On November 15, 2005, the French National Assembly voted to extend by three months a "state of emergency" declared eight days earlier in response to two weeks of clashes between police and youths in decaying suburban housing
projects across the country. The clashes broke out following the October 27electrocution of two teens, both housing project residents, who were fleeing what they believed was police pursuit. Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy went on national television to promise "zero tolerance" for what he called the "scum" torching cars and attacking state property in protest.

The immediate causes of the ongoing confrontations are the two teens' deaths and Sarkozy's inflammatory rhetoric. But as Paul Silverstein and Chantal Tetreault argue in their essay, "Urban Violence in France," the deeper cause
is a concatenation of state policies developed over decades that has endeavored (and failed) to "integrate" the children of immigrants and poor whites into the system, while simultaneously stigmatizing those youths as a
threat to public security. These policies point to an "enduring logic of colonial rule within post-colonial metropolitan France."

Silverstein and Tetreault's essay is now available in Middle East Report
Online:
 http://www.merip.org/mero/interventions/silverstein_tetreault_interv.htm