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| 1 |
ID:
172186
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| Summary/Abstract |
Why do some people go abroad to engage in other people’s wars? Some studies attempt to discern why individuals choose to fight in distant lands (Malet, 2013) or seek to count how many do so (Hegghammer, 2013). The term foreign fighter has been used nearly exclusively in recent research to describe transnational fighters who join with Islamist organizations, or more generally for individuals fighting with resistance groups against a state. However, little research has been done on the many transnational fighters who travel to fight against resistance groups or against Islamist organizations. Our paper examines these transnational militants who battle against the Islamic State, focusing on Americans who engage in such activities, often referred to as volunteers. Through a review of open-source media, we created a dataset of these individuals, recording demographic data such as each individual’s military experience and stated purpose for becoming a transnational fighter. We show descriptive analyses on these data, and then compare these findings against current scholarship on Islamist transnational fighters. We argue that American volunteers and foreign terrorist fighters are phenomena with difference in degree, but not in kind.
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| 2 |
ID:
130595
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| Publication |
2014.
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| Summary/Abstract |
The literature on foreign, or "transnational," war volunteering has focused overwhelmingly on the motivations and experiences of the volunteers. This approach has largely overlooked other aspects of the phenomenon such as the military and political use that host states can derive from foreign fighters. This article focuses on the enlistment of international volunteers by the Israeli armed forces in the war of 1948-49. Drawing on a combination of archival material, interviews with veterans, and secondary literature, the article assesses the relative importance of "Machal" (Israel's overseas volunteers) by comparing the role played by these foreigners with that of transnational volunteers who fought in other twentieth-century conflicts
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