Boyles A., You Can't Stop the Revolution: Community Disorder and Social Ties
| Author | Miltonette Olivia Craig |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1177/14624745211052780 |
| Published date | 01 April 2023 |
| Date | 01 April 2023 |
| Subject Matter | Book Reviews |
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Stephen Bohigian
California State University Fresno, USA
Boyles, A. (2019). You Can’t Stop the Revolution: Community Disorder and
Social Ties, University of California Press: California, 2019; 216 pp. (includ-
ing index). ISBN 9780520298330, $29.95 (pbk)
Ferguson. Just a mention of the city prompts images of protest and unrest, tragedy and
agony. The police-involved killing of Michael Brown, an unarmed Black teenager, in
Ferguson, Missouri, in 2014 was a watershed m oment for police-community relations in
the United States. You Can’t Stop the Revolution by Andrea Boyles takes us to t he
center of a reignited demand for social justice and civil rights in American policing.
Over the course of three years, Boyles engages in activist scholarship by speaki ng and
organizing together with Ferguson residents. In this ethnographic work, she expertly cap-
tures residents’words and actions as they work to bring about safer neighborhoods,
respect from authorities, and genuine acknowledgment of the importance of their humanity.
The author’soccupat ionof bot hi nsider and outsider status—witness and participant—gives
a very unique perspective for readers, and to hear profound accounts from someone who
spent time at “ground zero”in the immediate aftermath of Brown’s killing is poignant.
At the beginning of the book, Boyles provides context for the work by explaining how
a long history of racism and financial/social deprivation made the post-death unrest a
foreseeable consequence. She describes the ways in which decades of deliberate racial
segregation and discrimination in the St. Louis city area created such a ripe environment
for revolutionary demands. Operating under such a context, with officers as the de jure
enforcers of racial injustice, led to distrust of police in the local Black American commu-
nity, and this distrust reached a fever pitch as residents had to come to terms with the
unnecessary and unjust loss of life. Throughout the book, the author—through inter-
views, focus groups, photos, and participant observations of events such as town hall
meetings—paints a picture of how informal social ties among residents permit order to
return amid a chaotic environment. Boyles does so by reconceptualizing and extending
the (dis)order theoretical framework to account for the social alliances that residents
form with one another as they face external threats (police-citizen conflicts) as well as
internal threats (crime and physical and social disorder brought about by other neighbor-
hood residents) to their wellbeing. The book also chronicles of lives and work of local
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