| Chapter 1: | Jamaican Governance and Citizen Politics in Context |
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antiglobalization and trade protests of the mid-1990s have received a great deal of attention. Similarly, worldwide notice has been given to the widespread uprisings after the disputed elections in Iran in 2009; the democracy protests in Cairo, Egypt, in 2011 which deposed its leader, Hosni Mubarak; and the spread of agitation for democracy across the Middle East and Africa—Bahrain, Tunisia, Yemen, and Algeria (“Middle East Protests,” 2011). These images of massive popular mobilizations and collective action have essentially led to a romanticization of “people power,” in which civil society has become an unmitigated blessing for democracy and a sort of cure-all for weaknesses in the democratic state and society (Hann & Dunn, 1996; Keane, 1988a; Tempest, 1997).
But civil society is clearly not entirely virtuous. Some contemporary civil society scholars have begun to take note of the fact that civil society’s network of associations is cast so wide, it automatically and unwittingly embraces individuals and factions such as criminals, hate groups, and extremists as well as values, tendencies, and practices that constitute everything civility is not. Munroe (1999), for example, admitted that there are groups in Jamaica which skirt the boundaries between legal and extralegal behavior. Swift (1999) posited that if civil society is a catch-all category encompassing an assortment of groupings and a diversity of social forces and interactions, then unquestionably it also includes “fascists, terrorists, racketeers, [and] criminal elements as well as individuals and groups committed to democracy and the much fancied neighbourhood organizations” (p. 6). It would therefore appear that the image of a noble, vigilant, and organized civil society checking at every turn the predations of a self-serving state is highly romanticized and is of little use to the construction of a viable democracy. It is clear that civil society contains both civil and uncivil actors and legal and extralegal practices, processes, and dimensions. In short, not all constituents of this public space that is rendered civil society are civically engaged for a common good.
As I will illustrate in chapter 2, much of the scholarly literature disregards this reality. Whereas affectations of legality as well as civil attitudes and practices are, at times, powerfully acknowledged as part and parcel of what constitutes civil society (Diamond, 1994; Foley & Edwards,