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The hybrid state: crime and citizenship in urban Jamaica
Jaffe, R.
DOI
10.1111/amet.12051
Publication date
2013
Document Version
Final published version
Published in
American Ethnologist
Link to publication
Citation for published version (APA):
Jaffe, R. (2013). The hybrid state: crime and citizenship in urban Jamaica.
American
Ethnologist
,
40
(4), 734-748. https://doi.org/10.1111/amet.12051
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RIVKE JAFFE
University of Amsterdam
The hybrid state:
Crime and citizenship in urban Jamaica
ABSTRACT
In inner-city neighborhoods in Kingston, Jamaica,
criminal “dons” have taken on a range of
governmental functions. While such criminal actors
have sometimes been imagined as heading “parallel
states,” I argue that they are part of a hybrid state,
an emergent political formation in which multiple
governmental actors—in this case, criminal
organizations, politicians, police, and
bureaucrats—are entangled in a relationship of
collusion and divestment, sharing control over urban
spaces and populations. Extending recent
scholarship on variegated sovereignty and neoliberal
shifts in governance, I consider the implications of
this diversification of governmental actors for the
ways that citizenship is experienced and enacted.
The hybrid state both produces and relies on distinct
political subjectivities. It is accompanied by a
reconfigured, hybrid citizenship, in which multiple
practices and narratives related to rule and
belonging, to rights and responsibilities, are
negotiated by a range of actors. [citizenship,
governance, crime, dons, neoliberalism, Jamaica,
anthropology of the state]
O
n May 24, 2010, Jamaican security forces invaded Tivoli
Gardens, the West Kingston neighborhood ruled by the is-
land’s most notorious “don,”
1
Christopher Coke, better known as
“Dudus” or “the President.” Since August 2009, the United States
had been pushing unsuccessfully for his extradition on drug and
arms-trafficking charges. For over nine months, the Jamaican prime min-
ister, Bruce Golding, and his government had been stalling and attempting
to influence the U.S. position on the matter. Following increasingly harsh
criticism from the political opposition, civil society organizations, and the
media as well as diplomatic pressure from the United States, in mid-May
2010 Golding was finally persuaded to change his position. After the ini-
tiation of the extradition process and the warrant for Dudus’s arrest were
announced, armed men inside Tivoli Gardens began to erect barricades
from old cars and fridges, wooden pallets, and debris, effectively block-
ing the entrances to the neighborhood. On Thursday, May 20, some four
hundred residents of Tivoli Gardens and adjacent Denham Town, dressed
in white, walked out in a peaceful and apparently highly organized protest
march opposing the move to extradite Dudus. The following Sunday, the
gunmen launched preemptive strikes, attacking four police stations in West
Kingston and killing two police offers in an ambush in East Kingston. On
the same day, the prime minister declared a state of emergency for sec-
tions of the capital city, and on Monday, May 24, police and military forces
mounted a counteroffensive, forcing their way into Tivoli. One soldier died,
and at least 73 civilians were killed by the security forces. Dudus, however,
managed to escape. He was finally captured after remaining elusive for a
month, probably on the basis of intelligence. He was extradited soon after,
and in June 2012, following a guilty plea, he was sentenced to 23 years in
U.S. federal prison.
In this article, I seek to extend our understanding of citizenship, gover-
nance, and the state under neoliberalism by focusing on the complicated
relationship between the Jamaican state, dons, and the urban poor. These
various actors have been joined in a system known as “garrison politics,” a
type of electoral turf politics achieved through communal clientelism. On
the basis of their role as brokers between politicians and inner-city resi-
dents, dons came to preside over politically homogenous enclaves, or “gar-
risons.” In these marginalized urban areas, they have increasingly taken on
functions and symbols associated with the state. The system of urban order
AMERICAN ETHNOLOGIST, Vol. 40, No. 4, pp. 734–748, ISSN 0094-0496, online
ISSN 1548-1425.
C
2013 by the American Anthropological Association. All rights reserved.
DOI: 10.1111/amet.12051
The hybrid state
American Ethnologist
provided by dons such as Dudus is popular among socially
and economically marginalized Jamaicans, to the extent
that they are willing to march out in protest, and even to
engage in armed confrontations with the state, to defend it.
How can we understand the authority and legitimacy of Ja-
maica’s dons, and what insights can this case offer into the
ways the state and citizenship are being reconfigured?
In exploring these questions ethnographically, I ar-
gue for an analysis of donmanship through the concept
of a “hybrid state.” The hybrid state is an emergent form
of statehood in which different governmental actors—in
this case, criminal organizations, politicians, police, and
bureaucrats—are entangled in a relationship of collusion
and divestment as they share control over urban spaces and
populations. Extending recent scholarship on variegated
sovereignty and neoliberal shifts in governance, I consider
the implications that the diversification of governmental
actors has had for the ways that citizenship is experienced
and enacted. I show how the hybrid state exists in a mutu-
ally reproductive relationship with a hybrid form of citizen-
ship, in which multiple practices and narratives related to
rule and belonging, to rights and responsibilities, are nego-
tiated from the ground up.
