Dons, yardies and posses: representations of Jamaican organised crime

Focusing on representations of Jamaican organised crime, this project aims to connect arts and humanities approaches with social science and policy-oriented perspectives on transnational criminal organisations. The accelerated flows of capital, goods and people facilitated by globalisation have allowed criminal organisations to expand and develop into transnational networks. Rooted in political violence and electoral turf wars, Jamaican gangs played a central role in the growth of the international illegal drug trade in the 1980s. Jamaican organised crime remains a pressing concern of the Jamaican government, and also presents a significant security threat to the US and the UK, which are major consumer markets for cocaine and key locations in the transnational movement of Jamaican gangs.

A deeper understanding of Jamaican organised crime is necessary in order for the problem to be effectively addressed. Existing academic debate in this area has been contained within the social sciences. There has been no sustained focus on the question of representation, despite the fact that Jamaican gangs have since the 1980s acquired global notoriety through the media, film, music and popular fiction, and also increasingly feature in literary fiction and criminal autobiography. There is therefore a need for enquiry into the complex relationship of cultural and media narratives to social science and policy perspectives on Jamaican organised crime in the Caribbean, Europe and North America.

This network will advance research on Jamaican organised crime by exploring the multidirectional relationships between a.) literary, visual, cinematic, popular music and media representations of Jamaican organised crime; b) social science research on Jamaican organised crime; and c.) policies aimed at combating Jamaican organised crime. It will contribute to the AHRC highlight notice's emphasis on innovative areas of cross-council enquiry by bringing together arts, humanities and social science researchers to collaboratively address the following key questions:

- How do literary and visual texts, films, popular music and media reports frame the causes, consequences and control of Jamaican organised crime?

- How do cultural and media representations of Jamaican criminal gangs engage with, popularise, contest and complicate social science and policy perspectives?

- How do social science analyses of Jamaican organised crime and related policies in Jamaica, Europe and North America reflect the influence of these various kinds of representations?

As well as crossing disciplinary boundaries, the network will initiate cross-sector conversations between academics, writers, artists, a filmmaker, creative industry professionals, and public and voluntary sector representatives. In doing so it will generate new perspectives on representations of Jamaican organised crime relevant for academics, policy-makers and practitioners. It will also cross national boundaries through its concern with the global circulation of cultural and media narratives, academic theories and policies, and through its focus on connections between key urban sites in Jamaica, the US and the UK, such as downtown Kingston, Brooklyn, Brixton and Handsworth. An international range of participants is a necessary basis for the network's investigation of the transnational dimensions of Jamaican criminal gangs and their representation.

Networking activities will consist of three two-day workshops in Leicester, Amsterdam and Kingston focusing on the following themes:

'gangsta culture';

gangs and governance;

urban spaces and transnational connections;

Each workshop will incorporate a public-facing event relevant to the workshop theme involving writers, a filmmaker and artists. The network's findings will also be communicated via peer reviewed publications, a project webpage hosted by the University of Leicester, an online exhibition, a blog, and social media platforms.

Beneficiaries outside academia include:

1. Inter-governmental organisations, government agencies and NGOs

Network participants from inter-governmental organisations (the UK Department for International Development / Jamaica and the United States Agency for International Development / Jamaica), government agencies (Jamaica Ministry of National Security's Citizen Security and Justice Programme) and Jamaica-based NGOs (the Peace Management Initiative and Crime Stop Jamaica) will benefit from the opportunity to engage in cross-sector conversations on transnational criminal organisations. Through their attendance of the Jamaica-based workshop and their active participation in a round table session, representatives of these organisations will have the chance both to learn more about academic research on this issue, and to contribute to current scholarly debates by offering their own practice-based perspectives to an academic audience. The network activities and outputs will also be promoted to other relevant organisations at a local and regional level with the help of one of the project partners, the University of the West Indies Institute for Criminal Justice and Security. By developing innovative approaches to transnational organised crime that connect policy and academic perspectives to cultural and media narratives, the network has the potential to inform policy and practice in the field of crime control in Jamaica while also contributing to international debates on organised crime as a global phenomenon. This has UK-based ramifications since in the last decade the UK has significantly increased its allocation of law enforcement resources and personnel to the Caribbean region.

2. Writers, artists, filmmakers and creative industry professionals

The writers, artists and filmmaker participating in this network will benefit in three ways: a.) attending a workshop will enable them to draw on the perspectives of academic researchers in the development of their creative practice; b.) they will have an opportunity to contribute to the interdisciplinary and cross-sector conversations initiated by the network, since their active participation in the public-facing events will shape the critical, theoretical and policy-based discussions at the workshops; c.) their involvement in the network will expose their work to new audiences and raise their profile both locally and internationally. Renaissance One and the Literary Leicester Festival will also benefit from their participation in the network as project partners, since the proposed events will expand their repertoire.

3. The wider public in Europe and the Caribbean

The prominence of the Jamaican gangster figure in globally circulating media and popular texts since the 1980s indicates the potential appeal of the project theme to international audiences. Films, television documentaries and journalism produced in the global North for non-Caribbean audiences have stigmatised Jamaicans in the region and the diaspora. This has damaged Jamaica's public image, with adverse effects on the country's tourism industry and on attitudes to Jamaicans abroad. The main aim of the public-facing events at the UK-based and Netherlands-based workshops is to enable both non-Caribbean and Caribbean diasporic audiences to reflect critically on the problems with mass-media representations and to situate these representations in a wider context, while also introducing them to literary and cinematic texts which contest stereotypical portrayals of Jamaican criminal gangs and associated policies. The public-facing panel discussion at the Jamaica-based workshop focusing on artistic engagements with the 2010 Tivoli Incursion (the violent conflict between the Shower Posse and Jamaica's military and police forces) will offer members of the wider public in Jamaica the opportunity to engage in debates on local and international strategies for controlling transnational organised crime.