Leaving Home for Jihad: Predicting ISIS Foreign Fighters in the West

Undergraduate Honors Thesis

Citations

Citeable URL: https://scholar.colorado.edu/concern/undergraduate_honors_theses/7d278t50s

Abstract

Individuals all around the world are leaving their homes to join the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) as foreign fighters. With a focus on those from North America, Europe, Australia, and New Zealand, this study provides a novel mixed methods approach to analyze the social, political, economic, and online factors driving a country’s output of foreign fighters. Through multiple time series regression models, I find that low migrant acceptance, economic equality, high unemployment, and a higher percent of the population using the internet are all causally related to a larger number of foreign fighters by population. Although the exact roots of radicalization are difficult to pinpoint even with anecdotal evidence, my findings demonstrate that a coalescence of social, economic, and online factors influence the path to ISIS whereas political conditions are limited in their causality.

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