Reading the Riot: Understanding Urban Graffiti and Riot Violence

Riots and graffiti, in which groups of people engage in damage and destruction of property, are challenging to research due to their episodic nature, illegality, and often localized rationales, requiring deep contextual knowledge to understand. Multimodal discourse analysis of graffiti produced during riot events provides an unobtrusive method to gain insight into psychological states and political views of rioters, as illustrated in this examination of graffiti produced during a riot in Honiara, Solomon Islands, in November 2021. This study finds graffiti is used to release anger and political grievances simultaneously in layers of meaning expressed in text, placement of text, and references to local and international protest slogans. It is suggested that riots and graffiti are related phenomena in that they are both individual and collective responses to experiences of hegemony. This results in violence directed at property that both reveals and spreads narratives of logic about structural violence. Therefore, further understanding of riot graffiti can also inform peace and conflict theory and related interventions to promote more peaceful cities.