Behavioral Sciences of Terrorism and Political Aggression

ISSN: 1943-4472 (Print) 1943-4480 (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rirt20

A ‘Tale of two Jihadis’? Improperly conflating

terrorists and foreign fighters in the Arab spring

Michael J. Schumacher & Peter J. Schraeder

To cite this article: Michael J. Schumacher & Peter J. Schraeder (2019): A ‘Tale of two Jihadis’?
Improperly conflating terrorists and foreign fighters in the Arab spring, Behavioral Sciences of
Terrorism and Political Aggression, DOI: 10.1080/19434472.2019.1590444

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/19434472.2019.1590444

Published online: 18 Mar 2019.

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BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES OF TERRORISM AND POLITICAL AGGRESSION
https://doi.org/10.1080/19434472.2019.1590444

A ‘Tale of two Jihadis’? Improperly conflating terrorists and

foreign fighters in the Arab spring
Michael J. Schumacher and Peter J. Schraeder
Department of Political Science, Loyola University Chicago, Chicago, USA

ABSTRACT ARTICLE HISTORY

This article draws on a unique dataset of state-level data for 196 Received 19 October 2018
countries to establish answers to three research questions. We Accepted 1 March 2019
begin by exploring whether a global spike in terrorist acts and the
KEYWORDS
numbers of foreign fighters leaving to fight for ISIS in Syria and Foreign fighters; terrorists;
Iraq are linked during the first five years of the Arab Spring Arab Spring; domestic
(2011–15). We also assess whether the spike in terrorist attacks political instability; negative
and foreign fighters for ISIS can be labeled a phenomenon of binomial regression
the Middle East and North Africa and Islam more generally. In
other words, are we witnessing a ‘Tale of Two Jihadis’? The
answer to both questions is ‘no.’ Third, we seek to establish
whether terrorist acts and foreign fighters are driven by the same
explanatory factors, as would be assumed by those who conflate
the two phenomena. A series of negative binomial regressions
demonstrates that while a country’s level of domestic political
instability leads to increases in both foreign fighters and terrorist
attacks, the explanatory commonalities end there. Whereas
foreign fighters to ISIS hail from Muslim majority countries with
higher levels of education and internet access, terrorist attacks
occur in countries with lower levels of unemployment and higher
levels of ethnic fractionalization.

Introduction
The popular protests commonly referred to as the Arab Spring1 that swept across the
Middle East and North Africa beginning in 2011 have largely failed to deliver on the opti-
mistic expectations of scholars and policymakers. They instead have resulted in at best an
Arab Fall and at worst an Arab Winter (Brownlee, Masoud, & Reynolds, 2015; Brynen,
Moore, Salloukh, & Zahar, 2012; Kamrava, 2014), as marked by two global trends that
are perceived negatively by domestic publics, the media, academics, and policymakers
within the northern industrialized democracies. First, the globe witnessed a surge in ter-
rorism that peaked in 2014 with 16,860 terrorist attacks according to the Global Terrorism
Database (START, 2017). The Middle East and North Africa was the largest regional contri-
butor that year, with terrorists undertaking 6,917 attacks in 2014 alone (a 52% increase
from 2013), although increases were evident in all regions of the world. This period also
witnessed the decisions of at least 24,900 citizens from 74 countries to travel to Syria to

CONTACT Michael J. Schumacher mschumacher2@luc.edu Department of Political Science, Loyola University

Chicago, 1032 W. Sheridan Road, Coffey Hall, 3rd Floor, Chicago, USA
© 2019 Society for Terrorism Research
2 M. J. SCHUMACHER AND P. J. SCHRAEDER

serve as ‘foreign fighters’ for the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) in the Syrian civil war
(Barrett, 2014; Soufan Group, 2015). These numbers increased after June 2014, when ISIS
announced the creation of a new ‘caliphate’ that included adjoining territory in Syria and
Iraq. The perceived negative implications associated with the surge in terrorist attacks and
the record number of foreign fighters for ISIS was captured by one of our students, who
made a literary alliteration to Charles Dickens, to hypothesize that what the world was wit-
nessing was ‘A Tale of Two Jihadis.’ This statement, made partially in jest, captured rising
misperceptions in the U.S. that disenchanted Muslims throughout the globe were largely
responsible for both the ‘threat’ posed by global terrorism and the foreign fighter
‘problem.’.
The primary purpose of this article, which draws on a unique dataset of state-level data
for 196 countries, is to establish preliminary answers to three research questions. We begin
by exploring whether a global spike in terrorist acts and the numbers of foreign fighters
leaving to fight for ISIS in Syria and Iraq are linked during the first five years of the Arab
Spring (2011–15). We also assess whether the spike in terrorist attacks and foreign
fighters to ISIS can be labeled a phenomenon of the Middle East and North Africa and
Islam more generally. In other words, are we witnessing a ‘Tale of Two Jihadis’? The
answer to both questions is ‘no.’ Third, we seek to establish whether terrorist acts and
foreign fighters are driven by the same state-level factors, as would be assumed by
those who conflate the two phenomena, or if each trend is explained by different
factors. The academic literature is largely silent on this question, in that scholarship typi-
cally has focused on separately explaining either terrorist attacks or foreign fighters.2 A
series of negative binomial regressions demonstrates that while a country’s level of dom-
estic political instability leads to increases in both foreign fighters and terrorist attacks, the
explanatory commonalities end there. Whereas foreign fighters to ISIS hail from Muslim
majority countries with higher levels of education and internet access, terrorist attacks
occur in countries with lower levels of unemployment and higher levels of ethnic
fractionalization.
The remainder of this article is divided into four sections. Section 1 provides a brief
review of the literatures devoted to foreign fighters and terrorists. A second section sets
out the research design, including the creation of separate, mutually exclusive dependent
variables of terrorists and foreign fighters, generation of hypotheses and independent
variables, and empirical strategy. Section 3 provides the statistical results and analysis. A
concluding section details the broader implications of the analysis and avenues for
future research. It is important to note that our analysis is based on state-level explanations
that can be generated via state-level data, as a prelude to future individual-level research,
including individual-level data that can be drawn from biographical and archival research
and field interviews. To be clear, our objective is to provide explanations using state-level
data that in the future can be tested employing individual-level data.

Foreign fighters, terrorists, or foreign terrorist fighters?

