Coercive Citizenship and the Postcolonial State: State Violence, Social Class, Psychological Supremacy, and the Poor in Jamaica, 1962-2026

Abstract

Jamaica achieved political independence from Britain on August 6, 1962, establishing a constitutional democratic state whose formal institutions promised citizenship, political participation, liberty, equality before the law, and national self-government. Yet the post-independence period has also contained episodes in which coercive state power has been directed towards populations located disproportionately within economically disadvantaged, territorially marginalised, politically stigmatised, or socially vulnerable communities, including the 1963 Coral Gardens violence, the 1978 Green Bay killings, the 2010 West Kingston operation, recurrent fatal encounters with security forces, and state interventions involving informal settlements and unauthorised land occupation. This study develops the concepts of coercive citizenship and psychological supremacy to investigate whether these apparently heterogeneous episodes reveal a deeper pattern in which formally equal citizens experience the coercive capacities of the Jamaican state unequally according to class, territory, tenure, political history, and social legitimacy. Drawing upon John Stuart Mill's theory of liberty and social tyranny alongside Fanon's colonial analysis, Galtung's structural violence, Foucault's disciplinary power, Bourdieu's symbolic power, and postcolonial scholarship, the study constructs an interdisciplinary framework for distinguishing legitimate governmental authority from domination and excessive coercion. Methodologically, the research employs comparative-historical analysis, structured process tracing, qualitative documentary analysis, theoretical triangulation, negative-case analysis, and international comparison with Brazil, South Africa, India, the United States, and selected Caribbean societies. The study argues provisionally that the central problem is not simply whether the Jamaican state has exercised violence, but whether differential exposure to coercive power has produced unequal experiential forms of citizenship within a formally democratic political order, thereby reproducing selected psychological and institutional features of colonial hierarchy while simultaneously generating distinctly postcolonial forms of domination, resistance, accountability, and reform.