The Popular Culture of Illegality: Crime and the Politics of Aesthetics in Urban Jamaica

Jaffe, Rivke

doi:10.1353/anq.2012.0010

Cited by 25 publications

(19 citation statements)

References 33 publications

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“…These networks could be very effective in delivering valued public goods, like security. Jaffe (), for example, demonstrates that criminal organizations in parts of Jamaica have become legitimate systems of urban order precisely because they provide protection and conflict resolution where the state does not.…”

Section: State Capacity Beyond the Central Statementioning

confidence: 99%

“…In developing a subnational measure of state capacity, the discussion below concentrates on the municipal level. It therefore seeks to occupy a middle position between the political science literature on the “politics of the periphery” (Gibson ), which has tended to focus on the provincial level, and the anthropological literature, which has generally studied neighborhoods or villages (e.g., Jaffe ). Focusing on the municipal level makes it possible to develop a relatively fine‐grained map but still keep the administrative divisions of the state as units of analysis.…”

Section: A Subnational Measure Of State Capacitymentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Yet, much like the state, they also expect something in return. There is an emerging literature on informal taxes, which are levied by nonstate actors for the provision of services such as security (e.g., Jaffe ; Vandekerckhove ). Citizens that already pay local strongmen are unlikely to pay the state to essentially provide the same service poorly.…”

Section: A Subnational Measure Of State Capacitymentioning

confidence: 99%

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Taxation and the Unequal Reach of the State: Mapping State Capacity in Ecuador

Harbers

2014

Governance

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Even though the unequal reach of the state has become an important concern in the literature on developing democracies in Latin America, empirical measures of intracountry variation in state capacity are scarce. So far, attempts to develop valid measures of the reach of the state have often been hampered by inadequate data. Leveraging insights from national‐level scholarship, this article proposes a tax‐based measure to capture such intracountry variation. Drawing on a comprehensive data set of municipal finance and estimates of economic activity derived from nighttime lights, it maps state capacity in Ecuador. The article validates the measure on the basis of survey data collected by the Latin American Public Opinion Project. A multilevel analysis demonstrates that citizens tend to be more satisfied with the services provided by the state in municipalities with higher state capacity, which strengthens confidence that the measure picks up relevant differences.

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Section: State Capacity Beyond the Central Statementioning

confidence: 99%

Section: A Subnational Measure Of State Capacitymentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: A Subnational Measure Of State Capacitymentioning

confidence: 99%

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Taxation and the Unequal Reach of the State: Mapping State Capacity in Ecuador

Harbers

2014

Governance

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“…While dons are associated directly with Jamaica's high homicide levels, my approach involved a stronger emphasis on the aspects of donmanship in which violence featured less prominently. My work considered, for instance, the aesthetic underpinnings of their authority (Jaffe, 2012a) and highlighted their role in providing social welfare and public order (Jaffe, 2012b(Jaffe, , 2013.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Writing around violence: Representing organized crime in Kingston, Jamaica

Jaffe

2019

Ethnography

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Ethnographies of Latin American and Caribbean gangs tend to emphasize the violent practices of these social groups. My own research in Kingston, Jamaica, on criminal leaders known as 'dons', analyzed their entanglement with the Jamaican state and studied how their relations with inner-city residents resemble citizenship relations. While dons are undoubtedly directly associated with Jamaica's high homicide levels, they also provide social welfare and public order, and my work has focused principally on this relatively non-violent side of donmanship. In this article, I reflect on the factors underlying this particular representational emphasis, which has sometimes led to accusations of my 'romanticizing the dons'. Assessing these various factors, the article considers whether it is ethically justifiable and epistemologically sound to produce ethnographies of violent actors without dwelling in detail on their acts of violence. Given the skew in studies of criminal organizations, and of inner-city life, toward extensive description of and analytical attention to violence, I propose that producing ethnographic narratives that decenter it is in fact justifiable. In addition, studying criminal organizations through less common frameworks can open new avenues of exploration that may be obscured if we continue to satisfy popular and academic expectations of the centrality of violence.

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“…See Jaffe and Sneed for more on how popular‐culture expressions such as street dances both represent and reinforce the power of social sovereigns.…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

The hybrid state: Crime and citizenship in urban Jamaica

Jaffe

2013

American Ethnologist

Self Cite

167

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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.

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The Popular Culture of Illegality: Crime and the Politics of Aesthetics in Urban Jamaica

Cited by 25 publications

References 33 publications

Taxation and the Unequal Reach of the State: Mapping State Capacity in Ecuador

Taxation and the Unequal Reach of the State: Mapping State Capacity in Ecuador

Writing around violence: Representing organized crime in Kingston, Jamaica

The hybrid state: Crime and citizenship in urban Jamaica

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