Invasion Of Grenada Research Articles

Using Process Tracing to Investigate Elite Experience Accrual: Explaining Margaret Thatcher’s Support for US Air Strikes Against Libya

The United States’ invasion of Grenada in 1983 represented the lowest point in Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan’s relationship, with Thatcher incensed at what she perceived to be her ally’s misuse of military force. However, in April 1986, Thatcher gave permission for the United States to use British-based aircraft for air strikes against the Gaddafi regime in Libya, a mission as tenuously grounded in international law as Grenada. How do we explain Thatcher’s apparent change in approach to foreign policy, now placing strategic interests above her previous deference to international law, and what does this tell us about the role experience plays in a leader’s foreign policy decisions? Drawing on insights from the ongoing behavioural revolution in International Relations, this paper argues that the experience Thatcher gained during the Grenada episode led to her support for US strikes against Libya. A process tracing approach using documents from the UK National Archives, as well as biographies and memoirs, tests this individual-level hypothesis against a rival structuralist explanation. This research shows how experience gained in office can influence a leader’s future foreign policy decision-making and demonstrates the utility of process tracing methods for investigations into the role of experience in international politics.

From peaceful coexistence to the War of all the People: Cuba and the Cold War in Central America and the Caribbean (1975-1983)

ABSTRACT Building on recent scholarly interest in Latin America’s Cold War, this paper breaks new ground in using a broad range of original documents from previously largely overlooked voices – the foreign ministries, parties, and security services agencies of Poland, Hungary, Bulgaria, Germany, the Czech Republic, and Romania – in discussing Cuba’s Cold War involvement in Central America and the Caribbean from the First Congress of the Cuban Communist Party until the U.S. Grenada invasion. The candid reports provided by contemporary East European observers help us attain a more nuanced picture of Havana’s complex policy dilemmas as it sought to negotiate and navigate between its vast ambitions, limited abilities, Soviet bloc restraint, and the ever-present threat of a U.S. invasion. Finally, further in line with the latest advancements in the globalized Cold War historiography, in hearing the voices of Moscow’s junior partners, this article casts the events surrounding the tumultuous period in a broader Transatlantic setting beyond the shadows of the superpowers.

Regaining Control of the National Security Establishment

To justify its enormous cost, the defense sector promotes China as a deadly military threat, noneother being available This is a potentially fatal error. The Biden administration should recognize China’s sphere of influence and strengthen control over the national security establishment. Like all other government agencies, the national security agencies fight relentlessly to defend their programs, prerogatives and budgets. To that end, they use the world’s largest public relations budget, a flotilla of supporting think tanks, associations, institutes and columnists, and an army of defense industry lobbyists. Despite having never clearly won a war since World War II (not counting the farcical invasion of Grenada) and having clearly lost at least two despite a seemingly overwhelming advantage of force (Vietnam, Afghanistan and arguably Iraq), the military nonetheless has been so spectacularly successful in its political mission that we now spend more on the military than do all other countries combined – an incredible eight hundred and sixteen billion dollars per year.

On Scripts and Sensibility: Cold War International Law and Revolutionary Caribbean Subjects

AbstractThrough a literary-theatrical reading of international legality, this Article challenges the “settled script” produced by international legal scholars to frame and assess the legality of two historical events—the Grenada Revolution (1979–1983) and the U.S. Invasion of Grenada (1983). It does so by reading the Cold War as a sensibility performed by these scholars, one that recognized the operation of rival international legal orders and one that crafted a different script—Cold War Customary Law (“CWCL”)—to decide questions of international legality in a Cold War context. In addition to offering a new way to read the Cold War and international legality, this Article argues first that it is important to uncover this parallel and competing script of international legality operating at the time, and not dismiss it as unrelated political or ideological discourse, as it clearly influenced the interpretive logic and reasoning practices international lawyers deployed to frame what constituted legality in international law. Second, it argues that this Cold War sensibility in international legal scholarship on intervention and revolution predated the events in Grenada, and that if a different theatrical mise en scène is adopted—one which eschews “the short durée” or “evental history” of the settled script—this sensibility can be understood as being both continuous and discontinuous with rival imperial forms of international law operating in the Caribbean across time and place, where its discontinuities open up space to recover revolutionary Caribbean subjects of international law and a sensibility of shame in the present.