There is broad academic agreement in empirical studies on terrorism about certain attri-
butes of the concept of terror that lead an individual to be labeled a terrorist.3 These attri-
butes include (1) killing or threatening civilians; (2) having in mind a wider audience as the
target of terror; and (3) applying the strategy to achieve some political and/or religious end
 BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES OF TERRORISM AND POLITICAL AGGRESSION 3

(e.g. Weinberg, Pedahzur, & Hirsch-Hoefler, 2004). There is equally broad academic agree-
ment about what constitutes a foreign fighter: ‘A non-citizen of a state experiencing civil
conflict who arrives from an external state to join an insurgency’ (e.g. Malet, 2015). Toward
this end, a terrorist presumably could be a foreign fighter, and a foreign fighter presum-
ably could be a terrorist, but we argue they constitute two different forms of political
behavior.
The starting point of our analysis is a voluminous terrorism literature that seeks to ident-
ify the causes of terrorism. Those who seek quantitatively-driven answers have found that
there are numerous state-level conditions that may lead to increases or decreases in ter-
rorist activity (Krieger & Meierrieks, 2011). This quantitative subset of the terrorism litera-
ture explores numerous theoretical explanations by testing for a large number of
hypotheses, which in turn are informed by specific determinants and indicators. Table 1
summarizes the multitude of potential state-level explanations identified in this quantitat-
ive terrorism literature (Gassebner & Luechinger, 2011; Sandler, 2014).
The foreign fighter literature is much smaller in comparison. To date, the most compre-
hensive scholarly treatment of the foreign fighter phenomenon is Malet (2013), who esti-
mates that 335,118 foreign fighters have participated in 93 conflicts during the last two
centuries, beginning with the Greek War of Independence in 1821. Malet’s primary theor-
etical contribution is to demonstrate that foreign fighters often join insurgencies ‘to
defend some transnational identity community,’ which is either ethnically or ideologically
based, or both. Toward this end, he presents a typology that delineates between type of
insurgency (ethnic or non-ethnic) and the relationship of foreign fighters to the local
fighters (co-ethnic or non-co-ethnic). In this regard, Malet indicates in an on-line,
revised typology (see Malet, 2018) that foreign fighters in the Syrian civil war are driven
by ideology, and not ethnicity (i.e. they fall under the ‘true believer’ category, or non-
co-ethnics fighting in a non-ethnic conflict).
Data scarcity has prevented further study into the state-level factors that might contrib-
ute to the conditions pushing individuals to become foreign fighters. There have been two
exceptions. The first involves the quantitative analysis of a trove of records discovered in
Sinjar, Iraq, of 700 Muslim foreign fighters who entered Iraq between August 2006 and
August 2007 to fight occupying U.S. military forces. The so-called ‘Sinjar records’ include

Table 1. Determinants of terrorism.

Global Hypothesis
Economic Deprivation
Modernization Strain
Institutional Order
Political Transformation
Identity Conflict
Global Order
Contagion
Source: Krieger and Meierrieks (2011).
Potential determinant Possible indicators
Economic Conditions GDP p.c., GNI p.c., poverty, inequality
Economic Performance GDP growth, unemployment, inflation
Population Dynamics Population growth, size, age, structure, urbanization
Education Literacy, school attainment
Political Institutions Political rights, civil liberties
Economic Institutions Economic freedom, property rights protection
Government Welfare policies, government spending
Political Stability Regime stability, civil war proxy, domestic political instability
Minorities Ethnic or linguistic fractionalization
Religion Religious fractionalization
Economic Integration FDI, terms of trade, trade openness, globalization
International Politics alliances, foreign aid, incidences of conflict or crisis
Contagion Spatial, temporal proximity to terrorism
Geography Climate, elevation, latitude
4 M. J. SCHUMACHER AND P. J. SCHRAEDER

‘varying levels of information on each fighter, but often include the fighter’s country of
origin, hometown, age, occupation, the name of the fighter’s recruiter, and even the
route the fighter took to Iraq’ (Fishman & Felter, 2007). The statistical analysis of these
records has resulted in a limited number of conclusions about why this subset of
foreign fighters entered the war in Iraq, ranging from a combination of Muslim affinity,
geographic proximity (neighboring countries), and the authoritarian nature of the
source country (Krueger, 2006), to the argument that these foreign fighters came from
more developed and more religious societies that were also occupied by U.S. or Israeli mili-
tary forces (Hewitt & Kelley-Moore, 2009). One of the drawbacks of the Sinjar records is that
they document only a small fraction of a much larger number of foreign fighters, who
entered from only one transit point into Iraq.
A second exception is a recent publication by Pokalova (2018), who is one of the first to
statistically analyze the state-level factors that may be driving individuals to ISIS. The
author derives a number of testable hypotheses regarding political, economic, demo-
graphic, and social factors, similar to those used in quantitative terrorism studies, to test
what conditions might cause countries to serve as sources of foreign fighters to ISIS.
She finds that countries with higher levels of human development, unemployment,
youth, emigration, and Muslim populations correlate with higher levels of foreign
fighters. An important shortcoming of Pokalova’s study is that she uses 2010 data to
create her independent variables. This means that her analysis cannot account for the
major political, demographic, and economic changes associated with the Arab Spring
(2011-present), including the state of the world in 2014 when the ISIS caliphate spanning
Iraq and Syria truly began to take shape. Pokalova’s research nonetheless represents the
first comprehensive attempt to identify the state-level conditions driving foreign
fighters to ISIS, marking the beginning of what could become a rich quantitative research
agenda on foreign fighting, similar to what already exists in quantitative terrorism studies.
There has been a tendency in recent years for scholars to link terrorism and foreign
fighters. In 2015, Byman wrote of the dangers posed by returning foreign fighters from
Syria, describing them as brutal, ‘hardened veterans’ likely to undertake acts of terrorism
in the absence of local security arrangements directly aimed at stopping them. In a later,
supplementary article, Byman (2016) clarifies that while fears of a new global terrorist
threat stemming from foreign fighters may have been overstated, they are not incorrect,
and recent trends suggest they are not unjustified. Cragin (2017, p. 293) argued that if
foreign fighters do not die on the battlefield, they are likely to return home to commit
acts of terrorism or become recruiters who ‘inspire local residents to become terrorists.’
Most recently, Malet and Hayes (2018, p. 1) published an article addressing the question,
‘How long does it typically take a returned foreign fighter to launch a domestic terror
attack?’ Although the authors find that foreign fighter returnees do not pose an ‘indefinite
threat’ to their home countries, they do conclude that if foreign fighters commit an act of
terrorism that it is likely to happen within the first six months of their return. The fact that
they test this assumption is indicative of the popular perception that it is no longer a
matter of ‘if’ but ‘when’ a returning foreign fighter will undertake an act of terrorism.
This perception is obviously due to the fact that some foreign fighter returnees have
engaged in terrorist attacks. For example, foreign fighters have committed acts of terror-
ism both overseas and at home (e.g. British-born Mohammed Emwazi, also known as
Jihadi John, was infamous for beheading ISIS captives on video; French-born Mehdi
 BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES OF TERRORISM AND POLITICAL AGGRESSION 5

