‘Wars of Others’: National Cleavages and Attitudes towards External Conflicts

ABSTRACT

Why do individuals sympathize with others’ wars, an antecedent of the decision to become a foreign fighter? By collecting original public opinion data from Lebanon, in 2015, and Turkey in 2017, about the actors of conflict in Syria, we test the argument that an ethno-religious cleavage at home shapes the proclivity of individuals to support others’ wars. Individuals may perceive a war abroad as endangering political and social balance of power at home – and hence own survival. Therefore, when transnational identities map onto a national cleavage, as in the Sunni–Shia cleavage in Lebanon, and Turk – Kurd cleavage in Turkey, individuals are more disposed to show sympathy for others’ wars both to help their kin and to protect the balance of power at home. Our findings imply that efforts to end the trend toward citizens becoming foreign fighters must start at home by mending the relations between ethnic and religious groups.

KEYWORDS:

• Civil war
• transnational identity
• public support
• Middle East

Acknowledgments

We would like to thank Tiffany Chu, Aysenur Dal, Berk Esen, David Malet, Idean Salehyan, Zeki Sarigil, the participants of the panels in International Studies Associations 2016 (Atlanta) and 2019 (Toronto) Annual Meetings and ESPA 2019 (Adana, Turkey) meeting as well as the anonymous reviewers and editors of the International Interactions for their helpful comments. All errors are ours.

Notes

¹ The Assad family is Alawite, a minority religious group within Syria, which constitutes around 10% of the Syrian Population. Even though some claim that Alawites are not a subsect within Shia, others argue the sect is an offshoot of Shia. Regardless, Alawites are following the Shiite interpretation in the topic of the great schism of Islam, which is “who should have succeeded Prophet Muhammad” (Manfreda 2019). In this debate, like Shiites, Alawites also side with Ali, who is Muhammad’s son-in-law, and take a step forward in attributing some divine features to him (Spencer 2016). Hence, it is not inappropriate to side Alawites next to Shiites against Sunnis within the sectarian cleavage among Muslims.

² http://english.alarabiya.net/en/News/middle-east/2013/06/02/Top-cleric-Qaradawi-calls-for-Jihad-against-Hezbollah-Assad-in-Syria.html

³ One of the authors of this article, running this survey in Lebanon, participated in the training session of the surveyors before running a pilot study.

⁴ Whereas the first two groups are more or less homogenous in terms of group boundaries, the Sunni group is heterogeneous in regard to ideological stance, adopted means, and ends. However, based on the preliminary analysis of our survey results, there was insufficient variance in attitudes toward two major extremist groups (ISIS and Al-Nusra, in both countries), making it impossible to derive reliable conclusions based on this limited sample. Therefore, we focused on the Free Syrian Army as the Sunni insurgents in our analysis.

⁵ If a respondent does not reveal any sympathy for the group, then their operational and logistic support automatically calculated as zero. This is to differentiate those who reveal sympathy but against any operational/logistic support from those who do not reveal any sympathy at all. We also run each item as separate dependent variables. We further explain the findings in the Result section and report them in the Appendix.

⁶ We selected 141 districts randomly from all three cities to ensure a representative sample for each city. Four streets were randomly chosen from each district, and then two houses were selected randomly from each street for an interview. In the case of no response, the interviewers skipped three houses and conducted an interview with the fourth one. The interviews were held only with household members. Thirty-one interviewers carefully selected by Infakto to represent the ethnic and religious characteristics of the cities and districts conducted the interviews.