How western non-EU states are responding to foreign fighters: A glance at the USA, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand’s laws and policies

Abstract

The issue of foreign fighter mobilisation to the Syrian conflict (and more recently Iraq) is the biggest security challenge for Western nations since the September 11th attacks. This is the first time since those events that governments all over the world including the West are beginning to rethink their legal regimes and reforms related to how they deal with this particular problem set. This chapter will look at ‘Five Eyes’ countries except for the United Kingdom (‘Five Eyes’ refers to the intelligence alliance amongst these countries). It will explore the United States’, Australia’s, Canada’s, and New Zealand’s responses to the unprecedented foreign fighter phenomenon over the past few years. These four case studies will provide a comparative perspective that will help show how they are changing in either similar or unique fashions. This will allow insights to be ascertained into a broad range of ways to deal with this issue on a legal level spanning different countries’ sizes and mobilization sizes. The organization of this chapter will include: first, an introduction that discusses the issue of foreign fighters and Syria and how that is affecting governments in these particular countries and the threats they perceive for if and when individuals return home. This will follow with case studies looking at each country’s particular responses from the United States to Australia to Canada to New Zealand. Finally, there will be a concluding section that provides a comparative look at these four different countries’ approaches.