Nemmouche murdered four people at a Jewish museum in Brussels; and the Paris and
Brussels attacks in November 2015 and March 2016, respectively, were orchestrated and
carried out by foreign fighter returnees from Syria) (Almasy & Erdman, 2014; Braithwaite
& Chu, 2018; Casciani, 2015). Numerous foreign fighters have also directed domestic
acts of terrorism from abroad (e.g. French-born Rachid Kassim was an infamous ISIS pro-
pagandist who influenced numerous ‘lone wolves’ to commit acts of murder in their
homes countries) (McKernan, 2017). And, there are well-documented cases where aspiring
foreign fighters who were thwarted from traveling overseas to fight turned to terrorism
instead (e.g. Lewis Ludlow, who was prevented from leaving the United Kingdom to go
to the Philippines in February 2018, was later arrested for planning to orchestrate a
truck attack in Central London) (Dodd, 2018). Indeed, some of these individuals are part
of the same networks, absorb the same propaganda, and are inspired by or connected
to the same organizations.
To our knowledge, 2017 witnessed the publication of the first quantitatively-
oriented article that addressed the impact of the foreign fighter phenomenon on ter-
rorism. Braithwaite and Chu (2018) found that the outcomes of disparate civil conflicts
that include a foreign fighter element will have an impact on terrorism at home.
Specifically, the authors find that foreign civil conflicts ending in success for rebel
groups that had foreign fighter contingents can result in a surplus of well-trained
foreign fighters, which increases the risk of terrorism in the home countries of
former foreign fighters. However, this work focuses more on conflict outcomes than
on foreign fighter flows, and therefore does not address the empirical questions of
our study.
The growing tendency to link foreign fighters with terrorism was cast in international
stone following a 2014 meeting of the United Nations (UN) Security Council devoted to
ISIS and foreign fighters. For the first time, the international community conflated
foreign fighting with terrorism as witnessed by the adoption of the term ‘foreign terrorist
fighters.’ This was demonstrated by UN Security Council Resolution 2178, which under-
scored that ‘foreign terrorist fighters [our italics] increase the intensity, duration and intract-
ability of conflicts, and also may pose a serious threat to their States of origin, the States
they transit and the States to which they travel, as well as States neighboring [sic] zones of
armed conflict in which foreign terrorist fighters are active and that are affected by serious
security burdens’ (UNSC, 2014). The UN was following in the legislative footsteps of what
many northern industrialized countries had already been doing: Criminalizing the act of
joining and supporting ISIS and deeming those who travel to Syria and Iraq to join ISIS
as foreign terrorist fighters. For example, the U.S. both criminalized the act of joining
ISIS and started using the term foreign terrorist fighter in the 2014 annual State Depart-
ment Country Reports (e.g. see U.S. Department of State, 2014). The conflation of
foreign fighting and terrorism is now not just a matter of perception, but of legislative
action as well.

Research design
Our study is designed to offer the first comprehensive, statistical analysis of foreign
fighters and terrorists. We specifically are interested in whether common state-level
factors can explain increases in both foreign fighters and terrorist attacks.
6 M. J. SCHUMACHER AND P. J. SCHRAEDER

Creating mutually exclusive dependent variables: foreign fighters and terrorists

We begin our analysis by creating two mutually exclusive dependent variables: Total
number of foreign fighters by country who traveled to Syria and Iraq to fight for ISIS
during the first five years (2011–15) of the Arab Spring, and the absolute number of ter-
rorist attacks that occurred in each country of the world during this same period. To cal-
culate our foreign fighter variable, we created a comprehensive list of foreign fighters by
combining two waves of estimates (2014 and 2015) collected by the International Centre
for the Study of Radicalization (Neumann, 2015; Zelin, 2013) and The Soufan Group
(Barrett, 2014; Soufan Group, 2015). According to the authors of these reports, data collec-
tion methods vary due to the clandestine nature of foreign fighting. Some estimates come
from official sources within a host country or the United Nations, and others are based on
independent reporting. For some countries, multiple foreign fighter figures have been
reported by different sources, leading to confusion and disagreement as to how many
foreign fighters were sent. When there was disagreement between sources as to the
number of foreign fighters that traveled from a specific country, we reported the
average between any two figures. We did this because reporting either the highest (i.e.
potentially inflated) estimate or the lowest (i.e. most conservative) estimate may bias
results. For example, countries which find it disadvantageous to be perceived as global
sources of foreign fighters might be inclined to self-report lower totals. Adopting the
average of estimates is therefore expected to mitigate the potential political biases associ-
ated with estimates that may be either too high or too low.4
To calculate the absolute number of terrorist attacks occurring in a country during the
same 2011–15 period, we use the University of Maryland’s Global Terrorism Database
(GTD) (START, 2017). The GTD defines a terrorist attack as ‘the threatened or actual use
of illegal force and violence by a non-state actor to attain a political, economic, religious,
or social goal through fear, coercion, or intimidation,’ in which at least two of three criteria
must be met (1) ‘The violent act was aimed at attaining a political, economic, religious, or
social goal’; (2) ‘The violent act included evidence of an intention to coerce, intimidate, or
convey some other message to a larger audience (or audiences) other than the immediate
victims’; and (3) ‘The violent act was outside the precepts of International Humanitarian
Law’ (START, 2017).
The GTD accounts for the fact that there is often definitional overlap between terrorism
and other forms of crime and violence such as insurgency and guerrilla warfare, hate
crimes, and organized crime. To account for this, an act is only coded as terrorism by
GTD coders when it clearly meets the criteria set out above. An example from the
recent civil war in Syria is telling. ISIS can, at the same time, be considered both an insur-
gent group and terrorist organization. It has been involved in insurgent activity in Syria
and Iraq against government and coalition forces since it declared its caliphate in 2014.
Clashes between ISIS and conventional military forces are not coded as terrorism.
However, when ISIS detonated two explosive-laden vehicles in a suburb of Homs, Syria
killing 22 and injuring 70 on December 12, 2015, the incident was included in the GTD’s
terrorist event count.
Three additional elements of the GTD’s variable that we utilize merit mention. First, it
includes all cases of domestic and transnational terrorism that occur in a country. This is
because it does not matter from where the terrorist attack occurs, but rather whether a
 BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES OF TERRORISM AND POLITICAL AGGRESSION 7

country’s domestic environment is conducive to terrorist attacks. It also includes all suc-
cessful and thwarted terrorist attacks occurring in a country, as evidence of either
allows us to test the state-level factors that lead to more terrorism, successfully orche-
strated or not. Finally, we do not separate out the database into attacks committed by
Islamic terrorist groups and attacks committed by other terrorist groups. We are trying
to capture the full scope of what state-level factors lead to terrorism; limiting our analysis
to cases of Islamic terrorism would restrict our ability to do that.

