Abstract
This article investigates what motivates combatants to fight in non-conventional armed organizations. Drawing on interviews with ex-combatants from the Army of the Serbian Republic in Bosnia and Herzegovina and the Provisional Irish Republican Army, the article compares the role of nationalist ideology, coercive organizational structures, and small group solidarity in these two organizations. Our analysis indicates that coercion played a limited role in both armed forces: in the VRS coercion was relevant mostly in the recruitment phase, while in the IRA its direct impact was only discernible during armed operations. We also find that although both organizations are seen as being highly motivated by nationalist ideas, the picture is much more complex and nationalism is less present than expected. The study demonstrates that nationalism played a relatively marginal role in combatants’ motivation to fight. Instead our research indicates that individualist motivations, small group solidarity, and local networks dominate.
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Notes
Neither of these forces was the Army of a legitimately constituted State and the terms “soldier” and “combatant” are used to indicate membership of a hierarchically organized military formation rather than to suggest the legitimacy of these forces or their conformity with the rules of warfare.
This is not to say that some members of these military organizations were not in part motivated by other material incentives including the protection of their homes or in some instances the opportunist pillaging of abandoned goods (see Bougarel 2006, p. 481).
Irish Times, 22 May 2014, “PSNI to seek entire Boston College tape archive.”
Handbook for Volunteers of the Irish Republican Army: Notes on Guerilla Warfare (1956) IRA General Headquarters, Dublin. https://archive.org/stream/IRA_Volunteers_Handbook_Notes_on_Guerrilla_Warfare/IRA_Volunteers_Handbook_Notes_on_Guerrilla_Warfare_djvu.txt
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Acknowledgments
We would like to thank our interviewees for sharing their experiences with us. We would also like to thank Katy Hayward, John A Hall and the four anonymous Theory and Society reviewers for their comments on earlier versions of this article.
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Malešević, S., Ó Dochartaigh, N. Why combatants fight: the Irish Republican Army and the Bosnian Serb Army compared. Theor Soc 47, 293–326 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11186-018-9315-9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11186-018-9315-9