Civil Conflicts Abroad, Foreign Fighters, and Terrorism at Home

Abstract

Terrorist attacks in Brussels (May 2014) and Paris (January and November 2015) highlight the threat related to the arrival of foreign fighters (FFs) from civil wars elsewhere. We develop an argument suggesting that terrorism at home is systematically affected by the exit of the so-called FFs out of civil wars abroad. We contend that foreign civil conflicts ending in success for rebel groups can result in a surplus of well-trained FFs, increasing the risk of terrorism at home. By contrast, when rebel groups are defeated in foreign civil conflicts, we anticipate a restriction in the flow of FFs, which reduces the likelihood of terrorism at home. Empirical analyses on most countries for the years 1970 to 2006 support these hypotheses. Our tests also demonstrate that the flow of FFs is associated with the creation of new terrorism campaigns rather than the exacerbation of existing operations.

The impact of foreign fighters on civil conflict outcomes

“…Research on the effect that foreign fighters have on the conflicts they join enables both academics and policy makers to assess the validity of security concerns. There is, for instance, evidence that once foreign fighters leave a conflict, there may be an uptick in domestic terrorist attacks abroad, because there is now a surplus of well-trained foreign fighters that are not tied geographically to the conflict country (Braithwaite and Chu, forthcoming). The present study suggests that foreign fighters from further afield likely extend the duration of their employment by reducing the odds of a government victory without necessarily achieving victory and remaining in the conflict country indefinitely.…”

“…Contributors to academic, policy, and popular commentary communities have increasingly voiced concerns regarding the threat posed by foreign fighters entering and exiting civil conflicts around the globe (Braithwaite and Chu, forthcoming; Hegghammer 2013). These unpaid, non-national combatants, with no apparent link to the conflict they enter, commonly join the side of rebel groups who are violently resisting the government of the state.…”

Cascades of Violence: War, Crime and Peacebuilding Across South Asia

“…This can only be interpreted as a South Asian cascade, mostly internal to India, in the twenty-first century in which perhaps the only other state in the world to have had a really substantial Maoist insurgency has been neighbouring Nepal. crime. Terrorism is also exacerbated by hotspots in the sense that the exit of foreign fighters from hotspots is associated with heightened terrorism at home (Braithwaite and Chu 2017). Similarly, the exit of state troops back to the homeland after foreign wars is associated with heightened homicide at home, much of it domestic violence.…”

Does Immigration Induce Terrorism?

“…More crucially, simply focusing on 1 Some notable exceptions (e.g., Braithwaite and Li, 2007;Neumayer and Plümper, 2010;Nemeth, Mauslein and Stapley, 2014;Braithwaite, 2015;Findley, Piazza and Young, 2012;Blomberg and Hess, 2008;Li and Schaub, 2004) on the spatial dimension of terrorism do exist. However, neither do these works explicitly develop an argument based on the diffusion literature nor do they make use of spatial econometrics.…”