| Chapter 1: | Jamaican Governance and Citizen Politics in Context |
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the current period. It does not examine specific protest incidents per se but instead calls attention to particular examples in an attempt to make sense of the overall reality of violence and incivility within the domain of citizen politics and its impact on the construction of civil society in the context of Jamaica.
Chapter Organization
There are several critical tasks that this book will undertake in order to elucidate the nature of protest politics and its effects on citizen politics and civil society in Jamaica. The first two chapters examine the received portrayal of civil society and attempt to invest it with fresh conceptual meaning and sociopolitical significance. The main objective here is to draw attention to a central but often neglected theoretical theme in contemporary civil society scholarship: the problem of incivility within the civil sphere (chapters 1 and 2). In chapter 3, I examine the beginnings of organized civil society in Jamaica and attempt to trace the factors that led to its variegated nature and perceived disintegration. Another important element of this book is the interplay among state performance, the functioning of citizen politics, and the nature of civil society. Within the context of the inescapable theoretical interactions between state governance and citizen politics, the book explores, in chapter 4, the challenges facing the contemporary state and the extent to which it is able (or unable) to provide good governance by sufficiently fulfilling the expectations and needs of its citizens.
Analyzing the predominant ways in which Jamaican citizens are reacting to the perceived failings of their government and their overall marginalized status is the task of chapter 5. Emphasizing the dominant political economy of the poor’s approaches (Gray, 2004; Piven & Cloward, 1977; J. C. Scott, 1976, 1985, 1990) and highlighting the perspectives of Jamaican citizens, this chapter examines the circumstances which drive the poor to protest and the communion of feelings and attitudes which both justifies and radicalizes their struggles. The chapter also explores how the democratic tool of protest may be used to serve contradictory ends