Why Foreign Fighters? Historical Perspectives and Solutions

Insurgencies that recruit foreign nationals to join rebel groups in various civil wars around the globe are a source of growing concern to policymakers. Despite attention focused on recent Islamist groups, foreign fighters are a phenomenon that is neither new nor uniquely Islamic. In conflicts from the Spanish Civil War to the Afghanistan War, insurgencies consistently recruited foreigners by framing the local war as one that threatened a shared transnational identity group and necessitated a defensive mobilization. It is therefore possible to draw lessons about combating their flow through counter-recruitment from a wide array of historical cases. F oreign fighters pose a challenge to counterinsurgency and peacekeeping efforts in a growing number of civil conflicts. The quantity of insurgent groups that have mobilized transnationally has been increasing in recent decades, both in absolute numbers and as a proportion of the total insurgencies being waged. Transnational recruits are responsible for higher levels of violence than are local insurgents, and insurgencies that manage to recruit foreign fighters are disproportionately successful as compared to other rebel groups. However, what appears to be part of a new phenomenon tied to the growth of militant Islamists is, in fact, nothing new or peculiar to current circumstances. A wealth of available information from past cases suggests how the problem can be managed successfully. While a good number of studies address how non-state armed groups are successful in recruiting combatants at the sub-national level in civil conflicts, researchers have largely overlooked transnational recruitment. A number of recent works have attempted to analyze the origins and motives of 1 See David Malet, The Foreign Fighter Project (2007), available at http://www.foreignfighter. com; and David Malet, Foreign Fighters: Transnational Identity in Civil Conflicts (2009), available at http://www.proquest.com/products_umi/dissertations. # 2009 Published by Elsevier Limited on behalf of Foreign Policy Research Institute.