Jermaine A.R. Young

Colonialism has shaped Jamaica. By acknowledging this, readers can understand how emergency powers have impacted there and still continue to do so. The project highlights how emergency powers have been strategically (ab)used over time in colonial and post-colonial Jamaica, paying special attention to the growing intersections between state violence and (il)legal justifications for it. Emergency powers are supposed to be temporary tools for urgent situations, but under colonialism they were used to repress Afro-Jamaicans as "martial law" while in the postcolonial period they have been overwhelmingly used to fight crime and violence under varying terminologies (Suppression of Crime and Zones of Special Operations Acts). Chronologically ordered case studies are used to explore and trace this “normalized exception” path and its punitive function across nearly two centuries of Jamaica’s history. Using primary sources such as extensive archival materials from the Digital Library of the Caribbean (DLOC), key emergency statutes, first-hand narratives, Jamaican governmental and external non-governmental (NGO) reports alongside relevant secondary sources, the use of emergency powers in post-independence Jamaica have problematic histories. The effect is a continuation of a colonial legal architecture that perpetuates states violence and repression towards some, not all, citizens; thus impugning Jamaica's liberal democracy.