When do ties bind? Foreign fighters, social embeddedness, and violence against civilians
| DOI | 10.1177/0022343318804594 |
| Author | Pauline Moore |
| Published date | 01 March 2019 |
| Date | 01 March 2019 |
| Subject Matter | Research Articles |
When do ties bind? Foreign fighters,
social embeddedness, and violence
against civilians
Pauline Moore
Josef Korbel School of International Studies, University of Denver
Abstract
How do foreign fighters affect civilian victimization in the civil wars they join? Scholars of civil war have gone to great
lengths to explain why states and insurgent groups victimize civilians, but they have not explicitly examined the
impact of foreign combatants. Furthermore, while contemporary conventional wisdom attaches an overwhelmingly
negative connotation to foreign fighters, history shows that the behavior of those who travel to fight in wars far from
home varies significantly, especially when it comes to interacting with local populations. To address this variation,
I demonstrate how differences in the embeddedness of foreign fighter populations combine with incentives that
foreign fighters face to remain in the conflict zone over the long term to shape tendencies towards civilian victimiza-
tion. My findings from an analysis of insurgent groups from 1990 to 2011 suggest that, overall, foreign fighters lead
to escalations in violence against civilians. When comparing across groups that recruit foreign fighters, however,
levels of violence differ depending on foreign fighter populations’ coethnicity to the rebel groups they join, and the
distances they travel to reach a conflict zone. Specifically, the presence of coethnic foreign fighters leads to fewer
escalations in violence, relative to the recruitment of non-coethnic individuals from non-neighboring states. The
study provides empirical support to the claim that degrees of embeddedness across foreign fighter populations are
important indicators of when and where their presence is likely to pose significant dangers to local populations.
Keywords
civil war, civilian victimization, escalation in violence, foreign fighters, political violence
How do foreign fighters affect the trajectories of the
conflicts they join? Despite increasing concern in the
academic and policy arenas regarding the threat posed
by foreigners joining civil wars around the globe
(Bakke, 2014; Braithwaite & Chu, 2018; Chu &
Braithwaite, 2017), we still know relatively little about
how these actors shape local conflict dynamics. In
2002, the United Nations highlighted the threat,
declaring, ‘Whatever the nature of the conflict, mercen-
aries [ ...] tend to escalate or at least perpetuate hosti-
lities’ (UN, 2002). But history also shows that foreign
fighters do not have uniform effects on the escalation of
violence across civil wars. During the Spanish Civil
War, the experiences of members of the transnational
fighting force that fought on the Republican side stand
out in sharp contrast to behavior implied in the UN’s
declaration. Returning Americans explained how local
civilians came to accept the foreign fighters who made
up the International Brigades: ‘[locals] are tremen-
dously interested in these comrades from other lands
and they do everything possible to make them comfor-
table during their stay in the village’ (William Colfax
Miller, as cited in Malet, 2013: 122). In the 1990s,
foreigners who joined Croatian irregulars during Croa-
tia’s war for independence characterized their experi-
ences as follows: ‘we’re not in it for the killing. It’s
about the camaraderie [ ...] We are here because we
want to be’ (Nir, 2012: 10). Such accounts suggest that
populations of foreign fighters may engage in different
behaviors across conflicts.
Corresponding author:
pauline.moore@du.edu
Journal of Peace Research
2019, Vol. 56(2) 279–294
ªThe Author(s) 2019
Article reuse guidelines:
sagepub.com/journals-permissions
DOI: 10.1177/0022343318804594
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The phenomenon of foreigners entering and exiting
domestic conflicts dates back to the early 1800s and has
increased over time (Malet, 2016). Foreign fighters have
participated in civil wars across all regions, including in
96 civil conflicts from 1990 to 2011 (34% of the total)
(Malet, 2016). The two panels in Figure 1 summarize
these trends.
Despite the wealth of knowledge that studies on vio-
lence against civilians offer, they remain oblivious to how
the addition of foreign combatants might change the
ways rebel groups interact with civilian populations.
While studies show that reliance on certain forms of
external resources leads to escalations in civilian victimi-
zation (Salehyan, 2009; Salehyan, Siroki & Wood,
2014; Stewart & Liou, 2016), the effect of foreign
human resources remains unclear. I combine and extend
arguments of insurgent behavior to develop an explana-
tion of how external human resources – foreign fighters –
affect insurgent violence against civilians. In particular, I
focus on variation in fighters’ embeddedness in the local
social fabric of a conflict to explain civilian victimization.
Different degrees of embeddedness can lead ‘roving ban-
dits’ to become ‘stationary’ and change their behavior
accordingly.
I use the conventional definition of foreign fighters:
‘non-citizens of conflict states who join insurgencies dur-
ing civil conflict’ (Malet, 2013: 9) and who lack kinship
ties to the militant groups that they join (Hegghammer,
2011). These individuals face particular hurdles when
they join civil wars. Like their local fighter counterparts,
they depend on civilians to survive during war, but their
foreign origins preclude some of them from easily form-
ing trust-based relationships needed to secure critical
resources, intelligence, and compliance . Local popula-
tions may also be less likely to cooperate with foreign
combatants as a result of linguistic or cultural barriers.
Without cooperation, certain foreign fighters may turn
to civilian abuse to force support.
This logic suggests that not all foreign fighters are
created equal. Different national origins, language pre-
ferences, or cultural values may accentuate the foreign-
ness of some, but allow others to behave more like local
fighters. This leads to two observable implications.
First, groups that recruit foreign fighters should be
more likely to abuse civilian populations, relative to
groups that recruit locally. Second, foreign fighters
sharing traits, such as ethnicity, with local conflict
actors should be less apt to commit violence against
civilians, while those without shared traits should be
more likely to victimize civilians.
My analysis of foreign fighters in insurgencies from
1989 to 2011 provides support for these hypotheses.
I find that the presence of foreign fighters leads to higher
average levels of civilian victimization at the armed group
level. Disaggregating foreign fighters, though, also shows
that those with shared traits are less likely to commit
violence against civilians; grou ps that recruit coethnic
foreign combatants from neighboring states commit less
violence than those that recruit non-coethnic foreigners
from non-contiguous states. The study thus demon-
strates the importance of foreign fighters as a group,
but also the value of disaggregating groups and begin-
ning to unpack the mechanisms through which certain
types of foreign combatants are likely to impact civil
war dynamics.
Foreign fighters and civilian victimization
during civil war
When armed groups recruit socially disembedded for-
eigners into their fighter base, the organization should
Figure 1. Foreign fighters in civil wars, 1990–2011 (Malet,
2016)
280 journal of PEACE RESEARCH 56(2)
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