| Chapter 1: | Jamaican Governance and Citizen Politics in Context |
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devices” (Munroe, 1999, p. ix) in contemporary Jamaica but also the manifestation of uncivil politics.
Violence and disruptive behavior as methods of popular resistance have become a norm rather than the exception in the existing landscape of citizen politics in many parts of the world. The manifest cost of violent protests to the Jamaican economy and society are by now well established: massive losses in productivity occasioned by interruptions to commerce and the transportation sector. There are also human consequences, measured in the virtual shutdown of the education system and, at times, loss of life. Perhaps more serious still is the considerable impact upon social stability, civic life, and the rule of law. The latter concerns have, in recent years, catapulted protest politics, the notion of good governance (United Nations Development Programme, 1997), and civil society to the top of the Jamaican public agenda. This development finds a broad contextual basis in a plethora of studies which examine the mutual interactions between the quality of a democratic government and popular citizen participation (B. Barber, 1984; B. R. Barber, 1998; Dalton, 2006; Hann & Dunn, 1996; Inglehart, 1999; Norris, 1999, pp. 257–263; Putnam, 1993, 1995, 2000, 2002; Santos & Nunes, 2004; van Deth, 1997).
Such theoretical contributions suggest that growing cynicism about the performance of government and elected political representatives worldwide is resulting in a manifest decline in voter participation at the polls while provoking or fuelling support for unconventional and elite-challenging forms of political participation and activism such as protest politics. This kind of citizen activism is usually embodied in a variety of social movements, community projects, and collective actions—from petitions, letters, community meetings, local initiatives, and symbolic protests (cf. Escobar & Alvarez, 1992; Foweraker, 1995; Guha, 1997) to more forceful mobilizations and confrontational demonstrations such as street marches and blockades.1 Some scholars acknowledge that this aspect of civil society in practice may also feature potentially dangerous tendencies, involving actions as fanatical as “support for anti-state extremist movements and even occasional cases of urban terrorism” (Norris, 1999, p. 262). Scholars such as Keane (1996) have contended