Michael C. Burch

Why do some states repatriate children of Islamic State (IS) foreign fighters while others ignore their human rights? The collapse of IS left thousands of children of foreign fighters stateless, trying to be repatriated to the home country of their foreign parents. While some states welcomed children back, others were quite hesitant. I argue that two mechanisms influence a state’s willingness to repatriate: the level of that state’s direct military involvement in the international coalition that fought IS and its regime type. The higher a state’s degree of commitment of troops, arms, or finances to the international coalition against IS, the less likely that state is to welcome home children of IS members. Additionally, I argue that lower levels of electoral competition within the state insulates leaders from any domestic audience costs associated with bringing IS-affiliated children to their country. These states will thus repatriate earlier than states with open elections. I explore the importance of these two mechanisms with a mixed-methods research design. Together, the mixed method approach helps illuminate the variation in children’s human rights in the post-IS conflict landscape.

How does the international community decide to frame grievous human rights abuses during wartime? Using the Islamic State’s campaign of human rights abuses against the minority Yazidi population over the past decade, we consider modern media portrayals of mass atrocities and the use of the term genocide. We argue that Western news will initially have few articles defining these atrocities as genocide, but with the passage of time, they will be more widely recognized as a mass atrocity. That is because, initially, only human rights groups will employ the term to draw attention to the abuses, but as the United States becomes more involved militarily in the region, more actors and policymakers will use the term to provide a moral justification for intervention. We test this theory through the analysis of multiple Western media sources from the start of the ISIS campaign in 2014 until 2020. Tracing the evolution of language used to describe the violence against the Yazidis, specifically focusing on the term “genocide,” we find support for our claims. These findings will provide important insight into the politics and challenges of classifying acts of mass atrocities in the 21st century.

Why and when do violent Islamist groups join the transnational franchises run by al-Qaeda (AQ) or Islamic State (IS)? Existing literature on the phenomenon of violent franchise networks stress the relative costs and benefits of franchising to the core organization. In this paper, we explore the question from the other side, namely, that of the franchisees. In contrast to explanations that stress the importance of capacity building or ideological alignment, we propose that franchising is driven by the dynamics of an intra-group conflict that encourages outbidding and/or splintering: established leaders join AQ or IS to forestall challengers and prevent internal schisms, while rising challengers join AQ or IS to set up their own insurgent splinter faction. We employ a mixed-methods approach that combines a statistical analysis of all violent Islamist groups in Africa in the post-2001 period with qualitative case studies of Islamist organizations that became franchisees for AQ and IS. Using data from ACLED, we estimate the effects of splinter risk on the likelihood of a group franchising. We then trace the proposed causal process through a case study of Islamist groups splintering and franchising in the western Sahel. Our results are consistent with the argument that franchising is used by insurgent leaders and commanders as a means of restraining or creating splinter factions.