Waves of the Black Banner: An Exploratory Study on the Dutch Jihadist Foreign Fighter Contingent in Syria and Iraq

Since the violent escalation of the Syrian conflict, 280 Dutch nationals have been flocking to Syria and Iraq to join jihadist terrorist organizations. Attempts to create a more comprehensive understanding of the backgrounds of these jihadist foreign fighters often rely on small-N, qualitative analysis. This exploratory study systematically assesses the backgrounds of 217 Dutch jihadist foreign fighters. Additionally, it further differentiates the different “waves” of fighters since late 2012, by looking at their characteristics and comparing their composition.     

Reframing the rising powers debate: state transformation and foreign policy

Abstract

The volume that we introduce breaks with the prevalent tendency in International Relations (IR) scholarship to treat rising powers (such as China, Russia, India and Brazil) as unitary actors in international politics. Although a neat demarcation of the domestic and international domains, on which the notion of unitary agency is premised, has always been a myth, these states’ uneven integration into the global political economy has eroded this perspective’s empirical purchase considerably. Instead, this collection advances the concept of ‘state transformation’ as a useful lens through which to examine rising power states’ foreign policymaking and implementation. State transformation refers to the pluralisation of cross-border state agency via contested and uneven processes of fragmentation, decentralisation and internationalisation of state apparatuses. The volume demonstrates the significance of state transformation processes for explaining some of these states’ most important foreign policy agendas, and outlines the implications for the wider field in IR.     

The Impact of Jihadist Foreign Fighters on Indigenous Secular-Nationalist Causes: Contrasting Chechnya and Syria

Jihadist foreign fighters have become common in civil conflicts in Muslim countries. While research exists on the impact they have upon returning home, less attention has been given to their influence on the opposition cause that they mobilize in support of. This article looks at the impact that jihadist foreign fighters on the Chechen and Syrian resistance causes, evaluating their influence on oppositional cohesion and ideology, domestic and international perceptions of the movements, and on governmental narratives regarding the conflicts the foreign fighters engage in. It is concluded that foreign fighters have overwhelmingly damaged the Chechen and Syrian opposition movements, making the likelihood of opposition success more remote.     

When States Die: geographic and territorial pathways to state death

Abstract

State death, understood as the formal loss of control over foreign policy, is an important but neglected issue in the international relations literature. When do states die and why? How do states exit the system? The consequences of state death can be wide-ranging, from forced migration movements, regional instability, to general famine. Despite these severe consequences, political scientists have yet to adequately study the causes of state death. Fazal finds that states are prone to death when they are located as a buffer between two rivals; this suggests that being a buffer state is a cause of state death. Our expansion of current research seeks to add the concept of territorial disputes to the state death literature. We suggest that states are at greater risk of death when they become involved in territorial disputes that raise the stakes of conflict. The resulting research demonstrates that a reliable predictor of state death is engagement in a territorial dispute. Territorial disputes are the most prevalent issue that leads to war and can also be a leading cause of state death.     

Foreign Fighters and Transnational Jihad in Syria

Foreign fighters arrive in Syria from across the Muslim world, yet the configuration of their countries of origin remains a puzzle. Examining alternative explanations for joining transnational jihad, the article draws insights from the cases of Tunisia and Saudi Arabia, two major countries of foreign fighters' origin, compared with Egypt, from where limited figures of volunteers have joined the Syrian war. The article shows that the sources of volunteering fighters may be well understood in combined terms of religious sentiments and national politics. Foreign fighters come largely from Muslim countries where restrained state–Islamists relations channel Islamic grievances to transnational arenas.     