Basing my discussion on fieldwork I conducted in
Kingston from 2008 to 2012, I give an illustration of a hy-
brid state and a hybrid citizenship. I carried out research in
several neighborhoods in Downtown Kingston but worked
most closely in a West Kingston neighborhood I call “Brick
Town.” Until recently, this neighborhood fell under the
leadership of a prominent don I refer to as “the General.”
This don was associated with a gang I call “the West Side
Posse,” which dated back to the 1940s and had strong con-
nections with one of Jamaica’s two main political parties.
In addition to this neighborhood-based research, I held nu-
merous interviews with politicians, policy makers, bureau-
crats, NGO workers, businessmen, police, and a number
of smaller dons.
2
Drawing on this fieldwork, I show how
governmental actors from bureaucrats to the police loosen
their grip on parts of the national territory and citizenry
as they enter into partnerships with dons, and how inner-
city residents negotiate rights, responsibilities, and partici-
pation within the resulting political order.
Hybrid states
I use “hybrid state” to refer to the entanglement of mul-
tiple governmental actors. In the case of Jamaica, this hy-
brid state mainly involves two systems of governance—
donmanship and the “formal” bureaucratic state—that are
often seen as separate or even mutually exclusive. The hy-
brid state is an emergent formation that develops from the
interaction between these two systems of governance and
the actors associated with them (dons, politicians, bureau-
crats, police): It is a new system of governance, even as
its constituent parts remain recognizable. While a heuris-
tic distinction can be made between formal and nonformal
governmental actors, between state sovereignty and social
sovereignty, the hybrid state is that system of governance
that emerges from the entanglement of these forms of polit-
ical authority.
3
It cuts across public–private boundaries and
combines elements of redistributive, market, and predatory
logics.
Much recent attention has gone into how processes
of neoliberalization have led to a diversification of govern-
mental actors and to the shifts in the logic of governing that
occur as nonstate actors take on state responsibilities.
Specifically, various authors have examined the ways in
which state sovereignty is being restructured in relation to
private actors such as corporations and NGOs. Focusing on
Africa, for instance, James Ferguson notes the emergence
of “a form of government that cannot be located within a
national grid, but is instead spread across a patchwork of
transnationally networked, noncontiguous bits” (2006:40).
He identifies a sorting of territory into two types of spaces
with distinct forms of governance, contrasting the econom-
ically valued, mineral-rich enclaves, which are governed
and secured by oil or mining companies, with the “residual”
space of the continent, where humanitarian NGOs have in-
creasingly taken on the role of the state to provide govern-
mental services.
Ferguson’s account depicts a weakening of state capac-
ity in the face of neoliberal globalization processes. In con-
trast, Aihwa Ong (2006) shows how state policies in Asia ac-
tively encourage spaces of political and economic exception
as a technology of rule. She shows how the Chinese state has
employed zoning technologies—rezoning the national ter-
ritory through a system of enclaves both within and beyond
mainland China—to pursue economic reform and political
integration. These zoning technologies enable a controlled
form of capitalist transformation that extends rather than
erodes the power of the state, generating patterns of “varie-
gated” or “graduated” sovereignty.
These authors emphasize the extent to which the con-
cept of a homogeneous national state, which penetrates a
sovereign territory and incorporates its people uniformly, is
a fiction. Whereas this fiction was actively pursued under
the state developmentalism that characterized many post-
colonial nations in the mid-20th century, it has taken a less
prominent place in the context of neoliberal policies that
promote the diversification of governmental actors. Analy-
ses of the resulting variegated sovereignty have tended to
take on the perspective of states and corporations to ex-
plain specific governmental strategies and their spatial con-
sequences. However, they offer a more limited view of the
workings and implications of such hybrids on the ground
and of the active role that less powerful groups may play
in imagining, representing, and enacting their relationships
with these governance structures.
4
735
American Ethnologist
Volume 40 Number 4 November 2013
Work done within the growing field of the anthropol-
ogy of the state has explored the possibilities of studying
ethnographically how “the state” is produced and contested
through everyday practices and discursive constructions.
