All Jihad is local

The Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) recruited an estimated 40,000 foreign fighters from over 100 countries from 2013 until approximately the end of 2015. This was one of the largest foreign fighter mobilizations to a single insurgent group fighting in a single civil war in the past 120 years. Based on the size and scale of this mobilization, it would seem as though ISIS foreign recruits came from every corner of the globe. Yet the vast majority of ISIS foreign fighters came from a small number of places around the world. This dissertation focuses on these places, which I call recruitment hubs, because they were sites of disproportionate recruitment. In the Middle East and North Africa (MENA), for example, 75 percent of ISIS foreign fighters were recruited from regions that constituted 11 percent of MENA’s total population. Why were ISIS foreign fighters concentrated in these hubs and not others? How did these recruitment hubs form and function? And why were people recruited to become foreign fighters, as opposed to joining an armed rebellion or participating in protests in their own country? This dissertation argues that ISIS foreign fighter recruitment hubs were crucial to the group’s success attracting foreign fighters; not only because large numbers of fighters joined ISIS from hubs, but also because hubs affected the types of fighters who joined ISIS. This dissertation finds that there are some identifiable patterns in where hubs form, how they form, and why recruitment is so effective there. But it is much more difficult to predict whether recruitment hubs form for foreign fighting or other outcomes, like domestic insurgency. That is because the foreign fighting occurs in part due to highly contingent events – breaks in patterns of past relationships, the emergence of conflicts in foreign lands, and choices made by several individuals at critical junctures where potential alternatives existed.