The project has achieved most of its objectives and milestones for the period, with relatively minor deviations. The number of expected outcomes was exceeded. According to DoA, these objectives are broadly divided into research and training objectives.
Expected
Over the course of the project, the Fellow was expected to:
- Participate in research seminars at ISGA
- Conduct literature review on foreign fighters
- Establish contact with potential interlocutors in Bosnia-Herzegovina and Kosovo
- Prepare informed consent policy, incidental findings policy as well as data management plan (DMP) for conducting interviews in Bosnia-Herzegovina and Kosovo
- Make two open datasets on foreign fighters in Bosnia-Herzegovina and Kosovo
- Participate in and present at 1 conference
- Publish 2 popular articles about the project
- Prepare 2 articles for publication at peer-reviewed journals (one of which might be a book chapter) utilising results from the project
- Organize a workshop on the wider themes of the project
Realized:
- Participated in all research seminars at ISGA that were held every Monday until the pandemic started (months 1-7)
- Conducted literature review on foreign fighters (months 1-3)
- The contact was established with potential interlocutors in Bosnia-Herzegovina and Croatia (see below the reasons for the deviation).
Prepared informed consent policy, incidental findings policy as well as data management plan (DMP) for conducting interviews in Bosnia-Herzegovina and Croatia
Due to the global pandemic, in-person fieldwork was not possible and a research assistant was hired to carry out interviews in Croatia. This work was successfully carried out and 25 interviews were collected from former foreign fighters who took part in the Croatian war (1991-1995). These interviews were transformed into open data and stored in Zenodo. For the Bosnian case, it was not possible to carry out similar work through a research assistant because nearly all of the former fighters returned to their home countries or elsewhere. While the research could not find the whereabouts of the former Mujahideen fighters, existing biographies, and reports on the Russian and Greek foreign fighters allowed for the creation of the Bosnian dataset, which is stored in Zenodo.
-Participated at an online American Political Science Association conference in September 2020. Several in-person conferences were canceled due to the pandemic.
- Published a blog piece on the role of foreign fighters in Bosnia-Herzegovina and Croatia on the Leiden security and -global affairs blog (
https://www.leidensecurityandglobalaffairs.nl/articles/pathways-of-foreign-fighters(odnośnik otworzy się w nowym oknie))
- Prepared a working theoretical paper on the influence of foreign fighters on insurgent cohesion on a global sample and submitted it to Terrorism and Political Violence for publication
- Published 3 peer-reviewed research articles. 1 co-authored peer-reviewed research article on determinants of Kosovo recognition published in Journal of Peace Research (
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0022343320963382(odnośnik otworzy się w nowym oknie))
- 1 co-authored peer-reviewed research article on haram attacks accepted for publication in Comparative Politics (forthcoming)
- 1 single-authored peer-reviewed research article on the effect of bombing on electoral results accepted for publication in Journal of Peace Research (forthcoming).
