Running Out of Riots

When cities started erupting into racial violence during the 1960s, dangerously little was known about the phenomenon of urban rioting. Brandeis University founded the Lemberg Center for the Study of Violence in 1966, and it began analyzing the causes of civic disturbances, charting their numbers, and advising community leaders on ways of handling and preventing them. The center stressed the importance of contingency planning for all situations, the usefulness of third-party negotiations and the importance of maintaining the trust of violence-prone groups.

Recently, large-scale civic disruptions have dwindled in number. The Lemberg staff has dwindled as well, from 30 persons at the height of the disturbances to a present five. Later this year the center will quietly close its doors.

"The Lemberg Center is ending because we were concerned with collective violence," said Director John Spiegel last week, "and this marks the end of an era in which that phenomenon was dominant ... There are still many events of severe conflict in neighborhoods, around schools, in prisons. But these phenomena remain localized and are much more susceptible to mediation and what we now call conflict-regulation. We no longer say conflict-resolution, because that is too optimistic."

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