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even while individuals or groups who are powerful or innovative enough may also affect structures and may even lead to the transformation and reconstitution of the very structures that gave them the capacity to act (Giddens, 1979, 1984; McAnulla, 2002; Sewell, 1992).
My analysis of popular protest, citizen politics, and civil society begins with what D. Stone (2002) called a “model of community where individuals live in a web of associations, dependencies and loyalties, and where they envision and fight for a public interest as well as their individual interests” (p. xi). Rather than assume a purely structural frame of reference which forces people to act in predetermined ways, this book accounts for the circumstances and conditions that provide Jamaican citizens with their images, conceptions, and expectations of the state. It also considers the ways in which those images, conceptions, and expectations shape their desires, visions, and actions. Given the historical stratification of Jamaican society based on color, class, race, gender, and status (C. Stone, 1980; cf. Gray, 2004; Hope, 2004), the book also assumes a conscious awareness of how this distribution of power may influence the ways in which different groups define protest, interpret the actions of protestors, and view the quality of civil society more broadly. In the end, it is the reader who will give the book its authority.