ABSTRACT
This chapter attempts to describe some of the more important activities and linkages of the Caribbean states in the various dimensions of security. The Caribbean nations have had traditional small-state security concerns, focused on possible, albeit unlikely, threats to Caribbean survival coming from outside the core region. The strategies the Caribbean countries have adopted in order to meet the perceived needs of ideological security in the 1970s and 1980s have depended, of course, on whether the security threat has been seen as emanating from the United States or the Soviet Union. The geographical characteristics of Caribbean countries have opened them to social problems that have an external dimension, among them narcotics trafficking, refugee-immigration problems, smuggling, and piracy. The issue of conflict is traditionally very much a military-security one. The crises that have occurred in the Caribbean have come in the very security areas we have already discussed: territorial, ideological, and socioeconomic areas.
