Commissioned Book Review: Yonique Campbell, Citizenship on the Margins: State Power, Security and Precariousness in 21st-Century Jamaica
| Author | Jermaine Andrew Young |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1177/14789299211031836 |
| Published date | 01 August 2022 |
| Date | 01 August 2022 |
| Subject Matter | Commissioned Book Review |
Political Studies Review
2022, Vol. 20(3) NP11 –NP12
journals.sagepub.com/home/psrev
Commissioned Book Review
1031836PSW0010.1177/14789299211031836Political Studies ReviewCommissioned Book Review
book-review2021
Commissioned Book Review
Citizenship on the Margins: State Power,
Security and Precariousness in 21st-Century
Jamaica by Yonique Campbell. Cham:
Palgrave Macmillan, 2020. 169 pp., £46.00, ISBN
9783030276218 (eBook)
One would generally assume that de jure citi-
zenship is the reality for all Jamaicans since the
island gained its independence from Britain in
1962. Nevertheless, Yonique Campbell in
Citizenship on the Margins explores and dem-
onstrates marked inequalities in Jamaican in
the constructions, contestations and practices
about citizenship and its relationship to state
security practices. This is the main empirical
thrust of her work. Her multi-disciplinary work
– consists of eight concise and illuminating
chapters – straddles human geography, security
studies and political science.
The island’s homicide rate has been a cause
for concern since the 1970s, with it even being
dubbed the ‘the murder capital of the world’
(BBC Caribbean.com, 2006) in 2006. Over the
course of several decades and administrations,
there has been the deployment of tough secu-
rity measures such as suppressive laws and
states of emergencies (SOEs) as policy
responses to contain the island’s high homicide
rate. However, for Campbell, these responses
inherently criminalize the urban poor and have
led to violations of their citizenship rights.
Using three case studies, Campbell high-
lights competing narratives on how the urban
poor envisage themselves vis-à-vis the
Jamaican state’s conception of citizenship. The
urban poor largely exist in what she calls ‘gar-
rison citizenship’, one in which political tribal-
ism and clientelism thrives and serves the
interests of the two main political parties, the
centre-right Jamaica Labour Party (JLP) and
the centre-left People’s National Party (PNP).
Such communities and constituencies are
largely seen as zones of political exclusion, one
where a political strongman, called the ‘don’,
becomes the main interlocutor for the commu-
nity as it relates to party politics and the subse-
quent distribution of spoils.
Campbell’s qualitative interviews of com-
munity members in the garrisons reveal what
she calls ‘informal and localized forms of citi-
zenship’ (p. 71), one that is divorced from the
state’s juridical control. For example, her work
in the community of Tivoli Gardens1 in Western
Kingston reveals a profound distinction between
how constitutional rights are distinct between
‘poor people and society people’ (p. 77). In this
sense, the urban poor do not consider them-
selves as enjoying full de jure citizenship rights.
Similarly, the police as an arm of the state also
does not think the urban poor are deserving of
citizenship rights and oftentimes deploys
authoritarian and intimidatory tactics to gain
compliance. Several of the residents she inter-
viewed expressed fear of the police ‘as they
think ghetto people don’t know or possess any
rights’ (p. 83). However, community members
from another the urban poor community of Turl
Head note that while the state negates their citi-
zenship rights, the informal garrison system
based on the don’s rules is also quite oppressive,
thus trapping them between the proverbial rock
and hard place. Campbell thus notes that citizen-
ship rights are ‘negotiated in marginalized
spaces’ (p. 83), both with formal (state) and
informal (dons) actors.
According to Campbell’s work, a middle-
class conception of citizenship is largely seen
as the essence of being a good Jamaican.
Middle-class interviewees expressed height-
ened fears of crime, especially those affecting
their community of Market Heights. Therefore,
residents took an insular and individualistic
turn while calling for increased stringent state
security measures to address crime. Middle-
class citizenship stands in binary opposition to
the aforementioned urban poor/ghetto/garrison
culture and that informal model of citizenship.
While the police are somewhat more respon-
sive to the former’s needs based on their
acceptable citizenship, Campbell still found
that they thought there was a lacuna in terms of
security being offered by the state. Therefore,
residents have resorted to private security as a
remedy, called ‘neoliberal citizenship’ (p. 88).
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