| Chapter 1: | Jamaican Governance and Citizen Politics in Context |
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responsible everyday conduct (Hay, 2003, pp. 166–167). In this process, the state as the provider of an enabling environment for the empowerment of citizens and as the focal point for governance is not diminished, but governmentality accords attention to a whole set of relations of “institutions, procedures, analyses, practices and discourses which may or may not centre upon the state” (Foucault, 1991, p. 93). It recognizes that the conduct of conduct takes place at innumerable sites and hence requires rules of conduct across different spheres of society. Inherently implicated here is the character of both the governor (the state) and the governed (citizens). In this sense, whereas governability incorporates and requires of citizens “an ongoing process of governing oneself, properly applying oneself and acting responsibly” (Hay, 2003, p. 166), it equally demands responsibility and accountability from the state and its political actors.
The conduct of Jamaican citizens and, in this sense, the character and functioning of civil society cannot therefore be appreciated in the abstract or divorced from the practices, discourses, and political rationality of the Jamaican state. This book, then, does not simply argue from a twin-level perspective—the macro level of the state and the micro level of civilian politics and civil society—but, importantly, it considers the interplay between the two levels, akin to what Giddens (1984) called “structuration.” Within the context of Caribbean studies, which have been historically dominated by the analytical and theoretical impositions of structure (state, institutions, economy), the book therefore rescues people politics from the peripheral status to which it is customarily relegated. The book is not about absolving the state of responsibility by using a thematic focus on the negative outgrowths of civilian politics. Rather, it provides a corrective to those people who would assert that civil protest (no matter how uncivil it may be) is the democratic and constitutional right of the citizen, with no consequences for the overall desire for a civil society, and that any notion of civility and civil politics is strictly a function of state obligation. The answer may be located in the state–civil society nexus, rendering the nature of the relationship between citizen-protestors and the Jamaican state also theoretically salient.