Following Philip Abrams’s (1988) distinction between the
“state-system” and the “state-idea,” authors such as Akhil
Gupta (1995) and Timothy Mitchell (1999) have proposed
a two-pronged approach. Anthropological studies of the
state, they contend, should focus on the mundane tech-
niques of government and everyday practices of local bu-
reaucracies as well as on the more abstract, translocal rep-
resentational effects through which these practices become
associated with an autonomous, impartial state. Along sim-
ilar lines, Thomas Blom Hansen and Finn Stepputat (2001)
focus on what they term “languages of stateness,” distin-
guishing practical languages of governance (such as the
monopolization of violence within a given territory, the pro-
duction of knowledge on the population of that territory, or
the development and management of the economy) from
the symbolic languages of authority (such as the institution-
alization of law or the materialization of the state through
permanent symbols, including buildings and uniforms).
More recently, a number of anthropologists have be-
gun to focus their attention on what happens when new
sets of actors assume these governmental practices, these
practical languages of governance. Veena Das and Deborah
Poole, for instance, call attention to the margins of the state:
“sites of practice on which law and other state practices
are colonized by other forms of regulation that emanate
from the pressing needs of populations to secure politi-
cal and economic survival” (2004:8). Michel-Rolph Trouillot
also points to the “d
´
eplacement of state functions . .. away
from national sites to infra-, supra-, or transnational ones”
(2001:132). Consequently, our ethnographies should be at-
tentive to capturing “state effects” in a range of sites. This
involves studying how statelike institutions and practices
produce what Trouillot calls “isolation,” “identification,”
“legibility,” and “spatialization” effects—creating publics,
interpellating subjects, classifying and regulating collectiv-
ities, and producing jurisdictions with territorial bound-
aries. Similarly, David Nugent argues that, as “governmental
forces are becoming increasingly disentangled from state
structures” (2004:214), our challenge lies in focusing on the
wide range of forces that rely on governmental techniques
to order and discipline national populations. Drawing on
his own work on mid-20th-century Peru, he demonstrates
how the governing capacities of APRA, a political party that
was outlawed and went underground, were greater than
those of the military government itself. Having developed
a secret organizational structure that was highly specialized
and differentiated, APRA displayed greater efficacy in iden-
tifying objects of regulation, monitoring their behavior, and
using this knowledge to control them, achieving what Nu-
gent terms “subaltern governmentality.”
The case of donmanship in inner-city Jamaica, I sug-
gest, enables an analysis of a language of stateness—a
system of governance and authority—that is neither hege-
monic nor subaltern but a hybrid mix of both. I am espe-
cially interested in the ways that inner-city residents relate
to this hybrid state, how they narrate and perform relation-
ships of mutual obligation. I argue that such a hybrid state
both produces and relies on distinct political subjectivities:
It is accompanied by a reconfigured citizenship, in which
a range of actors—including both politicians and dons—
are central to structures of rule and belonging. In their in-
teractions with these various governmental agents and in
their imaginations and representations of these governance
structures, the urban poor can, to some extent, negotiate re-
lations of citizenship. These new forms of statehood and cit-
izenship are mutually reproducing phenomena: The hybrid
structures and techniques of governance both shape and
are reinforced by populations that understand themselves
as members of overlapping political communities.
Below, I give a brief historical overview of how Jamaican
dons, state actors, and the residents of inner-city commu-
nities became joined in the system known as “garrison pol-
itics.” I trace the transformation of this system toward what
can be understood as a hybrid state, interpreting the sys-
tematic linkages between dons and “formal” governmental
actors as an illicit form of public–private partnership that
emerged in the context of neoliberalization. I suggest that
Jamaica’s garrisons can be understood as enclaves that are
subject to the outsourcing of state functions and central to
a form of sovereignty that is noncontiguous. I go on to ex-
plore how this entanglement of citizens, state, and crimi-
nal leaders has been reshaping citizenship, focusing on new
sources of citizenship rights and responsibilities, and taking
into consideration the active role that persons play in nego-
tiating, alternating, and combining their relationships with
different power structures.
From brokers to partners-in-governance
The spaces over which dons preside are urban Jamaica’s
socially and economically marginalized neighborhoods.
The dons’ status as gatekeepers and power brokers devel-
oped in the context of Kingston’s sociospatial divisions,
where access to urban space is organized according to
socioeconomic, ethnoracial, and party political belonging.
The social distance that separates the so-called ghettos
and garrisons of Downtown Kingston and the spacious,
well-guarded “residential” areas of Uptown is connected to
a history of racialized exclusion. The recent emergence of
a darker-skinned middle class notwithstanding, the legacy
of colonialism and slavery is still evident in a correlation
between class, skin color, and urban space. Downtown
residents are disproportionately poorer black Jamaicans,
while lighter-skinned brown Jamaicans of mixed or
736
The hybrid state
American Ethnologist
ethnic-minority descent are overrepresented in elite and
middle-class Uptown circles. Historically, postemancipa-
tion Jamaica has been characterized by “differentiated citi-
zenship” (Holston 2008), a thoroughly inegalitarian citizen-
ship regime that distinguishes between different categories
of citizens on the basis of descent (primarily class and
color; cf. Austin-Broos 1994) and distributes rights and
privileges along these lines of differentiation.