Audre Lorde’s Anti-Imperial Consciousness

Providing the first extended analysis of Audre Lorde’s critique of the 1983 U.S. invasion of Grenada, this essay argues that Lorde’s critique models a form of anti-imperial consciousness that is still morally and politically instructive. Anti-imperial consciousness entails examining oneself for complicities with empire’s ravages, on the one hand, and solidarities with empire’s subjects, on the other. Lorde aims to generate in her readers (1) a sense of horror at the ways they may be morally implicated in U.S. imperial injustice and (2) a more intense identification with empire’s non-U.S. victims. Lorde’s goal is to free her audience from what she calls the “mistaken mirage of patriotism” and propel them to anti-imperial action. Illuminating Lorde’s economic socialism and anti-imperialist internationalism—two subjects still overshadowed by her more famous work on anger, the erotic, and the master’s tools—the essay contributes to the ongoing elaboration of the Afro-modern tradition of political thought.

Direct democracy and party politics in the Commonwealth Caribbean: an analysis of the 2016 referendum on constitutional reform in Grenada

ABSTRACT In the aftermath of the implosion of the Grenada revolution and the United States invasion of Grenada in October 1983, there was an urgency to construct a new political architecture for the consolidation of democracy. Grenada has, transitioned to electoral democracy. However, constitutional reform is imperative to address glaring democratic deficits. Yet, despite the urgency for constitutional reform, in the Commonwealth Caribbean, there is tension between direct democracy and the winner-takes-all Westminster system. This article analyses the 2016 referendum on constitutional reform in Grenada to provide broader explanations about direct democracy and political life in small states.

The M16 in Vietnam: A History of the Weapon’s Effectiveness in the Vietnam War and the Necessity of its Creation

Based off the AR-15 and necessitated by the need for a superior weapon to that of the enemy, the M16 made its debut in the Vietnam War. The M16 was an icon for protagonists in movies and TV, a symbol for democracy, and it became the image for American or NATO forces for decades to come. It is still in service today as the standard issue weapon for 85 sovereign nations, including the United States. Few doubt the efficacy of the weapon’s later, more advanced models in the Gulf War, the invasion of Grenada, or the war in Afghanistan. The Vietnam War, however, was the debut of the M16. However, the weapon’s effectiveness has faced scrutiny within the context of the Vietnam War. So, the question remains: was the M16 an effective weapon in the Vietnam War, and was it a necessary implementation?

Cost-Benefit Analysis of Discretionary Wars

Policy-makers should perform a cost-benefit analysis before initiating a war. This article describes a methodology for such assessment, and applies it post hoc to five military actions undertaken by the United States between 1950 and 2000 (the Korean War, the Vietnam War, the invasion of Grenada, the invasion of Panama, and the First Gulf War). The analysis identifies three broad categories of value: human capital, economic outcomes, and national influence. Different stakeholders (politicians, generals, industry, etc.) may assign different weights to these three categories, so this analysis tabulates each separately, and then, as may sometimes be necessary, monetizes them for unified comparison.

Diaspora Revisited: Toward a Transnational Feminist Critique

This essay explores how Operation Urgent Fury, the invasion of Grenada in 1983, shapes diasporic subjectivity. Examining Audre Lorde's "Grenada Revisited" (1984) and Monica Sok's "Yearning" (2016), the author argues that these two texts dialogically form a diasporic feminist synthesis that refuses—in the face of overpowering American military might, bellicose melancholy, diasporic loss, and pervasive indifference—to disremember. Ultimately, it is through this subtle manipulation of interpretive poetics, memory work, and recollective labor that Sok and Lorde engender a new way of seeing the legacies of war and the ongoingness of conflict.

Operation Urgent Fury: The Role of American Diplomacy in the U.S. Invasion of Grenada

This article explores the role of American diplomacy during the Grenada crisis in October1983. Although the invasion is usually viewed as a military operation, American diplomatsspearheaded the decision. George Shultz, Secretary of State at the time, argued in his memoirthat the entire Grenada operation was driven by the State Department. Following a coupon the island staged by an extreme Marxist group and subsequent murder of Prime MinsterBishop and some of his government members, a shoot-on-site curfew was declared and thesituation was becoming chaotic; endangering hundreds of American medical students in Grenada.The U.S. request to facilitate the students’ evacuation was not met by the Grenadianauthorities. The Organization of East Caribbean States members, fearing that the Grenadianscenario could affect their countries, formally requested the United States to intervene militarily.In response, President Reagan authorized military intervention. The American diplomatswere assigned a role of civilian control on the island during and after the invasion and facilitatedthe peaceful evacuation of the American students. The U.S. military left the island shortlythereafter, and the Governor General appointed the Provisional Government. In one year theGrenadians held the Parliamentary elections and elected a new government

