The foreign fighters, sovereignty, and counter-terrorism : selected essays / Edited by Michael P. Noonan [electronic resource]

"January 2011".

On the battlefields of Iraq and Afghanistan, U.S. soldiers, sailors, airmen, and marines have confronted third-party national combatants. Known as “foreign fighters,” these individuals have gained deadly skills and connections that can be exported or exploited to devastating effect in other locations. Over the past two decades, the foreign fighters phenomenon has grown after the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979—to the ethnically cleansed fields of the Balkans to Chechnya and beyond. But this is not a new problem. This report is the first volume of findings from an important series of FPRI conferences on the so-called foreign fighter problem. These conferences have brought together leading experts in the field to examine and discuss this phenomenon from different ideational and disciplinary perspectives. This monograph is a collection of essays from “The Foreign Fighter Problem,” a program conference held July 14–15, 2009 at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C.