Something Worth Dying For?

Abstract

Perhaps the most challenging thing about the foreign fighters – those people who disappear from their suburban homes and reappear on Facebook in Syria or Iraq carrying a grenade launcher or wearing a suicide jacket – is that they evidently have something they think is worth dying for. Probably most of us would lay down our lives for our immediate family. Beyond that, Anzac Day parades and endless military posturing by political leaders notwithstanding, it is difficult to imagine most people in this country genuinely willing to put their life on the line for Democracy, Australia, Socialism, the Liberal Party, Jesus or anything else. Not that people wouldn’t fight like hell to hang on to what they have, but willing to put their life on the line for an idea? A society which cannot give its young people an idea worth dying for is what is really shocking. What a shame it is the lengths foreign fighters go to to find something worth sacrificing their life for. The suicide bomber may be misguided, but unless there’s something worth dying for how can there be something worth living for? I will briefly review the rise of foreign fighters through the lens of collaborative projects, a unit of analysis which is particularly useful for understanding this phenomenon. Collaborative projects, or ‘projects’ for short, are entities which people join rather than launch themselves, in the overwhelming majority of cases. A project differs from a group. A group is a collection of people united by some attribute such as ethnicity or beliefs, but a project is an aggregate of actions directed towards the collaborative realization of an ideal. All those entities which motivate actions which do not satisfy a person’s immediate needs are projects. A foreign fighter is someone who participates in an insurgency but has neither citizenship nor kinship links in the war zone and has travelled from afar as a private citizen to fight as an unpaid volunteer. Foreign fighters are quite distinct from terrorists who carry out violent acts outside of any war zone and those who travel overseas to attend a terrorist training camp. Foreign fighters are engaged in conventional warfare. Before you can become a foreign fighter, someone has to be waging an insurgency that you can join. I will deal with the ‘demand side’ of foreign fighting first, where I rely on the work of Thomas Hegghammer (2011), before turning to the ‘supply side’ where I rely on a variety of sources.