Independent variables and hypotheses

We build on the conclusions of the broader terrorism and foreign fighter literatures to
explore whether the rise in foreign fighters for ISIS and the surge in global terrorist
attacks are linked during the first five years (2011–15) of the Arab Spring and whether
they can be attributed to the same explanatory factors. We are especially focused on expla-
natory factors that are potentially relevant for both foreign fighters and terrorists. We derive
a total of twelve testable hypotheses, which can be briefly summarized as follows.
First, we test whether the global spike in terrorist acts and the numbers of foreign
fighters leaving to fight for ISIS are linked. As detailed by the nascent literature on
foreign fighting, especially relating to the potential threat of returning foreign fighters
(see e.g. Byman, 2015; Cragin, 2017; Malet & Hayes, 2018), the proposed causal link is
that foreign fighters will return more motivated to attack than when they left. Hence,
the expectation in the literature is that countries that send more foreign fighters will
have more foreign fighter returnees and therefore more terrorism. Similarly, the expec-
tation of the terrorism literature is that countries with greater levels of terrorist activity
are more likely to have greater recruitment capabilities for foreign fighters. As a result,
the first two hypotheses we can derive from these expectations are:
H1: The greater the number of foreign fighters a country sends, the greater the number of ter-
rorist attacks it will experience.

H2: The more terrorist attacks a country experiences, the greater the number of foreign
fighters it will send.

To test these hypotheses, we employ the same data that were utilized to construct the
independent variables of foreign fighters to ISIS and terrorist attacks (see above). We
insert our terrorist attacks dependent variable as an independent variable when seeking
to determine what drives foreign fighters to ISIS, and insert our foreign fighters to ISIS
dependent variable as an independent variable when seeking to determine what drives
terrorist attacks.
A second set of hypotheses explore whether the increases in terrorist acts and the
numbers of foreign fighters can be labeled as phenomena of the Middle East and North
Africa and Islam more generally. Due to the fact that ISIS is a Muslim extremist group oper-
ating in two countries (Syria and Iraq) that are also predominantly Muslim, it is logical that
the makeup of its fighting force will be Muslim, drawing from the populations of other pre-
dominantly Muslim countries. This is consistent with findings that increases in Muslim war
volunteering are the result of a growing, pan-Islamic identity movement that gathered
strength beginning with the Iranian revolution of 1978–79, and the emergence of
Muslim foreign fighters in a variety of conflicts with an Islamic dimension, such as the
8 M. J. SCHUMACHER AND P. J. SCHRAEDER

foreign mujahedin in Afghanistan (Hegghammer, 2010; Testas, 2004). Such a line of reason-
ing would suggest that countries with a greater pool of Muslims would see more foreign
fighters join ISIS. This is also in line with the assumption that Muslims are responsible for
the recent rise in global terrorism since the events of September 11, 2001 (see e.g. Fish,
Jensenius, & Michel, 2010; Gleditsch & Rudolfsen, 2016). We therefore derive the following
testable hypothesis:
H3: The greater the percentage of a country’s population that is Muslim, the greater the
number of terrorist attacks it will experience and foreign fighters it will send.

We calculate Muslims as percent of population using data from the Pew Research Center
(2014).
To test whether foreign fighting and terrorism are phenomena associated with the
Middle East and North Africa, we include a variable that accounts for the regional distri-
bution of both acts. We divide countries into five regions: Asia, Europe, Middle East and
North Africa, Sub-Saharan Africa, and the Western Hemisphere. The testable hypothesis
is as follows:
H4: The region of the Middle East and North Africa should embody a greater number of ter-
rorist attacks and foreign fighters.

Countries included in our measure of the Middle East and North Africa are Algeria, Bahrain,
Egypt, Iran, Israel, Jordan, Kuwait, Lebanon, Libya, Morocco, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia,
Tunisia, Turkey, United Arab Emirates, and Yemen. Iraq and Syria are not included in
that these countries represent the destination of foreign fighters to ISIS. Palestine is not
included due to missing data.
A third set of hypotheses focus on a variety of socio-economic explanations. For
example, poor economic conditions, specifically stemming from poverty and unemploy-
ment, serve as potential root causes of terrorism and foreign fighters. Poverty has been
shown to be an inconsistent predicator of terrorism. Krueger and Maleckova (2003)
tested the poverty hypothesis and found no significant relationship between market
opportunities or income and terrorism. In a comprehensive study that tested multiple
economic indicators, Piazza (2006, p. 159) found ‘no significant relationship between
any of the measures of economic development and terrorism.’ Nevertheless, the conven-
tional wisdom is that individuals who participate in political violence, from terrorism to
foreign fighting, are thought to have fewer economic opportunities, living in countries
with higher levels of poverty and unemployment. Being economically marginalized theor-
etically forces individuals to seek opportunities elsewhere, including with terrorist organ-
izations or organizations like ISIS, which offer jobs and a sense of purpose (Atran, 2010).
Therefore, two testable hypotheses are:
H5: The greater a country’s level of poverty, the greater the number of terrorist attacks it will
experience and foreign fighters it will send.

We use gross national income (GNI) per capita from The World Bank (2017a), and logar-
ithmically transform the variable to account for issues of diminishing returns5 and the rela-
tive value of increases in $1 between countries.
H6: The greater a country’s level of unemployment, the greater the number of terrorist attacks
it will experience and foreign fighters it will send.
 BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES OF TERRORISM AND POLITICAL AGGRESSION 9

Unemployment rate is from The World Bank (2017c).

Education level is also important within socio-economic explanations. Robert Pape
(2005) demonstrated in a seminal study on global suicide terrorism that suicide terrorists
were more likely to be from literate countries with higher levels of college-educated indi-
viduals. This finding has since been supported in quantitative studies on terrorism where
the dominant assumption – that poorly educated populations are more susceptible to ter-
rorist recruitment – has been shown to be empirically invalid (Brockhoff, Krieger, & Meier-
rieks, 2015; Krueger & Maleckova, 2003). However, the conventional wisdom surrounding
ISIS recruitment is that uneducated individuals are more likely to sympathize with and join
the ranks of ISIS. These individuals are portrayed in the extreme as ignorant of the true
implications of joining an extremist organization like ISIS, and in any case as more easily
manipulated by ISIS propaganda efforts due to low levels of education. To the contrary,
more educated individuals are assumed to be able to see through the propaganda
efforts of organizations like ISIS, and having other avenues of economic opportunity,
are less prone to being recruited (Gates & Podder, 2015; Gentzkow & Shapiro, 2004;
Krieger & Meierrieks, 2011). Since there is no conclusive finding in the literature regarding
the role of education, we err on the side of hypothesizing the conventional wisdom.
Therefore:
H7: The greater a country’s level of education, the lower the number of terrorist attacks it will
experience and foreign fighters it will send.

We use the Education Index from the United Nations Development Programme’s Human
Development Index (2016).
Diverse studies have also demonstrated that terrorists and foreign fighters have
adopted modern forms of telecommunication to aid in recruitment, communication,
and the spreading of propaganda (Sageman, 2008; Thomas, 2003). Media outlets have
been keen to point out that the most sophisticated use of the internet by a terrorist organ-
ization has been by ISIS, which has creatively used the internet to deploy propaganda,
maintain recruitment and messaging forums, raise funds from across the globe, and
even start an online magazine (Dabiq) to help legitimize the organization (Stern &
Berger, 2016). We hypothesize:
H8: The greater a country’s level of internet access, the greater the number of terrorist attacks it
will experience and foreign fighters it will send.

