Essays on Islamic State Foreign Fighters

The dissertation consists of three essays on the foreign militants who joined the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS). The first essay examines the within-group role preference of ISIS soldiers. I look at the characteristics of the Islamic's States members who volunteer to be a suicide attacker instead of a fighter. I find that men who are less educated and have a basic knowledge of Islam are more likely to prefer to serve as a suicide attacker than a fighter. The results also show that men with previous combat experience and those are give large donations to ISIS are less likely to want to be a suicide attacker. The second essay takes a more typical approach to the study of terrorist participants and compares the demographic information of the ISIS foreign fighters to non-combatants from the same country in the Middle East. Consistent with past work on terrorist operatives, a university education is the strongest correlate of joining the Islamic State. In addition, an individual that holds an unskilled job but has a college education has a positive association with joining ISIS. This provides support in favor of the relationship between relative deprivation and extremism. Finally, this essay replicates well-known empirical findings on terrorist participants, such as age and marital status, using a new dataset and application. The third essay aggregates the individual ISIS foreign fighter observations up to the ethnic group level. I consider conventional explanations of ethnic conflict and determine whether they can extend to participation in ethno-transnational conflict. I find that income inequality is the strongest predictor of participation in foreign fighting. By contrast, political grievances have no association with transnational ethnic conflict. Overall, the results show that socio-economic grievances motivate foreign fighting.