Intrastate armed conflicts, whether of low or high intensity, are the most pronounced form of organized violence in the world today. Thousands of people are killed, wounded, or displaced every year in intrastate conflicts that range across the globe, from Sudan, Lebanon, Afghanistan, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo to Iraq, Libya, and Syria.

Intrastate conflicts are often viewed as stemming from, and revolving mainly around, domestic factors and issues. To the extent that scholars and policymakers explore the involvement of external actors in domestic disputes, most attention is devoted to states (including the immediate neighbors of the disrupted...

Bassam Ahmad Kanj, a Sunni Muslim, was born in 1964 in a small village in the al-Dinniyeh region of North Lebanon. In 1985 he left for the United States and studied in Boston. There, he was influenced by the conferences on Jihad in Afghanistan, organized by sympathizers of the Islamic cause in that country. In 1989, Kanj left the United States for Pakistan, where he underwent military training. He crossed the border to Afghanistan and joined the “Arab Afghans”: the Arab volunteers who came to fight the Soviet “infidels” alongside the local mujahidin. In Afghanistan, Kanj developed close ties with...

How do insurgencies recruit foreign fighters to join intrastate conflicts? Empirical data from a diverse array of civil conflicts in which foreigners joined the rebels indicate that the main contending explanations for local mobilization in civil wars—greed and grievance—appear to hold little purchase for transnational insurgents. Although this question is relevant to counterinsurgency (COIN) operations in contemporary wars including Iraq and Afghanistan, foreign fighters are not a new phenomenon. Indeed, numerous insurgencies have successfully recruited transnationally throughout the history of the modern international system, and their methods have remained consistent despite the vagaries of particular conflicts.

Reconstructing individual...

In December 1979, Soviet forces entered Afghanistan at the request of the embattled ruling communist regime, which faced a mounting indigenous insurgency. Over the ensuing decade, thousands of Arabs volunteered for holy war (jihad) against the Soviets, in solidarity with the Afghan Muslim resistance forces (mujahidin). As part of a joint anti-Soviet program in coordination with the United States and Pakistan, Arab regimes played a critical role in sponsoring these volunteers (known as Arab Afghans). Though implemented mainly through semiofficial Islamic associations, this state sponsorship is perplexing because the volunteers often identified with domestic Islamic opposition groups that espoused anti-regime...

Recent worldwide social, economic, and political developments have had a significant impact on diasporas, in particular on their relations with host-lands, homelands, and other states in which their kin permanently reside (Sheffer 2007a: 187–88). Consequently, many diasporic communities have been increasingly involved in the politics of their host-lands: for example, maintaining effective lobbies or directly and indirectly influencing politicians, political organizations, and institutions. At the same time, diasporans tend to remain involved in their homelands, either through transferring funds or more directly in local politics. Currently, ethno-national-religious diasporas are more demanding and active than before in attempts to promote...

For over ninety years a debate has been waging over how to define the tragedy of the Ottoman Armenians during World War I, referred to here as the Armenian genocide. The Armenian genocide was the culmination of an intrastate conflict between Armenians and Turks that began in the nineteenth century and escalated during World War I, when the Ottoman Empire lashed out at the Armenian minority that resided within its borders. The Ottoman Armenians were forcibly deported from their homes to the Syrian and Iraqi deserts, and under these harsh conditions many of them perished.¹ The use of the term...

During the last three decades, Turkey has repeatedly sent its forces across the border into Iraq, largely as a result of the trans-state nature of the Kurdish problem and the weakening control of the Iraqi central government over developments in Northern Iraq. The most recent of these incursions took place in 2011, previous interventions occurring in 1992, 1995, 1997, and 2008.¹ These frequent Turkish attacks have received wide international criticism, especially from EU countries (Hale 2007: 76). Furthermore, these offensive operations seem contrary to Turkey’s strategic culture as a status quo power, one that would normally hesitate before taking action...

The Israeli withdrawal from Lebanon in May 2000 had far-reaching effects on Israel and Lebanon, as well as on Middle Eastern regional dynamics. One of its lesser-known consequences was the creation of a new Lebanese diasporic community in Israel. This diaspora included the former members of the South Lebanese Army (SLA),¹ a militia mostly composed of Lebanese Maronite Christians, who collaborated militarily with Israel for over a quarter of a century within Israel’s self-proclaimed “security zone” in southern Lebanon. Following the Israeli withdrawal from Lebanon, many SLA members fled into Israeli territory in fear of Hizbullah’s reprisal.

While the Lebanese...

The two decades since the end of the Cold War have witnessed numerous intrastate conflicts (especially in the Balkans, Africa, and the Middle East) and various forms of outside intervention (particularly military intervention and mediation) designed to ameliorate them. Yet most of these conflicts (e.g., in Somalia, Iraq, and Sudan) turned out to be difficult if not impossible for external forces to cope with. The overall record of outside intervention in these conflicts shows more failures than successes; and political settlements reached due to outside efforts seem fragile and temporary.¹ At the same time, attempts by students of International Relations...