Between Russia and a Hard Place: Great Power Grievances and Central Asian Ambivalence

Abstract

This essay asks how Central Asian states have responded to Russia’s intervention in Ukraine and salvos against the West, as a means to assess how Russia and the Central Asian states understand their national interests and exercise state power. It argues that the post-Soviet region shares a cynical and geopolitically driven view of the exercise of global power. Yet Russia has sometimes deployed its resources to advance short-term ideological objectives, whereas Central Asian foreign policy is pragmatic and opportunistic. The Ukraine crisis threatened to coerce the Central Asian states into conformity with Russia’s interests; ironically, their dependence on Russia has enabled their freedom of action in foreign policy, within limits. The essay highlights the ways that geography enables and constrains the execution of foreign policy, and considers the ambiguous role ideology plays in the formulation of national interests and the prospects for international cooperation.     

Persuasion and Predation: The Effects of U.S. Military Aid and International Development Aid on Civilian Killings

ABSTRACT

Powerful states frequently employ foreign aid to pursue international security objectives. Yet aid's effectiveness will be undermined if it exacerbates the effects of conflict on civilians within recipient states. This article investigates how international development aid and U.S. military aid influence recipient governments' incentives and ability to target civilians. U.S. military aid has a persuasion effect on state actors, which decreases a recipient state's incentives and necessity to target civilians. Development aid flows, however, trigger a predation effect in some environments, exacerbating civilian targeting. An analysis of aid flows in 135 countries on civilian killings between 1989–2011 provides support for both the persuasion and predation effects associated with aid.     

Driving Factors behind Foreign Fighters in Syria and Iraq

With the rise of the self-proclaimed Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS), the phenomenon of foreign fighters became a significant security concern. Governments around the world have become preoccupied with the possibility of their citizens leaving for combat zones and then coming back with training and experience. While previously foreign fighters participated in such conflicts as Afghanistan, Bosnia, or Chechnya, today ISIS has attracted record numbers of individuals from various backgrounds. This article examines factors that might be connected with the outflow of foreign fighters to Syria and Iraq. The analysis is based on 190 countries with 103 of them serving as countries of origin for 33,815 foreign fighters. Negative binomial regression is used to evaluate the connection of political, economic, demographic, and social factors to numbers of foreign fighters. The findings indicate that more foreign fighters come from countries with higher Human Development Index levels, unemployment rates, percentages of youth, population size, percentages of Muslim population, emigration levels, Internet penetration, and the presence of Al Qaeda cells. However, the findings further indicate that the effect of these variables is not uniform across majority Muslim and majority non-Muslim countries.     

Interviewing Jihadists: On the Importance of Drinking Tea and Other Methodological Considerations

The field of terrorism research has arguably long been characterized by a separation of the scholars from their subject of inquiry. Interviews can be used to bridge this chasm, but making contact with potential interviewees, conducting interviews, and analyzing the data pose unique challenges when conducting research into jihadists, especially active ones. This article focuses on the author's experience of interviewing both former and active jihadi foreign fighters. It is specifically intended to contribute to a better methodological understanding of conducting first-hand empirical research into jihadi foreign fighters and builds on fieldwork conducted in Sweden, Iraq, and Lebanon.     

South Korea's State-led Soft Power Strategies: Limits on Inter-Korean Relations

Abstract

The South Korean government has taken on many of Joseph Nye's ideas as it is promoting a state-led soft power in the form of the cultural hallyu, foreign aid, and domestically, a future-orientated rebranding of South Korea as a multicultural state. Soft power is understood in instrumental terms as well as in more substantive terms. This state-led multiculturalism has challenged widely held beliefs in ethnic homogeneity which have been the mainspring of national identity and national security in South Korea. These beliefs have underscored inter-Korean relations as the two states officially share beliefs despite political and ideological differences. The growing significance of such state-led multiculturalism in Global Korea to attract foreign workers can be linked to a myriad of intentional and unintentional strategic issues arising from this form of state-led soft power promotion. This is particularly significant given the sensitive culture and identity across the East Asian region.     