The secret story of Grenada’s independence

Using declassified British government files at the National Archives, the author shows how the US invasion of Grenada in 1983, which overthrew the radical government of Maurice Bishop and the New Jewel Movement, was not the first time that such an invasion was contemplated in Grenada’s recent history. The UK had had an almost identical plan to land a battalion of troops on Grenada a decade earlier, on the very eve of independence, to ensure the continuation in power of the dictatorial Eric Gairy, should the widespread unrest across the island lead to his ousting.

Los orígenes del control informativo en las coberturas de guerra

La cobertura de los conflictos, desde sus inicios, ha estado muy ligada a la relación que han mantenido los militares y los medios. Desde la libertad de la que gozaban en sus primeros conflictos, aunque no exentos de problemas, pasando por la censura estricta que sufrieron en la Primera Guerra Mundial hasta el encorsetamiento al que se han tenido que enfrentar en las últimas guerras. La guerra de Vietnam marcaría un punto de inflexión en estas relaciones, y tras la invasión de Granada los militares pondrían en marcha un nuevo escenario informativo, el llamado “pool” informativo o agrupación de corresponsales. La falta de una guía clara y la lucha de ambos por controlar su espacio, ha hecho que las relaciones entre medios y militares sean siempre complicadas, por lo que las normas han ido evolucionando a cada conflicto marcando el futuro de las coberturas de prensa y por ende, el periodismo de guerra.

“Times When Greater Disciplines Are Born”: The Zora Neale Hurston Revival and the Neoliberal Transformation of the Caribbean

This essay reframes the recovery and canonization of Zora Neale Hurston’s novel Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937) in the late 1970s and early 1980s in relation to the US economic restructuring and military invasion of the Caribbean in that same period. Focusing on Paule Marshall’s novel Praisesong for the Widow (1983) and Audre Lorde’s biomythography Zami (1982), the essay demonstrates how US black feminist literature used Hurston’s work as a stimulant and script for representing the Caribbean as a free zone of individual autonomy and desire outside of hegemonic and cultural nationalist gender and sexual binds. By juxtaposing the spatiotemporalities and affects of these fantasies alongside those of Ronald Reagan’s speeches and CIA literature produced in the wake of the Grenada invasion, the essay shows how these Hurstonian fantasies of the Caribbean worked to both mask and enable the US government’s destruction of Caribbean revolutionary and anticolonial societies in the name of the freedoms and intimacy neoliberal capitalism purported to offer.

Journalism and the Invasion of Grenada 30 Years On: A Retrospective

The 1983 United States-led invasion of Grenada represents an important case study of journalism in the front line because it marked a changing point in the relationship between journalists and the US administration. The exclusion of news organisations and independent journalists at the time can be conceived of as a test in trying new forms of information management. The tensions experienced between journalists, government and military officers signalled the need to design alternative solutions to the problem of information coverage in wartime.

Global radicals : Caribbean radical thought 1920-1983

This chapter explores the development of radical thought in the Caribbean, from the 1920’s until the American invasion of Grenada in 1983. The thrust of the argument is that radical thinkers had a global outlook, and not a nationalistic parochial one. They were aware of world debates and included within the international movements of their time. George Padmore is a case in point. An agent of the Communist International in the USSR and Germany, he fell foul with communism and became a Pan Africanist. CLR James, who spent most of his life in Britain and the US, was an eclectic mind, and a non-sectarian militant within international trotskysm. He was and still is a cherished figure in Trinidad, and all over the region. The Oil Workers Trade Union of Trinidad has spawned a radical, multiracial social and political culture which to some extent still informs the life of Trinidad. In Grenada, Maurice Bishop and Bernard Coard, also trained in the UK, combined radical concerns for social development and equality with rash pro soviet statements in the United Nations. In spite of soviet caution, they openly provoked the US by associating with Cuba. The revolution became increasingly sectarian, and soon after Bishop’s murder, the US invaded the island and put an end to the experiment. Radical thinking in the Caribbean cannot be understood outside the global framework.

