Challenged Sovereignty

The drug trade. Crime. Terrorism. Cyber threats. In the Caribbean, these cross-border Problems Without Passports (PWPs) have shaken the very foundation of nation states. Blending case studies with regional analysis, Ivelaw Lloyd Griffith examines the regionwide impact of PWPs and the complex security and sovereignty issues in play. The interaction of local and global forces within PWPs undermines the governments’ basic goal of protecting their people against military threats, subversion, and the erosion of political, economic, and social values. Seeking solutions to these multidimensional threats requires addressing both traditional and non-traditional security and sovereignty issues. Griffith focuses on clashes between PWPs and the state from warring drug gangs in Jamaica, to Trinidad and Tobago’s one-time status as a center for terrorism-related activities, to the political resurgence of drug trafficker Desi Bouterse in Suriname, and the growing cyber threats across the region. Informed and up to date, Challenged Sovereignty explains the effects of today’s globalized problems on the contemporary Caribbean.

"This masterpiece of description and critical analysis by renowned security scholar, Ivelaw Griffith exposes the difficulty of governing in our complex interdependent, interconnected, and multicentric world. Griffith’s excellent take on Challenged Sovereignty is a tour de force of the impact of problems without passports (PWPs) that skillfully blends his vast empirical knowledge of the concatenated nature of security phenomena--drugs, crimes, terrorism, and cybersecurity--with an evolving conceptual understanding of how small, subordinate and subaltern states, like those in the Caribbean, are negatively impacted by the existential threats that are the result of glocalization. This book owes its intellectual tradition to Eric Williams’ Capitalism and Slavery (1944) and its conceptual origins to Kofi Annan’s notion of 'problems without passports.' It reminds us that in our increasingly intermestic world, in which the boundary lines that separate the local from the global are so blurred, sovereignty is no longer sacrosanct if ever it was." --W. Andy Knight, coeditor of Remapping the Americas: Trends in Region-making, "Erudite and scholarly as always, and drawing from his extensive expertise on the multiple dimensions of Caribbean security, Ivelaw Griffith puts his sharp analytical mind to delivering a significant intervention in the ongoing debates about Caribbean sovereignty, which have now entered a phase that recognizes, articulates and emphasizes decolonial impulses and aspirations. Considering that security is a foundation of sovereignty, Griffith’s focus on drugs, crime, terrorism, and cyber threats offers an appropriate and comprehensive approach to probing the current state of affairs in a region that already was compromised through various historical handicaps by virtue of its exploitative colonial past. As the author successfully argues, widely prevalent vulnerability conditions and aggravating 'problems without passports' have evolved into a more generalized Challenged sovereignty for states in the Caribbean region–a condition which Norman Girvan had quippingly characterized from an economic perspective as 'In-dependence.' Griffith’s latest book is undoubtedly yet another valuable addition from his pen to the existing literature on these issues." --Holger Henke, coeditor of New Political Culture in the Caribbean

Ivelaw Lloyd Griffith is a Fellow of the Caribbean Policy Consortium and of Global Americans and a Senior Associate of the Center for Strategic and International Studies. His books include Strategy and Security in the Caribbean, The Quest for Security in the Caribbean, Drugs and Security in the Caribbean,The Political Economy of Drugs in the Caribbean, and Caribbean Security in the Age of Terror.