| Chapter 1: | Jamaican Governance and Citizen Politics in Context |
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The State Versus Civil Society
The current Jamaican political system is, in the main, widely perceived to be not only tolerant of protests but in many respects highly accommodating and conciliatory towards citizen participation, broadly interpreted (Franklyn, 2002; Munroe, 1999). Depending, however, on which government is in power, the political response may shift to one which is less accommodative and less conciliatory. In this context, the nature of state power and the uses to which it is put within protest politics, as well as the relationship between protests/protestors and politicians, are central to the character of citizen action in Jamaica. For example, state policies and state responses to protest politics (including the roles of members of Parliament and political party activists) have an enormous influence on the strategies that are undertaken, particularly by the poor and marginalized, to demand concessions or seek redress from the state in Jamaica. I will show in subsequent chapters the extent to which the nature of state responses to citizen protests (variously manifested as nonresponses, delayed responses, sham responses, or state repression) holds far-reaching implications for the tenor of citizen politics and the consequent quality of civil society. The acute absence of this analysis in the current theorizing about contemporary citizen actions also robs lower-class groups and those people who align themselves with these sectors of the wisdom that the critical stock-taking of their own struggles may provide. It is worth noting that the changing nature of the state and the emergence of newly powerful citizen-actors such as criminals and dons further complicate the state–civil society nexus in Jamaica. These dynamic changes are being reproduced within street-level citizen activism, and the extent to which these developments affect the tenor of civil society is of central importance in this book.
The Scope of the Book
The book examines the political culture norms that are inherent within Jamaican society and that impact people’s beliefs and attitudes about