest through use of force may simply not work. Even the killing of hundreds or more by Syria's security forces has not been enough to stem the pro-reform uprising there.