I strongly suspected that these riots have more in common with British football hooliganism and skinhead attacks than with social justice in any meaningful sense. I personally participated in enough riots, both here and in Poland to know that while they may start as legitimate demonstration they are quickly taken over by violent mobs infatuated with the delusion of raw power and invincibility. Social justice grievances are merely attributed to these mobs afterwards by political commentators.
I am particularly impressed with Oliver Roy's observation that this form of gangsterism is an international phenomenon affecting most modern countries. I can only add that mob violence by gangs of young males is a regular feature of the football (soccer) scene in Europe, from the UK to Turkey, and that gangs of skinheads have been terrorizing Russian and Eastern European cities for some time. It is just less spectacular and more confined in scale and thus getting less media attention, but its nature is not different form what we now see in France.
This growth of young male gangsterism is not linked to any particular "culture" (especially Islam) but results from structural conditions of market society that makes these males redundant in society (they cannot find employment and they are not a part of the conscript army anymore) while giving them considerable free time and resources and yes, anti-social egoistic role models embedded in cultural commodity.
In other words, this is a result of not failures of modern market society - but of it success in increasing productivity, creating unprecedented wealth and free time - but unable to create a humanistic society, unable to provide any guidance and means to channel these material resources, free time and human energy into a constructive use. This is the dialectics of the market society's success producing its own anti-thesis, gangsterism, unveiling before our eyes.
I also think that this mob violence cannot be curbed by the deployment of force, at least not in the long run. Structural reforms that remove its root causes - social redundancy, individualism and too much resources on hand while too little direction in the head - are needed. These root causes are by product of the ideology championing self-regulating markets and unrestrained accumulation of wealth - so the market society must go if this spreading of gangster nihilism is to be reversed.
Wojtek