We adopt the ‘internet users per 100 people’ measure from The World Bank (2017b).
A fifth set of hypotheses are derivative of the social, especially ethnic and religious
make-up of countries. Ever since Fearon and Laitin (2003) created ethnic and religious frac-
tionalization indices to statistically test the then conventional wisdom that civil wars are
caused by ethnic and religious antagonisms (and, according to their analyses, they are
not), these variables have been included in quantitative studies of terrorism. While the
findings of this literature remain inconclusive, Krieger and Meierrieks (2011) argue that
identity hypotheses remain empirically valid. Terrorists are driven to act by a collective
ideology that is fostered by some identity or world view, whether it be ethnic, religious,
or nationalist. The same can be said about foreign fighters. In societies where one world-
view prevails over another, or where one ethnic group is marginalized in favor of a domi-
nant ethnic group, terror is often the means to have an inferior group’s voice heard or is a
10 M. J. SCHUMACHER AND P. J. SCHRAEDER

means of shifting potential material gains in their favor. Furthermore, individuals who find
themselves on the ethnic or religious margins will seek solace in like-minded groups. The
following two hypotheses are derived:
H9: The greater a country’s level of ethnic fractionalization, the greater the number of terrorist
attacks it will experience and foreign fighters it will send.

A country’s level of ethnic fractionalization is adopted from the Alesina, Devleeschauwer,

Easterly, Kurlat, and Wacziarg (2003) fractionalization dataset.
H10: The greater a country’s level of religious fractionalization, the greater the number of ter-
rorist attacks it will experience and foreign fighters it will send.

A country’s level of religious fractionalization is also adopted from the Alesina et al. (2003)
fractionalization dataset.
The political dimension is also important. Some scholars have found that highly demo-
cratic countries are more likely to experience terrorism (Abadie, 2006; Bohlen, 2015; Li,
2005; Savun & Phillips, 2009). The theoretical link between democratic governance and ter-
rorism nonetheless is complex; grievances stemming from a lack of civil and political rights
in autocratic states, especially military dictatorships, are likely a mechanism that can breed
terrorism (Walsh & Piazza, 2010). It is also theoretically possible that autocratic regimes are
better able to suppress terrorist groups, thus preventing such activity within their borders.
In more recent studies, scholars (Gaibulloev, Piazza, & Sandler, 2017) have shown that
there is an inverted U-shaped relationship between regime type and terrorism, suggesting
that both full-fledged democracies and strict autocracies are less prone to terrorism than
mixed or hybrid-regimes. Nevertheless, conventional wisdom suggests that democratic
political systems allow for the peaceful airing and resolution of political grievances. As a
result, they are less likely to serve as breeding grounds for discontent and radicalization,
and hence result in lower levels of terrorism and lower numbers of fighters for any inter-
national conflict, regardless of where it may be taking place. Therefore, the hypothesis is as
follows:
H11: The greater a country’s level of authoritarianism, the greater the number of terrorist
attacks it will experience and foreign fighters it will send.

We adopt the Marshall, Gurr, and Jaggers (2016) Polity IV score, which ranges from −10
(highly authoritarian) to 10 (highly democratic).
A final, politically-inspired hypothesis involves the degree to which a regime is under-
going domestic political instability. Specifically, logic would suggest that stable regimes
are less likely to serve as sources of foreign fighters to a conflict and are less likely to
experience terrorism. This logic theoretically should hold regardless of whether a
regime is democratic or authoritarian, as long as it is stable (i.e. via coercive measures
under authoritarian regimes and via open political discourse in democratic regimes). Con-
versely, countries having recently undergone, or currently undergoing, some form of pol-
itical destabilization, such as anti-regime riots or revolutionary change, are invariably less
stable and less capable of maintaining control over their populations (Campos & Gasseb-
ner, 2013). They subsequently should be more likely to serve as sources of foreign fighters
to a conflict and more likely to experience terrorist attacks. The testable hypothesis for this
proposition would be as follows:
 BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES OF TERRORISM AND POLITICAL AGGRESSION 11

H12: The greater a country’s level of domestic political instability, the greater the number of
terrorist attacks it will experience and foreign fighters it will send.

We utilize a weighted domestic political instability index taken from Databanks Inter-
national Cross-National Time-Series Data Archive (Banks & Wilson, 2017), and logarithmi-
cally transform this variable to standardize (i.e. make it more linear) and account for
diminishing returns.6 The types of domestic political instability included in the variable,
including the relative weighted values, are as follows: anti-government demonstrations
are weighted as 10, general strikes as 20, major government crises as 20, government
purges as 20, riots as 25, and revolutions as 150. We multiply the value for each variable
in the dataset by the specific weight, multiply that sum of products by 100, and divide by
the number of variables included in the equation, which is six.

Empirical strategy
We are limited in our ability to perform panel analysis in that there are no time-series data
available for foreign fighters, which is one of our two dependent variables. This variable
instead represents a sum total of foreign fighters by country for the entire 2011–15
period. We did the same with our second dependent variable, terrorist attacks, which
also represents the sum total of terrorist attacks by country for the five-year 2011–15
period. We subsequently did the same with each independent variable (i.e. we averaged
each over 2011–15 to give us a single data point for each). The only exception involved the
creation of region dummies for Asia, Europe, Middle East and North Africa, Sub-Saharan
Africa, and the Western Hemisphere, where each country is given a numeric value of ‘0’
or ‘1,’ to denote which region it is affiliated with and thus control for region-specific
shocks that may or may not independently affect a specific geographical locale. Sub-
Saharan Africa was chosen randomly as our reference group.
Our data have a wide variance, a set minimum value of zero, and standard deviations
that are far larger than the means (Table 2). We therefore adopted negative binomial
regression analysis and use robust standard errors to account for the potential misspecifi-
cation of the model (Allison & Waterman, 2002). We report the incidence rate ratios by way
of eigenvalues to enable a more succinct understanding of how increases in certain vari-
ables may increase numbers of foreign fighters and incidents of terrorism.