Kingston’s urban rupture along lines of class and color
is cut through by violent political fissures, often referred
to as “political tribalism.” In Downtown Kingston, the two
main political parties—the Jamaica Labour Party (JLP) and
the People’s National Party (PNP)—had, and to some extent
still have, clientelist relationships with their constituencies
through “garrison politics.” In the 1960s and 1970s, both
the PNP and the JLP created party-loyal “garrisons” by con-
centrating supporters in new housing developments and
distributing money, jobs, and weapons through the com-
munity strongmen (or “dons,” as they came to be called) to
protect and strengthen their political strongholds.
5
This garrison system began to change in the 1980s.
An economic recession, a growing debt burden, and IMF-
induced neoliberal structural adjustment programs (SAPs)
stressing cutbacks in government expenditure and in
public-sector employment reduced the politicians’ power
to distribute material resources to their constituencies.
6
The local political henchmen, the dons, were able to lo-
cate new viable sources of revenue, both transnationally in
the narcotics trade, and locally in extortion rackets, con-
struction business, and the entertainment industry. This
has meant a shift in the relationship between politicians
and dons. With the expansion and solidification of dons’
national and transnational networks and their increased
financial independence, their negotiating power vis-
`
a-vis
politicians grew. Whereas the dons initially served as clien-
telist brokers, trading community votes for political pork,
with the advent of structural adjustment they came to re-
place members of parliament (MPs) as community patrons
who distributed largesse (Sives 2002, 2010). As programs
of deregulation and privatization diminished state abil-
ity to provide services such as health care and social and
physical security, the opportunity emerged for dons to ex-
pand their role even further, to go from being patrons to
corulers.
7
State and criminal actors remain intertwined and in-
terdependent, although this relation is dynamic and varies
in intensity across the city. While certain state actors com-
bat the power of the dons, others continue to rely on them
and obstruct their criminal investigation and prosecution.
In addition, dons’ role and impact vary significantly across
inner-city communities, depending on, among other fac-
tors, their economic base, the nature of their organizations,
their attitude toward politics, and their political, social,
and business connections (Figueroa et al. 2008).
8
On the
whole, dons continue to function as important inner-city
gatekeepers for politicians, government agencies, and bu-
reaucrats. The garrison-politics system of clientelism that
has been described by various authors is still operative:
Dons provide political parties with access to electoral blocs
in exchange for lucrative government contracts. Yet, as I
demonstrate below, the more successful dons have gone be-
yond being brokers and local patrons to being partners-in-
governance. They draw on their own funds and their access
to the means of violence, and the residents of their com-
munities rely on them for the provision of “public” services
such as welfare, employment, and security.
These recent developments necessitate an understand-
ing of the entanglement of criminal organizations and state
actors that goes beyond clientelism. As David Scott notes,
“The old clientelistic dependencies and obligations are un-
raveling; they no longer produce the same governing-effects
of rule” (2003:21). The relationship between dons, bureau-
crats, and politicians can be understood as central to a hy-
brid form of statehood, in which a range of state duties
have been de facto outsourced to dons. This form of state-
hood, characterized by the prominence of multiple govern-
mental actors, is most evident in the deprived spaces and
impoverished but unruly populations of urban Jamaica’s
garrisons. From welfare provision to infrastructural project
management to policing, dons take on state responsibili-
ties in the inner city effectively and efficiently. In return,
they demand a steady flow of state funds and a measure
of political protection. Often faced with a limited range
of choices, state actors divest the responsibility of manag-
ing certain populations and spaces, subcontracting these
tasks in a nontransparent and unstable process of quasi
privatization.
9
While the authority wielded by dons is often inter-
preted as a failure of the Jamaican state, if their rule were
not accompanied by so much violence, their “success” at
governance might be considered a measure of the state’s
success in adapting to the exigencies of neoliberalism.
10
These transformations of institutionalized power can be
understood to a certain extent within the context of neolib-
eral shifts in governance. The incorporation of donmanship
as an essential part of a hybrid state began in the 1980s,
through the coincidence of a less resourced, less develop-
mental state (following the debt crisis and roll-back neolib-
eral policies of structural adjustment) with more-resourced,
more-independent dons (through transnational narcotics
trade as well as increasingly professional local endeavors
in extortion, construction, and the entertainment indus-
try). From the 1990s on, bureaucratic–criminal links be-
came elaborated as partnerships that were framed or jus-
tified by state actors in the neoliberal terms of cost effi-
ciency, decentralization, and community participation that
are propagated by international financial institutions, bilat-
eral donors, and NGOs.
11
737