| Chapter 1: | Jamaican Governance and Citizen Politics in Context |
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with their government and conversely expose the inadequacies in the quality of governance that is on offer to them. The gist of the current challenge confronting civilian politics in Jamaica is that in a context of widespread grievances about social and political conditions, personal standards of living, and perceived government underperformance, “citizens have no sense of being able to exercise effective control over the direction of the state except through vigorous and sometimes violent protest” (P. Baker, 2003, p. 56). This phenomenon symbolizes the dramatic collision between political governance (including political decision making, accountability, and inclusion) and the strategies by which citizens elect to express their discontent. It also illuminates the unmistakable linkages between the character of civil society (as embodied and manifested in popular protest) and the performance of representative democracy.
As one mode of citizen political participation and activism, popular protest is, then, a sort of litmus test of the nature of citizen politics and civil society as well as the quality of political governance. It is this problematic interplay among seemingly failing governance, popular protest, and the construction (or deconstruction) of civil society within the Jamaican setting that is the focus of this book. Through an empirical case study of protest politics, including the sociocultural, political, historical, and economic features that are at work in Jamaican society, this book seeks to understand and explain the nature and tenor of popular protest in this context. It offers critical, relevant, and timely insights into the reasons eruptions of protest occur, why they occur with such frequency, why they take the forms they do, how the state responds, and the impact of that response on the subsequent tenor of citizen action. The fundamental goal is to uncover the extent to which the existing models of protestation that are adopted in Jamaica represent a negation or a retreat of civil politics and civil society. Importantly, it is hoped that this country-specific case will offer a broad understanding of how the existing theoretical and empirical perspectives of civil society may be expanded to make them more relevant and useful to contemporary contexts and the specific conditions (socioeconomic, political, cultural, and historical) of different societies facing similar challenges.