| Chapter 1: | Jamaican Governance and Citizen Politics in Context |
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It is useful here to also say what the book is not about. The book is not about stigmatizing protest campaigners and participants. In this regard, it does not presume or suggest that forceful social protest is intrinsically uncivil. Neither does it wish to equate civility with the failure of citizens to protest. Instead, the book recognizes the episodic mobilizations of Jamaican citizens, particularly of people on the margins, as an often useful, autonomous, and emancipatory aspect of civil society without romanticizing it or extracting it from its position in relation to the state and its quest to maintain social order and the rule of law. The book, in other words, aims to locate the moral principle in protest politics—to establish the basis for a presumption in favor of civility, civil discourse, civil action, and civil society—and undermine the authority of claims about the futility of civil protest in this context. Similarly, it seeks to foreground the values that can rebut this assumption.
This investigation into popular protest and citizen politics in Jamaica is important because it reveals much about the possibilities and limitations for poor people exercisingpower in this context. It also informs and lends support to a vision of governance and civil society that is more in line with civil society’s normative ideal. On this basis, I wish to introduce some theoretical considerations regarding civil society which have not been fully appreciated in contemporary writings on the subject. I will explore these in much more detail in chapter 2. The goal here is to briefly highlight some conceptual deficits in the current theorizing on civil society and the reason its newer outgrowths must be taken into account. Because the nature and conduct of civil society cannot be divorced from the performance of the state and its representatives, I also make some preliminary observations about the notion of governance and the existing nature of civil society and citizen activism within the specific context of Jamaica.
Civil Society: The Hidden Transcript
Civil society is commonly understood as a vast public realm of voluntary, self-generating, and self-supporting organizations and/or associations which stands outside the control of the state (Cohen & Arato, 1992; Diamond,