Results and analysis

The raw data provide an important backdrop to our first empirical question of whether a
global spike in terrorist acts and the numbers of foreign fighters leaving to fight for ISIS in
Syria and Iraq are linked. A total of 24,900 citizens from 74 countries traveled to Syria to
fight for ISIS during the first five years of the Arab Spring (2011–15). During this period,
ten countries accounted for two-thirds (67%) of all foreign fighters to the conflict
(Table 3). Tunisia was the largest contributor (4,500 fighters), with the ‘top ten’ group
also including five additional Middle East and North African countries (Jordan, Lebanon,
Morocco, Saudi Arabia, and Turkey) and four European countries (France, Germany,
Russia, and the United Kingdom). The data also demonstrate that there was a dramatic
surge in terrorist attacks beginning in 2011 and peaking in 2014, with a total of 57,279 ter-
rorist attacks occurring during the first five years of the Arab Spring (2011–15) (Figure 1).
 12
M. J. SCHUMACHER AND P. J. SCHRAEDER
Table 2. Summary statistics.
Variable Source Obs Mean Std. Dev. Min Max
Foreign Fighters Neumann (2015) and The Soufan Group (2015) 193 129.0155 450.8642 0 4500
Number of Attacks Global Terrorism Database (START, 2017) 195 292.7641 1247.166 0 12262
Muslim percent Pew Research Center (2014) 195 0.257349 0.425651 0 .999
GNI GNI per capita, The World Bank (2017a) 187 9.147373 1.178691 6.46925 11.77089
Unemployment Unemployment rate, The World Bank (2017c) 178 8.812627 5.998908 0.2758 29.0736
Internet access Internet penetration, The World Bank (2017b) 194 40.18166 28.70174 0 96.78725
Level of Education United Nations Development Programme (2016) 187 0.624392 0.173052 0.200316 0.957647
Level of Democracy Polity IV, Marshall et al. (2016) 165 4.044848 6.106788 −10 10
Domestic political instability Banks and Wilson (2017) 195 5.260585 3.173045 0 11.53409
Ethnic fractionalization Alesina et al. (2003) 191 0.43104 0.261972 0 0.930175
Religious fractionalization Alesina et al. (2003) 193 0.427421 0.23879 0 0.86026
Western Hemisphere 195 0.179487 0.384748 0 1
Europe 195 0.241026 0.428807 0 1
Asia 195 0.225641 0.41908 0 1
Africa 195 0.251282 0.434867 0 1
Middle East and North Africa 195 0.102564 0.30417 0 1
 BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES OF TERRORISM AND POLITICAL AGGRESSION 13

Table 3. Top 10 Countries by foreign fighters.

Country Foreign Fighters
Tunisia 4,500
Saudi Arabia 2,500
Jordan 1,795
Russia 1,600
France 1,450
Turkey 1,400
Morocco 1,350
Lebanon 900
Germany 630
United Kingdom 630
Source: International Centre for the Study of Radicalization (Neumann, 2015; Zelin, 2013) and The Soufan Group (Barrett,
2014; Soufan Group, 2015).

Asia was the largest contributor of terrorist attacks during this five-year period (24,553
attacks), followed by the Middle East and North Africa (21,492), Sub-Saharan Africa
(6,886), Europe (3,272), and the Western Hemisphere (1,076). Although of different magni-
tudes, all five geographical regions witnessed a peak in terrorist attacks in 2014. It is there-
fore easy to see why domestic publics, the media, academics, and policymakers in the
northern industrialized democracies have linked the proliferation of foreign fighters to
ISIS with the surge in global terrorism.
Once we break down terrorist attacks by ‘top ten’ country, however, the raw data
demonstrate that there is no overlap between those countries and our top ten list of

Figure 1. Global terrorist attacks (1970–2016).

Source: University of Maryland’s global terrorism database (START, 2017).
14 M. J. SCHUMACHER AND P. J. SCHRAEDER

Table 4. Top 10 Countries by terrorist attacks.

Country Terrorist Attacks
Pakistan 8,258
Afghanistan 7,077
India 3,690
Nigeria 2,486
Philippines 2,361
Yemen 2,283
Somalia 2,106
Thailand 1,631
Libya 1,627
Ukraine 1,544
Source: University of Maryland’s Global Terrorism Database (START, 2017).

countries that produced foreign fighters for ISIS during the first five years of the Arab
Spring (2011–15).7 To be clear, none of the countries from the top ten list of terrorist
attacks is found on the top ten list of foreign fighters to ISIS. Indeed, three South Asian
countries dominate the top ten list of countries experiencing terrorist attacks, with
8,258 terrorist attacks in Pakistan, 7,077 in Afghanistan, and 3,690 in India (Table 4). This
list also includes two additional Asian countries (the Philippines and Thailand), two
African countries (Nigeria and Somalia), and one European country (Ukraine). Only two
countries hail from the Middle East and North Africa: Libya and Yemen.
The results of the negative binomial regressions provide clear support for the finding
suggested by the raw data (Table 5). The statistical analysis demonstrates that higher
numbers of foreign fighters do not lead to higher numbers of terrorist attacks
(Model 4), and that higher levels of terrorist attacks do not lead to higher numbers of
foreign fighters (Model 2). In sum, foreign fighters to ISIS and the increase in terrorist
attacks during the first five years of the Arab Spring (2011–15) constitute different
forms of political behavior.
The statistical analysis also provides a conclusive response to our second empirical
question of whether the spike in terrorist attacks and foreign fighters to ISIS can be
labeled a phenomenon of the Middle East and North Africa and Islam more generally.
Specifically, the results demonstrate that disenchanted Muslims throughout the globe,
including in the Middle East and North Africa, are not responsible for both global terrorism
and foreign fighters. Not surprisingly, Muslim as a percentage of a country’s population is
positively associated with higher levels of foreign fighters to ISIS, in that only Muslims have
been known to join this religiously-based organization (Models 1 and 2). This is not true for
terrorist attacks, where Muslim is not statistically significant (Models 3 and 4). Moreover,
the region of the Middle East and North Africa is not significant for either foreign
fighters or terrorist attacks. Asia is the only region that is statistically significant (0.1
level), and only as concerns foreign fighters. This region accounts for 4,145 foreign
fighters from twenty countries, with eight countries contributing more than 300 foreign
fighters each: China, Indonesia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Pakistan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan,
and Uzbekistan.
The statistical answer to our third empirical question – Are terrorist acts and foreign
fighters driven by the same state-level factors – is especially fascinating. The overarching
answer is that although there are some common explanatory factors, the domestic con-
ditions that drive terrorism do not necessarily drive foreign fighting, and vice-versa.
Specific findings are pertinent.
 BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES OF TERRORISM AND POLITICAL AGGRESSION 15

