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on protest participants and are thus much more than mere observers. Indeed, although much of the literature on popular protest and social movements tends to focus almost exclusively on the actual participants, I have broadened the focus to incorporate the views, perspectives, beliefs, values, and motivations of the peripheral groups I have just described, whom I describe as protest nonparticipants or observers on the grounds that protest in the Jamaican context plays out as a continuous interaction between participant and observer groups. The Jamaican media, for example, by virtue of their coverage (treatment) of popular protests, are implicated in the construction and performance of protests and the production of meanings and perspectives about political rebellion in Jamaica. The mutual impacts of these various groups on each other is thus not to be overlooked, because they each have a stake in the construction and existence of a truly civil society outfitted with civil citizens conducting civil politics.
One of the challenges of studying this issue was my recognition of a prostructural5 theoretical tendency within the Jamaican scholarship on citizen politics. By prostructural, I mean an overemphasis on structural factors such as modes of production which define social formations and direct the range of actions that are available to social actors. Thus, the state and the market—which structures the nature of the economy, determines employment opportunities, and affects the levels of poverty and marginalization—have come to assume precedence in contemporary analyses of and commentary on citizen action in Jamaica (see C. Charles, 2002; Meeks, 2000; Munroe, 1999; Price, 2004). As a context, the decade of the 1990s (and beyond), which was largely marked by worldwide antiglobalization and antitrade protests, also saw a privileging in political science scholarship of the processes and structures that drive people to protest and a de-emphasis on the nature of the activity itself and its impact on the construction of real civil societies.
The fundamental problem with contemplating and rationalizing popular protests through a purely structural lens is that structuralist arguments tend to assume a far too rigid causal determinism in social life.