Why Do Americans Go Abroad to Fight in Foreign Conflicts

Abstract

Why do Americans travel abroad to fight in civil conflicts? Since proclaiming the caliphate in 2014, the Islamic State (ISIS) has been recruiting men and women to the battlefields of Syria and Iraq from countries around the world. This study explores why American men and women volunteered to join ISIS and leave behind their families, their friends, and the comforts of American society. The profiles reviewed in the thesis were built from open-source documents. Three drivers were explored to explain this phenomenon: integration deficit, social media, and network connections. This study concluded that bidirectional social media use and social network connections were present in most of the cases surveyed.

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Document Details

Document Type
Technical Report
Publication Date
Jun 01, 2018
Accession Number
AD1059900

Entities

People

  • Alphonso Harris

Organizations

  • Naval Postgraduate School

Tags

DTIC Thesaurus Topics

  • Battlefields
  • Digital Media
  • Media
  • Recruiting
  • Social Media
  • Social Networking Services
  • Social Networks
  • Societies

Readers

  • Military History of the United States in the 20th Century.
  • Political Violence and Terrorism Studies.