Table 5. Negative binomial regression results foreign fighters and terrorists in the Arab spring era
(2011–15).
(1) (2) (3) (4)
VARIABLES Foreign Fighters Foreign Fighters Terrorist Attacks Terrorist Attacks
Terrorist Attacks 1.000
(0.000305)
Foreign Fighters 1.000
(0.000407)
Muslim percent 483.038*** 478.087*** .960 .873
(1.173) (1.181) (0.714) (0.720)
GNI per capitalog 1.310 1.289 .657 .618
(0.618) (0.607) (0.623) (0.644)
Unemployment 0.974 .975 .923*** .928**
(0.0465) (0.0464) (0.0310) (0.0310)
Internet access 1.033** 1.033** .985 .986
(0.0158) (0.0161) (0.0192) (0.0188)
Education level 1883.107* 2166.668** 51.284 59.381
(3.996) (3.909) (3.593) (3.595)
Level of democracy 0.948 .943 1.005 1.012
(0.0420) (0.0451) (0.0432) (0.0446)
Ethnic fractionalization 0.855 .811 13.977*** 16.374***
(1.239) (1.267) (0.849) (0.870)
Religious fractionalization 2.360 2.434 .960 .831
(1.086) (1.105) (0.840) (0.873)
Domestic political instabilitylog 1.618*** 1.599*** 1.882*** 1.858***
(0.0897) (0.0895) (0.0552) (0.0563)
Western hemisphere 3.037 3.001 .318 .318
(1.613) (1.612) (0.813) (0.803)
Europe 9.185 8.865 1.407 1.256
(1.375) (1.348) (0.883) (0.890)
Asia 11.686* 10.345* 1.596 1.694
(1.331) (1.239) (0.715) (0.708)
Middle East and North Africa 1.891 1.861 2.186 1.857
(1.093) (1.080) (0.909) (0.913)
Constant −12.26** −12.11** 1.291 1.699
(5.078) (4.963) (3.975) (4.127)
Observations 155 155 155 155
Wald test (χ 2) 262.41*** 272.50*** 283.28*** 285.00***
***p < 0.01; **p < 0.05; *p < 0.1.
Notes: The table includes negative binomial regressions; dependent variable in Model 1 and 2 is total number of foreign
fighters sent from a country to ISIS and Model 2 and 3 is the sum total of terrorist attacks in a country from 2011–15; the
coefficients given in the table are incidence-rate ratios where values greater than 1 indicate an increase and values less
than 1 a decrease in the outcome variable; robust standard errors in parentheses.

The first finding is that three factors do not matter for either foreign fighters or terrorist
attacks: poverty, religious fractionalization, and level of democracy. The common assump-
tion that more impoverished, religiously-fractionalized, and/or authoritarian countries will
lead to higher numbers of terrorist attacks and foreign fighters for ISIS is unfounded (see
Wilson & Piazza, 2013).
Second, a country’s level of domestic political instability is the only factor that is stat-
istically significant in contributing to higher levels of both terrorist attacks and foreign
fighters to ISIS and is robust to all model specifications. Taking the incidence rate ratio
of all models shows that increasing the level of domestic political instability in a
country by 1 results in a roughly 60–62% [(1.599–1) * (100)] increase in the number of
foreign fighters a country sends and a 86–88% increase in the number of terrorist
attacks it experiences. One explanation for this phenomenon is that domestic political
instability is indicative of declining regime control which permits foreign fighters and
16 M. J. SCHUMACHER AND P. J. SCHRAEDER

terrorist actors to move more freely within and across the borders of a given country or
geographical region. Another explanation is that domestic political instability provides
the environment necessary to carry out more, and increasingly deadly, terrorist attacks,
as potential terrorist actors are more capable of freely coordinating with each other and
with international terrorist networks (Campos & Gassebner, 2013). This finding has impor-
tant policymaking implications for those who favor international democracy promotion,
which we explore further below.
Two factors are statistically significant for explaining foreign fighters to ISIS, but not ter-
rorist attacks. First, a country’s level of internet access runs in the expected positive direc-
tion. A 1-unit increase in internet access equals a roughly 3% increase in foreign fighters.
This finding is intuitively appealing, in that one would assume that recruitment from
countries outside of the conflict is facilitated by potential recruits having internet
access. It is also consistent with the popular narrative regarding the power and attractive-
ness of the ISIS online propaganda/recruitment machine (Stern & Berger, 2016). Although
the null result for terrorist attacks is counter-intuitive given the hypothesized relationship
(i.e. one would expect recruitment for terrorist attacks, like foreign fighters, to be depen-
dent on internet access), the null relationship is potentially explained by recent studies
that show that technological resources, such as the internet, better enable intelligence
agencies and local law enforcement to prevent terrorist attacks through increased surveil-
lance and monitoring (see e.g. Byman, 2016; Wright, 2018).
Second, a country’s education level is also statistically significant for explaining foreign
fighters to ISIS (but not terrorist attacks). Education is positively associated with foreign
fighters (i.e. foreign fighters are more likely to hail from countries where the level of edu-
cation is higher). This conclusion makes sense, in that it takes a significant amount of
know-how to not only leave one’s country to travel abroad, but to operate through inter-
national channels that allow one to gain entry into the conflict zone. In the case of foreign
fighters for ISIS, for example, this often includes taking a series of flights to a neighboring
country, such as Turkey, and then negotiating land entry into Syria and Iraq. Because our
data do not allow us to infer individual-level explanations from state-level data, we could
say that this finding instead complements recent work showing a disproportionate share
of ‘Islamist radicals,’ including those who have joined ISIS, have educational backgrounds
in engineering, including many with post-graduate degrees (see Gambetta & Hertog,
2016).
Two factors are statistically significant for explaining terrorist attacks, but not foreign
fighters to ISIS. First, unemployment is negatively correlated with terrorist attacks:
higher levels of unemployment lead to lower numbers of terrorist attacks. This runs con-
trary to the hypothesized relationship that idle members of society (i.e. the unemployed)
are more likely to carry out terrorist attacks. It nonetheless makes sense that employed
individuals will potentially enjoy both the organizational and financial resources necessary
to organize and conduct terrorist attacks though this is a conclusion deserving of further
research.
Second, the most significant factor explaining terrorist attacks (but not foreign fighters
to ISIS) is ethnic fractionalization. A 1-unit increase in ethnic fractionalization leads to a
roughly fourteen-fold increase in terrorist attacks. This relationship is as expected:
Ethnic conflict is more likely to result in domestic violence, rather than prompt individuals
to leave their countries to undertake violence abroad. Countries like Afghanistan and
 BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES OF TERRORISM AND POLITICAL AGGRESSION 17

Nigeria, which have experienced the third and fifth largest numbers of terrorist attacks
(7,077 and 2,486) during the Arab Spring era, are highly ethnically fractionalized, experien-
cing their own forms of domestic conflict, and thus are more likely to experience terrorist
attacks than to send foreign fighters to ISIS.

