Citation

Moore P. J. Peace Res. 2019; 56(2): 279-294.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2019, SAGE Publishing)

DOI

10.1177/0022343318804594

PMID

unavailable

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 victimization. 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.

Language: en