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Beyond the Headlines: Joe Sacco‘s The Once and Future Riot and the Fragility of Democracy
Joe Sacco is a name synonymous with immersive, unflinching reportage through the medium of comics. From the harrowing realities of the Balkans in Safe Area gorazde to the everyday struggles in the West Bank documented in Footsteps in the Desert, Sacco doesn’t just tell stories; he places you within them. His latest work, The Once and Future Riot, shifts gears, moving beyond individual narratives to confront a chilling possibility: that large-scale communal violence coudl become a recurring feature of modern democracies. It’s a challenging, unsettling book, and a vital one.
Sacco’s previous work, notably Footsteps in the Desert, frequently enough began with a deeply personal connection – a guide, a family, a shared experience. This allowed him to build a nuanced, human-scale portrait of conflict. As he himself notes, Footsteps in the Desert and his earlier book Palestine were investigations into individual lives, expanding into broader communal portraits, illustrating how injustice impacts people both collectively and individually. Riot, however, feels different.It’s a more focused, almost clinical examination of a specific event: the 2013 Muzaffarnagar riots in Uttar Pradesh, India, and specifically the violence that erupted in the village of Lisarh.
This narrowing of focus is both a strength and a weakness. Sacco meticulously reconstructs the timeline of events in Lisarh, detailing the escalating tensions between the Jat (dominant caste) and Muslim communities, the immediate triggers for the violence, and the subsequent attempts to downplay or justify the atrocities. He expertly catalogs the denials and excuses offered by local officials and activists, exposing a disturbing pattern of impunity. Though, this intense focus comes at a cost.
While providing a granular account of Lisarh, the broader context – the scale of the riots across the region, the variations in violence between rural and urban areas – feels somewhat obscured. The reader is left with questions about the overall impact, the number of villages affected, and the wider patterns of displacement and suffering. sacco acknowledges this inherent uncertainty, a hallmark of his previous work, but occasionally seems to gloss over it, perhaps due to the sheer difficulty of obtaining a complete picture.This isn’t a failing of research, but a reflection of the chaotic and deliberately obscured nature of the events themselves.
The human cost, too, feels somewhat muted. Victims appear and disappear, their individual stories often truncated in the rush to document the unfolding events. Unlike the deeply drawn portraits of omm Nafez and Khamis in Footsteps in the Desert, the individuals in Riot sometimes feel like figures in a sprawling, tragic tableau. They coalesce into a collective of suffering, losing some of their unique identities in the process.
But this apparent loss of individual detail is, arguably, the point. The Once and Future Riot represents a meaningful evolution in Sacco’s work.It’s less concerned with the immediate aftermath of violence and more preoccupied with the systemic factors that enable it. He’s not simply documenting a riot; he’s analyzing the conditions that make such riots possible,and even predictable.
Sacco argues that mass assaults like the one in Muzaffarnagar could become increasingly common in India, fueled by the rise of Hindu nationalism and a political climate that thrives on division. He paints a disturbing picture of a democracy where politics is dominated by the manipulation of fear and prejudice, where truth is malleable, and where the targeting of minority groups is normalized. And the implications extend far beyond India. He draws uncomfortable parallels to conflicts around the globe, driven by demagogues who exploit existing cleavages and weaponize misinformation.
His conclusion is stark: “A democracy that arouses violence,” he warns, “may one day be overwhelmed by it.” This isn’t a sensationalist claim, but a sober assessment based on years of reporting from conflict zones. Sacco has stepped back from the immediate details to offer a chillingly prescient long view, a warning that resonates deeply in our own
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