Public trust in the armed forces often rests on the military’s legitimation as, and aspiration to be, a non‑partisan institution. This non‑partisan identity shapes how citizens evaluate the military relative to other state institutions and to political actors.
Does early-life trauma influence battlefield behavior? Evidence from Irish regiments in the American Civil War shows that experiencing the Irish Potato Famine more than a decade earlier made soldiers more likely to desert.
This research note examines incentives for former rebel combatants to remobilize in ongoing civil war, a topic that has received limited attention. The goal is to inform scholarship on when and why ex-fighters might go back to violence, using micro-level evidence from volunteer ex-combatants in the Syrian civil war.