Implications and avenues for future research

The objective of this article was to provide answers to three interrelated research ques-
tions: (1) Is the global spike in terrorism during the first five years of the Arab spring
(2011–15) linked to the numbers of foreign fighters traveling to fight for ISIS in Syria
during this same period? (2) Is it appropriate to label the global spike in terrorism and
the foreign fighters traveling to fight for ISIS as phenomena of the Middle East and
North Africa and Islam more generally speaking? (3) Are terrorist attacks and foreign
fighters driven by the same explanatory factors, as would be assumed by those who
conflate the two when referring to ‘foreign terrorist fighters’? Our preliminary answers
to each of these questions is ‘no.’ We are not witnessing a ‘tale of two jihadis’ in which
Islam and specifically the Middle East and North Africa are responsible for terrorist
attacks and foreign fighters to ISIS during the Arab Spring. To the contrary, the state-
level factors that drive foreign fighters are largely different than those state-level factors
that drive domestic terrorism, with one exception. A series of negative binomial
regressions demonstrated that while a country’s level of domestic political instability
leads to increases in both foreign fighters and terrorist attacks, the explanatory common-
alities end there. Whereas foreign fighters to ISIS hail from Muslim majority countries with
higher levels of education and internet access, terrorist attacks occur in countries with
lower levels of unemployment and higher levels of ethnic fractionalization.
These results suggest an important implication for policymakers. The finding connect-
ing domestic political instability to foreign fighter numbers and terrorism calls into ques-
tion a large and growing body of literature that underscores the positive aspects of
international democracy promotion. Scholarship has long highlighted the negative conse-
quences that pervasive political change can have on societies and their populations (Car-
others, 1999; Diamond, 1999; Muravchik, 1992). With the Arab Spring arguably constituting
the most recent surge of what is commonly referred to as the ‘third wave’ of democratiza-
tion that began in 1974 (Huntington, 1991), scholars and practitioners alike must contend
with whether efforts to promote democracy should be sought. The potential dilemma with
democracy promotion, at least according to our statistical analysis, is that it is precisely
those countries that are reeling from increases in domestic political instability, potentially
resulting from varying degrees of political transition and upheaval, which have served as
some of the greatest sources of foreign fighters for ISIS and targets of terrorism.
Our findings also point to two avenues for future research. First, domestic political
instability emerges as the only common variable that explains both terrorist attacks and
foreign fighters during the Arab Spring. Countries experiencing higher levels of domestic
political instability will also witness higher levels of terrorist attacks and higher numbers of
foreign fighters traveling to fight for ISIS. Future research should focus on the impacts of
specific forms of domestic political instability, ranging from nation-wide protests to revo-
lutions, on fostering increased terrorist attacks and foreign fighters to ISIS, as well as the
causal mechanisms as to why this is the case (e.g. is it reflective of public disenchantment
18 M. J. SCHUMACHER AND P. J. SCHRAEDER

with a regime, that can be used by foreign or domestic recruiters, or is it reflective of a lack
of regime control, which enables foreign fighters and terrorists to move more freely).
A second avenue of future research would be to replicate our findings to other cases of
foreign fighters in history. Foreign fighters to ISIS constitute but the most recent example
of a rich history of 335,118 foreign fighters who have participated in 93 conflicts during the
last two centuries (Malet, 2013). One potential case for comparison would be the Spanish
civil war (1936–39), which attracted over 40,000 foreign fighters, and specifically the 2,800
U.S. citizens who participated in that conflict as part of the Lincoln Brigade. Records related
to these foreign fighters are maintained by the Abraham Lincoln Brigade Archive in
New York, but have yet to be systematically analyzed. More comprehensive data is the
only way to adequately explore the phenomenon of foreign fighting across time and
space in the same manner that terrorism scholars have done regarding terrorist attacks
for the last two decades.

Notes
1. Various terminology and inclusive dates have been adopted to explain the recent socio-econ-
omic and political-military upheavals in the Middle East and North Africa, including ‘Arab
Uprisings’ or ‘Arab Revolts’ to refer to the initial protests that started in December 2010 in
Tunisia that challenged authoritarian rule; ‘Arab Spring’ (2011–12) which captured the early
optimistic vision that these uprisings and revolts would lead to more inclusive, ideally demo-
cratic forms of governance; and ‘post-Arab Spring’ (2013-present), a period marked by author-
itarian resilience and reaction to popular pressures for change, including movement towards
an ‘Arab Fall’ or ‘Arab Winter.’ Individual revolutionary events, of course, have unique terminol-
ogy, as in the case of the Tunisian Revolution which is referred to as the ‘Jasmine Revolution’ or
the ‘Dignity Revolution.’ We, like many authors, use the term ‘Arab Spring’ as shorthand to
capture the 2011-present era. See, for example, Ganen (2016) and Haas and Lesch (2017).
2. One exception is Hegghammer (2013), who focuses on Western jihadists and why they decide
to travel overseas to serve as foreign fighters rather than fighting at home. Our analysis does
not focus solely on Western jihadists, but rather the potential for foreign fighters and terrorists
in all countries of the world.
3. This is of course contrary to recent scholarship showing how the general public understands
terrorism is quite different from scholarly definitions (see Huff & Kertzer, 2018). In addition,
there is far less agreement in the realm of ‘critical terrorism studies,’ a field which acknowl-
edges the inherent pro-state biases of empirical definitions (see Smyth, Gunning, Jackson, Kas-
simeris, & Robinson, 2008). It is merely for the sake of comparison that we adopt this standard
for defining ‘terrorism.’
4. We ran our regressions using the more conservative figures and found almost no difference in
the statistical findings. The magnitudes of the coefficients changed only slightly and the only
significance value that changed was in Model 1 (Table 5), where ‘Internet access’ would have
been significant at the .1 level rather than the .05 level.
5. There were more terrorist attacks in Iraq during this period than any other country in the
world, with 12,262 total attacks according to the GTD (START, 2017). We do not include Iraq
in our statistical analysis because it serves as one of the host countries of foreign fighters
to ISIS and therefore should not be in our comparative test of terrorist attacks. Removing it
from the ‘Top 10’ does not change the fact that there is no overlap between the countries
with the most foreign fighters and the countries with the most terrorist attacks.
6. In statistics, when dealing with any measure of per capita income, you must take into account
the issue of diminishing returns. Computational models cannot account for the real relative
impact dollar increases or decreases actually have on a country’s per capita income. For
example, when a country’s per capita income increases $100 dollars in a country where the
 BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES OF TERRORISM AND POLITICAL AGGRESSION 19

per capita income is $10,000, this is not as significant as when a country’s per capital income
increases $100 in a country where the per capita income is only $500. Therefore, logarithmi-
cally transforming the data helps account for those relative changes.
7. Much like per capita income (see Footnote 6), our measure of domestic political instability
needs to be transformed to account for similar issues. For example, a country that experienced
100 domestic riots when in a previous year it had not experienced any is different than a
country that experienced 800 domestic riots when in the previous year it had experienced 700.

Acknowledgements
The authors would like to thank our colleagues, Tofigh Maboudi and Vincent Mahler, for reviewing
earlier versions of this paper. An earlier version of this paper was also presented at the 2018–19
American Political Science Association’s MENA Workshops in Rabat, Morocco and Tunis, Tunisia.

Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Funding
The research for this project was partially funded by the U.S. Department of State under Linkage
Grant # S-4480T-11-GR-055.

Notes on contributors
Michael J. Schumacher is a Ph.D. Candidate in the Department of Political Science at Loyola Univer-
sity Chicago.
Peter J. Schraeder is Professor and Chair of the Department of Political Science at Loyola University
Chicago.

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