Description
The paper investigates why a relatively high number of Serbian foreign fighters joined the Russian side in the Ukraine War. Although the Serbian government has criminalised foreign fighting, at least a few hundred Serbs have participated in this conflict, with a steady stream of new volunteers joining. Common reasons cited for their involvement include poor socioeconomic conditions, financial gain, and a desire to repay Russian fighters for their participation in Yugoslav wars. In contrast, this paper proposes that ideology and micro-level group solidarity play significant roles in both individual and collective motivations to engage in fighting and aims to provide a deeper understanding of this phenomenon. Specifically, Serbian foreign fighters are affiliated with a larger ideological sphere commonly referred to as radical or extreme right, which broadly aligns with the ideals of the Russian ‘civilisationist turn’. This ideology has penetrated micro-level interactions and solidarity between the Serbian and Russian right-wing groups, leading to relatively high motivation of Serbian right-wing groups to join the War in Ukraine. On top of that, the paper invokes the concept of ‘digital kinship’ to elucidate the role of digital platforms in ideologisation and micro-level solidarity development. The paper examines Serbian foreign fighters’ networks and narratives to demonstrate that their motivation to fight is rooted in this civilisationist discourse, which portrays the West as corrupt and decadent while attributing Christian and traditional values to the East, supported by the sense of solidarity and digital kinship between the right-wing groups’ members.
Keywords: foreign fighters, War in Ukraine, radical/extreme right, civilisationism, digital kinship, Serbia
