T&T has the highest per capita rates of foreign fighters in the world, says Prof W Andy Knight.
And he said research has shown that many of them are converts to Islam.
In a commentary last week, Knight questioned why anyone would want to leave the islands which are considered a "tropical paradise" for the "hell-hole" in Iraq and Syria.
He said the 100-plus men and women who've been recruited by Isis?and left T&T were citizens.
"This is a huge number, given the fact that the twin-island state has a population of 1.3 million. To do a comparison, according to a 2014 Public Safety Canada report, 130 individuals with Canadian connections have been radicalised and are now suspected of carrying out terrorism-related activities overseas.
"And Canada's total population is 32 million. It may come as a surprise to many that Trinidad and Tobago has one of the highest per capita rates of foreign fighters in the world."
His article, Why are young men from the Caribbean joining ISIS?, was published online in The Caribbean Camera newspaper.
It is an ethnic newspaper that has been a member of the Queen's Park Press Gallery and is often consulted on Canadian politics.
Knight teaches international relations at the University of Alberta in Canada. He spent the past three years on a secondment from his university to be director of the Institute of International Relations at The University of the West Indies, St Augustine campus.
He said the primary reason Isis propaganda was attracting young people in T&T was that the seeds of extremism were already planted here by people who "cloaked themselves in the robes of a radicalism" that called for righting the wrongs of injustice.
"As long as there are young people in Caribbean countries who feel marginalized and oppressed, we can expect that this tropical paradise will become the breeding grounds for radical and extremist ideas that have little or nothing to do with Islam per se," he added.
Knight, along with John McCoy, conducted a study on the subject of Homegrown Violent Extremism in T&T and found that young people were succumbing to the same recruitment tactics used by Isis in other western countries, including in Canada and the United States.
He said,?"Isis recruiters are utilising the Internet and social media to spread their ideology of hate in every corner of the world, and Trinidad and Tobago is certainly not immune to those efforts at radicalisation.
"Trinidad and Tobago is in fact more susceptible to the radical Islamist overtures than most other Caribbean countries because it already has a well-established Muslim population, in which extremist individuals can blend."
