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ability to return citizens to the center of revivalist participatory politics, thus disproving claims about citizens’ apathy and malaise—pessimism abounds about its meaning and actual manifestation in different societies. Civil society continues to suffer from its ambiguity and an inherent potential to contribute to its own demise. It retains enormous usefulness as a space in which citizens can associate, engage, and participate to secure common interests and goals, defend collective causes, and build social capital—and in so doing, improve the quality of society. However, civil society often displays a tendency to self-destruct and resemble everything that, properly speaking, a civil society is not. The political and moral irreconcilability of the civil society project is manifested in popular protests and other aspects of citizen politics. Using Jamaica as a case study, this book undertakes an in-depth study of contemporary protests to illustrate not only the challenges to building a civil society but also the requirement for the current scholarship to reconcile its moral and thematic ambivalence. For example, whereas the capacity of citizens to band together to make claims upon the state exemplifies the civil (read as positive) dimensions of civil society in Jamaica, the typically violent strategies and tactics that are deployed by citizen-protestors as they seek justice expose its uncivil (read as negative) aspects. The presence of rogue actors called “dons” in the civil sphere and their construction of outlaw systems of governance at the community level—eclipsing the functions of the Jamaican state and of organized civic groups—also illustrates the uncivil dimension of civil society in this context.
The book not only gives an account of the reality of civil society in Jamaica but also demonstrates that the current literature perpetuates a global misunderstanding and misrepresentation of civil society by variously denying its capacity and tendency to be negative and uncivil. In this sense, this book corrects the inadequate reading of civil society by focusing on activities and actors within Jamaican civil society that skirt or blur the boundaries between legality and extralegality, uphold negative values, and exhibit tendencies that negate the wisdom of political networks engaging in collective citizen action as necessarily being