Abstract
Nir Arielli begins his history of foreign war volunteers with a sensational and well-known contemporary example of the phenomenon: Mohammed Emwazi, better known as Jihadi John, a British citizen who served with the Islamic State in Syria, and in 2014 executed an American journalist. But Arielli cautions against taking Emwazi as the quintessential foreign volunteer, noting that other foreigners fought against the Islamic State. The presence of volunteers on opposing sides of the conflict allows Arielli to question the current tendency, as formulated in a 2014 United Nations Security Council Resolution, to understand all foreign volunteers as ‘foreign terrorist fighters’ (p. 3).
Arielli is less interested in judging the volunteers’ causes than in uncovering patterns among mainly American and European volunteers who served in conflicts in Europe, the Middle East, and the Americas. He thus organizes the study thematically, with chapters tracing commonalities in recruitment, motivations to fight, fighters’ attitudes toward their home states, home states’ often ineffective efforts to stem the flow of volunteers, volunteers’ military effectiveness (and failures), and the ways in which fighters have linked themselves to earlier generations of foreign volunteers.
Although men have long travelled to join conflicts far from home, Arielli defines the ‘foreign war volunteer’ as a modern category. Unlike crusaders or early modern mercenaries, the foreign volunteers at the heart of Arielli’s study violated the modern expectation – fostered by the ideology of nationalism and growing state power to demand service – that citizens fight only for their home countries. He focuses on armed rather than non-military volunteers, recognizing that the borders between these groups could be porous, and ignores pseudo volunteers such as the German and Italian soldiers dispatched by their own states to aid the rebels during the Spanish Civil War.
Arielli constructs two typologies to organize his wide-ranging survey. First, he distinguishes three ideological ‘waves’ of volunteers. The first ‘ideological fault line’ (39) to attract large numbers of foreign volunteers was the struggle between ‘liberty’ and ‘tyranny’. Arielli places in this first wave wars of independence in Spanish America and the Balkans as well as the wars of Italian unification. His ‘second wave’ emerged after the 1917 October Revolution in Russia and ‘pitted the Left against the Right’ (p. 39). He includes in this wave the Russian Civil War, the Spanish Civil War, and various Cold War conflicts. He defines the third and current wave that began with the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and includes the Yugoslav wars, the Chechen wars, the post-2001 wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and the ongoing civil war in Syria as a ‘clash of civilizations’.
Arielli then divides foreign volunteers into four categories ‘based on how they positioned themselves in relation to their home state’ (p. 9). Here he distinguishes ‘self-appointed ambassadors’, who see themselves as doing the work their state should be doing; ‘diaspora volunteers’, who identify with their country of heritage; ‘cross-border volunteers’, who share national or ethnic ties with a neighbouring group involved in conflict; and ‘substitute-conflict volunteers’, who see the conflict abroad as a first strike against their real enemy at home. A single conflict could draw fighters of all four types. Only the last group, Arielli argues, is likely to turn from volunteering abroad to engaging in terrorism at home.
These categories provide a useful means of highlighting commonalities across cases, but Arielli’s account is never schematic. A particular strength of the book is his method of using mini biographies of famous and obscure volunteers to illustrate and sometimes complicate his categories. In these sketches Arielli highlights individual motivations and especially the personal ‘search for a sense of purpose and meaning’ (p. 69) and the ‘desire to affirm one’s masculinity’ (p. 87) that prompted sympathizers to become fighters.
Although much of the material on individual wars may be familiar to specialists, Arielli deftly brings together a broad survey of the secondary literature (mainly in English), personal stories, and a few nuggets from the archives to offer a convincing case for understanding foreign war volunteering as a distinctive process with a rich history and a complicated present. He challenges current conventional wisdom that foreign fighters ‘increase the intensity, duration, and intractability of conflicts’ (p. 169) and that they are likely to return home as terrorists. On the contrary, he argues, since Lord Byron’s time, their main contributions have been in the realm of propaganda, and they have left their wars both radicalized and disillusioned. Arielli ends with perhaps their most significant historical contribution: the romantic myth of the volunteer as ‘committed, brave, and selfless’ (p. 229). Linking volunteers across time and space, this myth legitimizes the violation of the modern norm that men should fight only for their own states, and endows the history of foreign war volunteering with contemporary relevance.