The Grenada Invasion, International Law and the Scoon Invitation: A 30-year Retrospective

All the international legal rationales for the US-OECS (Organisation of Eastern Caribbean States) invasion of Grenada in October 1983 arguably depend, at least in part, on the nature, substance and circumstances of the request for external assistance that was made by Grenadian Governor-General Sir Paul Scoon. Of all the factual circumstances surrounding the Grenada episode, perhaps the least well known in the 1980s were those related to the so-called ‘Scoon invitation’. Thirty years later, this article identifies the politically and legally consequential details of the Scoon invitation to which we are now privy, drawing upon the memoir accounts of key participants, scholarly interviews with key Grenada decision-makers, and declassified US government documents. Situating the Grenada case within post-1983 state practice on ‘interventions by invitation’, it concludes that Sir Paul did not initiate his informal, oral invitation or author his formal, written one, and that even though he genuinely supported ‘Operation Urgent Fury’, the Governor-General’s invitation did not legally justify the operation.

What does and should influence the number of lawyers?

Before we can ask whether there are too many lawyers we must answer several preliminary questions: whom do we consider lawyers, and what does and should influence their number? The term ‘lawyer’, w...

The American invasion of Grenada: a note on false prophecy

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to evaluate the reasons, especially the assertions about the future, given by the US administration under President Reagan, to justify the decision to attack and invade the Caribbean island of Grenada.Design/methodology/approachThe methodology is analysis of existing records and reports on the assertions, events, and decisions leading to the invasion.FindingsThe Reagan administration gave three main reasons for the invasion. They claimed that Americans on Grenada, particularly the students attending the St George's University Medical School, would be harmed from continuing social disruption on Grenada; that the militarization of Grenada was intended as a means for the future export of terrorism or revolution to its Caribbean neighbors; and that the planned international airport at Point Salines was intended to be a future Soviet‐Cuban military base. Each was false.Research limitations/implicationsDecision making includes assumptions about the future and invites the use of foresight. Such foresight, of course, can be presumptively true and, thus, useful. But also it can be wrong, sometimes deliberately manipulated, leading to wrongheaded actions and devastating consequences.Practical implicationsAn analysis of the 1983 American invasion of Grenada illustrates the power of authority to distort the truth and corrupt morality, processes that re‐occurred 20 years later with much greater consequences in the case of the 2003 American‐led invasion of Iraq.Originality/valueThe case study of the American invasion of Grenada can be used by decision makers and others to improve future decision‐making situations. Before doing violence to other people, we need to ask what violence we are doing to truth.

Communications

To the Editors: Stephen G. Rabe recently reviewed my book Gunboat Democracy: U.S. Interventions in the Dominican Republic, Grenada, and Panama (AHR, June 2007, 823–824). Rabe is known for the well-researched books on U.S. foreign relations with Latin America that he has penned over the past twenty-five years. Rabe advocates the conventional scholarly interpretation of the motives behind U.S. interventions in Latin America during the Cold War. He may include himself as one of those historians who have “concluded that the U.S. interventions degraded the political, military, and socioeconomic structures of these Western Hemisphere societies and that, especially in the Cold War period, the interventions undermined constitutional procedures and democratic processes.” Unfortunately, the conventional interpretation fails to fully answer the question posed to me by one of my Davidson students several years ago, “If the U.S. invasion of Grenada was so bad, why is Grenada now one of the world's most stable democracies?” My inability to adequately answer the student sparked my research, and I eventually focused on the only three episodes of large-scale armed U.S. intervention in Latin America during the Cold War.

The Big Drum Ritual of Carriacou: Praisesongs in Rememory of Flight

The Big Drum is the lively ancient dance rite of the small island of Carriacou, Grenada. This book introduces 129 of the ceremonial song texts and dances that call and entertain the ancestors who are central to Carriacou religious experience. McDaniel, who lived in Carriacou at the time of the 1983 invasion of Grenada, frequently observed Big Drum dances and interviewed many old heads (wise people) for this book. She concludes it with an analysis of a single calypso that memorializes the invasion and illustrates the history-keeping function of the calypso and Big Drum. She uncovers a structural relationship between ancient praisesongs and modern political songs and suggests the continuing impact of music on the memory of Caribbean people.