1. Jamaica is among several Third World countries where an inadequate performance by the state leads citizens to band together to stage belligerent protests. Other countries include Thailand, Bolivia, India, Mexico, Nepal, and Nigeria. Although these countries have had different historical, economic, and political developments, the conclusions I draw here are relevant across the Third World. They may even be extended to marginalized groups existing on the periphery of developed societies, such as the youths in London who went on a rampage of protests and looting in August 2011 and the immigrants in France who rioted in French suburbs in November 2005 to draw attention to their deprived status.

2. Although the majority of my interviewees did not seek anonymity, I have elected not to identify most of them by name. Instead, I have assigned each interviewee a participant number, indicated in the book by “P.” Hence, the interviewees are labeled P1, P2, and so on. When there were two speakers, such as in a focus group setting, I use italicized letters (e.g., P18b) to distinguish the two.

3. Chevannes (1995) made reference to what he called the “Barnes bias” during his use of the snowballing sampling technique in his ethnographic study of the social origins of the Rastafari movement in Jamaica. Brother Barnes was Chevannes’s first informant, and he rapidly mobilized his colleagues, thereby extending the network of potential interviewees. However, the problem was that the informants essentially became “Barnes’s network” (p. x). Chevannes wrote that his reliance on Barnes’s network did not invalidate the data, but he cautioned against faulty generalizing. See the introductory chapter of Chevannes (1995).

4. The specific empirical boundaries of this study (the character of street protests and demonstrations as an insight into the quality of citizen politics and civil society in Jamaica) did not allow me to elucidate the enormous and powerful role of reggae/dancehall music as a form of popular protest or to account for its potential as a part of the construction and transformation of civil society in Jamaica. The significance of the study is not limited or diminished by this omission, but this subject is worthy of future scholarly investigations and research.

5. The historical reliance on structural explanations in Caribbean scholarship (and even media-driven political commentary) has been driven by Marxist-oriented political analysis and theory building and the extraordinary