On July 27, 1990 a miltant Islamic organization launched an attempted coup d' etat premised upon a hostage situation to remove a democratically elected government from power in Trinidad and Tobago West Indies. This work focuses on the central issue of a Muslim minority in the West and its varied attempts to interact with a non-Muslim society on a daily basis. The work would present the ravages of black on black racism upon the Muslim communities of Trinidad and Tobago resulting in a divided community on the basis of race. Secondly, the work examines the influence of various discourses on the Muslim community of Trinidad and Tobago, especially the return to Islam by the Afro-Trinidadians and the development of a militant Islamic discourse which insisted that liberation for especially Afro-Trinidadians and Tobagonians was only found within the ambit of Islam. Finally, the work examines the impact of the illicit drug trade upon the relations between the then government and the Jamaat al Muslimmeen given the Muslimeen's assault upon the illicit drug trade in Trinidad immediately preceding July 27, 1990.

Security challenges pose significant hardship for citizens of Caribbean nations. Public safety is threatened by high rates of crime – especially violent crime – in much of the region, the plague of the illicit drug trade, transnational organized crime, gangs, the current global proliferation of crimes of terrorism and related violent extremism and radicalization. The situation diminishes morale among the youth, their education and their future, and operates as a major push factor. Yet, surprisingly, there has been a scarcity of scholarly work that addresses these conditions. This interdisciplinary volume succinctly responds to the gap in criminological and security studies on the Caribbean by drawing attention to the understudied nexus of crime, violence, and security that is so pervasive in the region, and the ways in which underdevelopment re/creates environments for insecurity. The book is organized in three parts: Part one encompasses conceptualizations of crime, violence and punishment. Part two takes up country cases on crime and security. Part three addresses issues of regional security, both public and private. This timely volume will be valuable reading for scholars, students, practitioners and policy makers who share a critical interest in the scope, impact, and inter-relationality of crime, violence, and in/security in the region.

This work analyses: (1) the discursive terrain of the Muslim community/Ummah of Trinidad and Tobago from the Jihad of the Jamaat al Muslimeen on July 27th, 1990 to 2015 with emphasis on the evolution of militant Islam in this period. (2) It deconstructs the discourse of the Islamic State constructed to motivate Muslims of the world, especially of the West to migrate/to undertake Hijrah to the Islamic State with emphasis on the discursive concepts of the Islamic Apocalypse, the Malahim, Hijrah and Jihad is War. (3) It deconstructs the specific discourse of the Islamic State constituted for the Muslims of Trinidad and Tobago which reveals the importance of the Trinidad and Tobago contingent to the propaganda machinery of the Islamic State. (4) It deconstructs the discourse of the survivors which reveals the complex motivational structure that drove Muslims of Trinidad and Tobago to journey to the Islamic State. What is revealed is a power relation between the Muslims of Trinidad and Tobago who are a minority group of the population of Trinidad and Tobago, the kufr State of Trinidad and Tobago and the discourse of the Islamic State. The reality that the Trinidad and Tobago contingent to Islamic State was the largest per capita amongst Muslims that undertook Hijrah to the Islamic State speaks volumes to the susceptibility of the Muslim community to the call of the Islamic State. This work deconstructs the underlying reality that ensured the virulence of the discourse of the Islamic State in its impact on Muslims of Trinidad and Tobago.

The Caribbean does not immediately come to mind when we think about ISIS – and yet, in 2017, Trinidad and Tobago ranked first place in the list of western countries with the highest rates of foreign-fighter radicalization, with over 240 nationals travelling to Syria and Iraq to join ISIS' caliphate. Simon Cottee investigates how ISIS came to gain such an unlikely, yet significant foothold in Trinidad. Based on a three-year investigation in the country, featuring interviews the families and friends of those who left to join the jihad, Muslim activists and community leaders, imams, politicians, and intelligence agents, this book presents the social forces and communities in Trinidad that have been affected by ISIS.

Honorable Mention, 2022 MLA Prize for a First Book Far from Mecca: Globalizing the Muslim Caribbean is the first academic work on Muslims in the English-speaking Caribbean. Khan focuses on the fiction, poetry, and music of Islam in Guyana, Trinidad, and Jamaica. Combining archival research, ethnography, and literary analysis, Khan argues for a historical continuity of Afro- and Indo-Muslim presence and cultural production in the Caribbean. Case studies explored range from Arabic-language autobiographical and religious texts written by enslaved Sufi West Africans in nineteenth-century Jamaica, to early twentieth-century fictions of post-indenture South Asian Muslim indigeneity and El Dorado, to the attempted government coup in 1990 by the Jamaat al-Muslimeen in Trinidad, as well as the island’s calypso music, to contemporary judicial cases concerning Caribbean Muslims and global terrorism. Khan argues that the Caribbean Muslim subject, the “fullaman,” a performative identity that relies on gendering and racializing Islam, troubles discourses of creolization that are fundamental to postcolonial nationalisms in the Caribbean.

This book analyses Mexican Transnational Trafficking Organisations (MTTOs) organised crime enterprises in Belize with specific emphasis on human smuggling and the joint organised crime enterprises with politicians and public servants. The driving discourse of the book insists that the failure of the Belizean state to resist the assault of transnational organised crime lies in the failure of its imported and imposed Westminster model of government to form an organic bond with the neo-colonial plantation social order since independence. And that the discourse of corruption is inadequate to the task of unraveling the reality of this Frankenstein monster seeking to pass itself of as a modern North Atlantic state.