(Last updated June 2010)










Presentation at The Foreign Fighter Problem conference
Foreign Policy Research Institute
National Press Club, Washington DC
14 July 2009
(Click thumbnail for link)


Foreign Fighters: Transnational Identity in Civil Conflicts
David Malet
George Washington University
Dissertation defended 5 June 2009

The precise origin of the term "foreign fighter" is not clear, but it appears to have come into currency during the Yugsolav wars of the early 1990s when volunteer diaspora Croats, Western European sympathizers and Muslim mujahidin fought against Serbian forces. Although also applied in media reports to Muslim volunteers in Chechnya and Kashmir in the 1990s, it began to be used in the context of Islamists during the 2001 invasion of Afghanistan, when Afghan prisoners received different treatment after the battle of Kunduz than did militants of foreign origin.

When I began research in 2005 for my doctoral dissertation on the recruitment of transnational insurgents, I was surprised to learn that not only was there no available existing work on this topic, but that there was not even a name for it in the Political Science literature. There also had not been any attempts to determine the scope of the phenomenon.
 
While most media reports of foreign fighters concern Islamist insurgents, there have been dozens of other rebel groups over the past two centuries who enlisted foreigners to fight for Communism, their ethnic kin or other religious or idelogical causes. I have created a typology of foreign fighters using data combined from the Correlates of War Intrastate War and the PRIO-CSCW Data on Armed Conflict data sets. Among the 331 civil conflicts 1815-2005, at least 67 of them featured the presence of foreign fighters. I welcome any information leading to additions or corrections, either by posting on the message board or contacting me directly at david.malet@gmail.com
I also welcome anyone interested in using the data for academic or journalistic purposes to do so if they would be so kind as to cite David Malet, The Foreign Fighter Project, 2007. I would also greatly appreciate copies of manuscripts or articles putting the information to use.


Uses of the Data

"Why Foreign Fighters? Historical Perspectives and Solutions"
Orbis Journal of Foreign Affairs, 2009

United States Department of State Counter-Terrorism Directorate
Remarks by Amb. Dell Dailey