Description
Transnational volunteer fighters are those who travel to warzones to participate in conflicts absent the territorial or de-jure citizenship incentives we normally associate with war labouring. Given that the term foreign fighter has become virtually synonymous with jihadi fighters in Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria, it is unsurprising that scholarly interest in this phenomenon has developed rapidly. The existing literature has typically looked at volunteer fighting from a political behaviour perspective, exploring recruitment, motivations and impact, or has adopted a historical perspective, pointing to the phenomenon’s continuing challenge to the authority and right of the state to declare and enact war. In contrast, this paper adopts an ethical perspective towards volunteer war fighting. It treats volunteer fighters as ethical agents in that they have made an ethical decision to fight in a war that they have deemed morally just. Subsequently, the paper investigates how these agents make ethical sense of their decisions. The paper assumes that these ethical agents lack the formal language of jus ad bellum and jus in bello; rather, these agents’ ethical reflections will be stated in a vernacular language of just war. Hence, the paper offers a first cut into how these ethical reflections are stated by these agents and how these agents make ethical sense of their actions. Utilising open-source interviews and first-hand accounts from volunteers who travelled to fight against the Islamic State in Syria, this paper demonstrates that many of these agents draw from narratives of the past, specifically the Spanish Civil War, to legitimise and justify their right to war. Hence, politics comes prior to ethics in this vernacular just war.