Capital and Labour Mobility and their Impacts on Mexico's Regional Labour Markets

Abstract

This paper studies the effects of capital and labor mobility on real wages across Mexican states for the period 1997–2006. Employing dynamic panel data methods, we find: (1) strong positive effects on real wages from foreign direct investment (FDI) and from migration; (2) domestic and foreign migration provide similar wage effects; and (3) alternative partitions indicate that real wages are more sensitive to FDI-related fluctuations across states with relatively lower wages and migration levels. Overall, these results provide support that real wages respond positively to fluctuations in capital flows and labour movements as predicted from the theory.     

Accepting Alien Rule? State-Building Nationalism in Georgia’s Azeri Borderland

Abstract

How did ethnic Azeris in the Marneuli, Bolnisi and Dmanisi districts, located inside Georgia but bordering Azerbaijan, react to the reorganisation of political space along national lines after the Soviet Union’s dissolution? ‘Beached’ in foreign states bent on nationalising their domains, minorities throughout Eurasia sometimes rejected and sometimes accepted their alien rulers. This essay examines reactions to this predicament among Georgia’s Azeris. Drawing on elite interviews and data from a matched-guise experiment, it concludes that locals have come to accept their host state after its state-building nationalism took an inclusive turn and the distinction between aliens and natives faded.     

Transnistria’s Order of Friendship: Legitimacy Through Diplomatic Practice

Abstract

What strategies do de facto states employ in conducting their diplomacy? This article examines Transnistria’s Order of Friendship, a state award that primarily targets foreigners, by analysing the profiles of all known award recipients. The Order is found to be a political tool to enhance Transnistria’s domestic and external legitimacy in the absence of recognised sovereignty. The findings confirm the literature on Transnistria’s ‘bandwagoning’ with Russia, indicate that a patron’s support must be actively sought rather than taken for granted, and—since many awardees are from jurisdictions other than the patron state Russia—point to the need to examine the foreign policy of de facto states more holistically.     

Putin's Power Revisited: How Identity Positions and Great Power Interaction Condition Strategic Cooperation on Syria

Abstract

This article investigates how Russian foreign policies are shaped in a two-level interactive social game. Russian foreign policies take their cue from ingrained identity positions articulated by the state leadership and negotiated in domestic debates, but they are also informed by interaction with other states. The article explains the shift in Russian policies away from pragmatic cooperation with the West in Syria from autumn 2015 onwards. While the Russian leadership initially sought such cooperation, the prominence of anti-Western discourse in Russia following the crisis in Ukraine as well as the West's rejection of Russia in this period spurred Russia to act independently in Syria.     

Public Policy in the Passive-Aggressive State: Health Care Reform in Bosnia-Hercegovina 1995–2001

This article uses Bosnia and Hercegovina as a prototype of an emerging subset of weak states, the passive-aggressive state. Appearing as the result of agreements ending civil strife, the general characteristics of the passive-aggressive state include complex power-sharing arrangements at the centre and local institutions that are designed for capture by parties to the conflict, which in turn creates a weak and segmented civil society. As a result, only the international community can devise and financially support policy reform, but it must rely on the state to implement the reform. Dependent on international support for its own survival, the centre rhetorically embraces reform while local institutions engage in passive resistance to block it. This article uses three examples of health care reform in Bosnia to illustrate the difficulties of reform in these types of states. The paper concludes with observations on how strengthening the powers of the central government and reorienting international aid towards civil society might alleviate some of the structural problems of passive-aggressive states.

passive-aggressive: Of, relating to, or having a personality disorder characterised by habitual passive resistance to demands for adequate performance in occupational or social situations, as by procrastination, stubbornness, sullenness, and inefficiency (American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, 4th Edition).     

Talking to Foreign Fighters: Insights into the Motivations for Hijrah to Syria and Iraq

Little of the discussion of foreign fighters in Syria and Iraq is informed by primary data derived from talking with the foreign fighters. This article reports some initial findings from interviews with twenty foreign fighters in Syria. The findings are compared with three other recent studies of European foreign fighters, and aspiring fighters, based on some primary data. While those studies emphasize the role of low social and economic prospects in motivating the choice to go, this study found little evidence of such factors, and alternatively argues more attention should be given to existential concerns and the role of religiosity. Consideration is also given to the methodological challenges posed by using of terrorists' accounts of their motivations.     

