Attitudes toward Returning Foreign Fighters: The Role of Institutional Trust
Session
Security Studies
Description
The military defeat of the Islamic State (IS) exposed many countries outside the territories that it controlled with the phenomenon of the returned foreign fighters. The new phenomenon of the returning foreign fighters presents their societies with difficult choices of what to do with those new crime categories and those people who have not committed any crime in their home countries, and whose criminal behavior could be mainly categorized as crime by association. Whereas a number of recent public opinion surveys have measured people’s attitudes regarding the returning ISIS foreign fighters, we still lack any understanding on what drive such attitudes. In order to overcome such gap, we build a series of hypotheses about the public opinion response to the recent phenomenon of the retuning FF. We argue that people’s policy preferences toward state response to returning ISIS foreign fighters reflect their opinions on ISIS, trust in country’s judiciary and religion institutions and religiosity. Relying on three representative samples of public opinion data that we collected in Albania, Kosovo and North Macedonia in 2018, we try to fill a gap created by the overreliance of current discussion on people’s opinions on state response to returning ISIS foreign fighters on data public opinion surveys have been conducted in Western countries, leaving a hot spot of ISIS foreign fighters’ origin, the Balkans.
Proceedings Editor
Edmond Hajrizi
ISBN
978-9951-550-50-5
Location
Lipjan, Kosovo
Start Date
29-10-2022 12:00 AM
End Date
30-10-2022 12:00 AM
DOI
10.33107/ubt-ic.2022.17
Recommended Citation
Peshkopia, Ridvan, "Attitudes toward Returning Foreign Fighters: The Role of Institutional Trust" (2022). UBT International Conference. 17.
https://knowledgecenter.ubt-uni.net/conference/2022/all-events/17
Attitudes toward Returning Foreign Fighters: The Role of Institutional Trust
Lipjan, Kosovo
The military defeat of the Islamic State (IS) exposed many countries outside the territories that it controlled with the phenomenon of the returned foreign fighters. The new phenomenon of the returning foreign fighters presents their societies with difficult choices of what to do with those new crime categories and those people who have not committed any crime in their home countries, and whose criminal behavior could be mainly categorized as crime by association. Whereas a number of recent public opinion surveys have measured people’s attitudes regarding the returning ISIS foreign fighters, we still lack any understanding on what drive such attitudes. In order to overcome such gap, we build a series of hypotheses about the public opinion response to the recent phenomenon of the retuning FF. We argue that people’s policy preferences toward state response to returning ISIS foreign fighters reflect their opinions on ISIS, trust in country’s judiciary and religion institutions and religiosity. Relying on three representative samples of public opinion data that we collected in Albania, Kosovo and North Macedonia in 2018, we try to fill a gap created by the overreliance of current discussion on people’s opinions on state response to returning ISIS foreign fighters on data public opinion surveys have been conducted in Western countries, leaving a hot spot of ISIS foreign fighters’ origin, the Balkans.