“First world justice requires first world resources”: debt, austerity, and justice in post-2008 Jamaica

Thesis

This thesis examines experiences of austerity across the Jamaican state, justice system, and society during the post-2008 conjuncture. In the wake of the 2008 global financial crisis, Jamaica experienced a multiyear recession that, combined with successive prior fiscal deficits and limited access to credit in the global credit markets, led to a devolving debt situation. In response to the emergent debt crisis, the Jamaican government engaged the IMF for emergency loans and undertook an intensive decade-long austerity programme characterised by public sector rationalisation, significant fiscal consolidation, and revenue enhancement.

Pursued as a corrective response to debt crisis, austerity has profound impacts on all areas of government—including the provision of legal justice. This study deploys the justice system in two ways: first, as an area of state service provision; and second, as a site of encounter in which structural and everyday challenges within the society surface. Through a combination of conjunctural analysis and grounded theory approaches, this thesis analyses contemporary experiences defined by debt, crisis, and austerity. It explores the multiscalar morphology of austerity: as economic policy, a dynamic contested mode of governance involving multiple state and non-state actors, and individual and institutional affective-material experiences in everyday lives and livelihoods.

The study reveals a governance landscape in Jamaica marked by related but distinct forms of crisis—a ‘crisis of debt’ and a ‘crisis of justice’—to which institutions have dialectical proximity and distance, which shapes their response to austerity governance. Given disciplining conditionality of multilateral debt arrangements, central fiscal allocations for public service provision is limited, which in turn leads to piecemeal, projectivised development financing to partially fill the gap. Moreover, neoliberal state retrenchment has produced protracted experiences of constraint in the lives and livelihoods of public officials and citizens alike. In turn, they reflect the neoliberal logics of individualisation as a corollary form of retrenchment, and shift from collective to individual modes of understanding and navigating their experiences of chronic resource constraint.

The thesis argues that austerity is best understood as a multiscalar affective-material phenomenon in which constraint serves as a conceptual joinder for experiences of lack and want across extended temporalities—which are internalised as a de facto reality across pasts, presents, and futures. It proposes systemic indebtedness as the enveloping frame in which multiscalar experiences of constraint are understood across state-citizen relationalities, which propagates a continued search for elusive justice across endured presents and pessimistic futures.

Authors: Munroe, J

• DOI: 10.5287/ora-7qx2g1db2
• Type of award: DPhil
• Level of award: Doctoral
• Awarding institution: University of Oxford
• Language: English