Coordination and control in Russia’s foreign policy: travails of Putin’s curators in the near abroad

Abstract

This article seeks to challenge the conception of the Russian state as being centred on Vladimir Putin by looking at the actors implementing Russia’s foreign policy in its near abroad. In particular, it explores the activities of curators (kuratory), a term applied in Russia to describe officials tasked with making things work often bypassing, and sometimes competing with, formal institutions. Following the state transformation framework, the argument put forward in the article is that curation (kuratorstvo), as a practice of coordination and control in Russia’s system of governance, can be seen as a manifestation of fragmentation and internationalisation of Russia’s foreign policy making. The empirical basis for this article is a case study of Russia’s policy towards Abkhazia, which Russia officially recognised as a sovereign state in 2008. This article addresses the involvement of curators in their attempts to exert political influence as an expression of fragmentation as well as emerging institutionalised curation in development assistance as a part of internationalisation.     

Can constituent states influence foreign and security policy? Coalitional dynamics in India

Abstract

The Indian state has undergone significant transformation since the late 1980s, most notably the extensive decentralisation of power, with consequences for the formation and implementation of Indian foreign policy. This article explores the role of India’s constituent states explaining the extent and limitations of their autonomy and influence. It deploys and extends the state transformation approach to incorporate considerations of issue area and coalition type. Under coalitions led by typical national parties, subnational governments are less likely to influence foreign and security policy. Under the same coalition type, they are more likely to behave autonomously on non-traditional security issues such as sharing of water resources with neighbouring countries. They are less likely to behave autonomously on security issues such as the transnational expression of ethnic solidarity. Under coalitions led by atypical national parties or regional parties, subnational governments are likely to exercise a moderate level of autonomy and influence on issue areas such as transnational expression of ethnic solidarity. They are likely to exercise a high level of autonomy and influence on non-traditional security issues such as sharing of water resources. The framework is illustrated through Tamil Nadu’s activism on Sri Lanka, and West Bengal’s position on water-sharing with Bangladesh.     

A Review of: “Jonathan Fox,Religion, Civilization,and Civil War: 1945 Through the New Millennium”

According to some terrorist fighters and academicians the constituencies of Muslim extremists are vital to the persistence of the jihad. Interviews and public information were used to examine the accuracy of this claim. The analysis demonstrates that sympathizers are indispensable to some preparative terrorist activities, yet not to others. Extremists depend less on sympathizers for making foreign journeys, generating revenues, and communication than they do for recruiting and sponsoring. So, sympathizers may be important for the persistence of the jihad, yet their role is not self-evident. This implies that receding of sympathy for the jihad will not automatically reduce it.     

The (Neglected) Statist Bias and the Developmental State: the case of Singapore and Vietnam

Abstract

This paper highlights three key weaknesses with the developmental state as a theory of the state. First, that the theory imagines the state in Weberian terms and then seeks to judge all states—even ones which are not Weberian—according to Weberian yardsticks which are not universal. Second, that the theory underestimates the extent to which it is itself bound up with dominant global power structures associated with the Cold War and the post-cold war period. Third, that in its concern to identify the correct ‘institutional mix’ for development to occur, developmental state theorists ends up believing that the (best) states really do stand apart from society, forgetting that this is an illusion which is fundamental to how states rule. Not to be alert to the state's ‘ideological effects’ is not really to study the state at all; this is ultimately a criticism which has to be levelled at the theory of the developmental state. To suggest—as many scholars do—that the theory's weaknesses can be solved by breaking the state down into its constituent parts, focusing more on society, or trying to locate the ‘blurred’ boundary between state and society more effectively, completely misses the point, since it does little, if anything, to uncover how states really rule. The issues are explored via a comparison of the state in Singapore and Vietnam.