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.