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Dayon et al: Career Foreign Fighters

Tags: papers, militias,bosnia, talks

Talk

  • Career FF’s have an outside impact on the conflicts they go to
  • Typically bring in transnational links
  • Conflicts that lack a credible threat of genocide typically have harder time drumming up FF’s
  • Career FF’s are greater security threat than non-career ones
  • Limited window of opportunity for inhibiting FF’s
    • Some conflicts produce more
      • This effect is hard to disentagle from the time since the war, however
  • Some FF’s have come with a letter of recommendation
  • No single individual profile of FF’s

Overview

  • Daymon, Chelsea, Jeanine de Roy van Zuijdewijn, and David Malet. “Career Foreign Fighters: Expertise Transmission Across Insurgencies.” RESOLVE Network, April 13, 2020. https://doi.org/10.37805/ogrr2020.1.cff.

  • Foreign fighters (FF’s) are debated whether they are more dangerous returning to their country or left unaccounted for

  • Many FF’s enjoy career progression from one conflict to another

  • Discusses the crime/terror nexus in europe

  • FF’s interactions with local communities sometimes makes them liabilities

Malet, David, and Miriam J. Anderson, eds. Transnational Actors in War and Peace: Militants, Activists, and Corporations in World Politics. Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 2017.

FF’s go to defend a transnational community percieved to be under existential threat

  • FF’s also see higher casualty rates

Bosnia jihad

  • First wave of FF’s were largely useless
  • Second wave had combat experience from afghanistan, which made them far more useful

Staniland, Paul. Networks of Rebellion: Explaining Insurgent Cohesion and Collapse. Cornell Studies in Security Affairs. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2014.

Rebel leaders either build deeply integration “vertical” ties or rely on more dispered “idealogical” ties

III, Thomas F. Lynch. “Sunni and Shi ’a Terrorism: Differences That Matter.” Brookings (blog), November 30, 1AD. https://www.brookings.edu/research/sunni-and-shi-a-terrorism-differences-that-matter/.