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Email this citationCIAO DATE: 01/04
The Caribbean Security Scenario at the Dawn of the 21st Century: Continuity, Change, Challenge
Ivelaw L. Griffith
North South Center
University of Miami
Agenda Paper #65
September 2003
This assessment of the Caribbean’s contemporary security landscape finds the region facing both traditional and nontraditional challenges. Border and territorial disputes and geopolitics typify the traditional issues, while drugs, crime, terrorism, and HIV/AIDS are the most salient nontraditional ones.
This Agenda Paper suggests that in the aftermath of the September 11, 2001, terrorist attack on the United States, the geographic proximity of the Caribbean offers a new dimension to U.S. national security sensitivities, as the U.S. homeland is vulnerable to "penetration" from the Caribbean. Thus, it is important to consider the location of the Caribbean in the new U.S. Homeland Security architecture.
Author Ivelaw L. Griffith argues that for reasons related to smallness, capability limitations, vulnerability, and the nature of the security challenges facing the Caribbean, a multidimensional strategy is the only credible one security elites and practitioners there can adopt. He proposes the concept of the Multilateral Security Engagement Zone as an analytic construct to probe regional and international engagement and examines problems of prioritization, institutionalization, and cooperation that arise from pursuits within engagement zones.
