The Individual Disengagement of Avengers, Nationalists, and Jihadists

The introductory chapter presents the key arguments of the book, suggesting that the current scholarship on individual disengagement fails to adequately conceptualize the phenomenon. With the bulk of existing studies on disengagement focused on demobilization, disarmament, and reintegration, individual pathways to exiting militant organizations remain underexplored. This chapter also provides a detailed explanation of the methods and data employed throughout the book.

The main goal of this chapter is to present the existing theoretical framework on individual disengagement. It is demonstrated in this chapter that the current research is heavily focused on rather vague and amorphous ‘pull’ and ‘push’ factors. Having reviewed a diverse body of literature in political violence studies, this chapter offers a detailed and contextualized analysis of different types of disengagement across a range of militant organizations from different parts of the world.

This chapter constructs a conceptual framework for analyzing individual militant disengagement. Having demonstrated on examples of different militant organizations that individual members of militant groups can be conceptualized as driven by ethno-nationalist, religious, or revenge-centered motivations, it is argued in this chapter that most individual militants in Russia’s North Caucasus can be roughly divided into three main categories — avengers, nationalists, and jihadists. Based on this classification, the key argument of the book posits that pathways to individual disengagement differ in each of these three categories of militants.

This chapter introduces two case studies examined in this book — the North Caucasian republics of Chechnya and Dagestan. While the first part of the chapter undertakes a journey into history and ethnography of these two republics, the second part guides readers through the decades-long armed conflict in the region. From the start of the First Chechnya War in 1994 to the current Caucasus Emirate-led insurgency, this chapter allows the reader to grasp the particular historical, geo-political, and socio-cultural conditions which have led to the birth and proliferation of insurgent groups in the contemporary North Caucasus.

The main purpose of this chapter is to present empirical findings of the study. A rigorous analysis of interviews with former militants belonging to three main categories — avengers, nationalists, and jihadists — as well as with the their relatives and close friends and experts, is organized in this chapter along the main research themes of the study. Adherence to ideology and resilience to external and internal pressures are examined along with the impact of the use of violence and hidden identities, as well as the role of social bonds and group membership in shaping the militants’ decisions to stick to violence or abandon it.

This concluding chapter summarizes the goals of research and presents its findings. Overall, the analysis of empirical data suggests that a strong connection exists between the category of (ex)militants and their disengagement pathways. Broadly speaking, the study demonstrates that disengagement from militant activity occurs more often among avengers and, to a lesser extent, nationalists than among jihadists. More specifically, this chapter points out that distinct types of insurgents are variously resilient to external and internal pressures — group membership and social bonds, (in)discriminativeness of violence and hidden identities, ideology and beyond — to individual disengagement. It also posits that stronger adherence to ideology, higher lethality rates and indiscriminativeness of violence, interrupted social links, and stronger group membership renders jihadists, followed by nationalists, and in contrast to avengers, the less likely category of militants to seek individual disengagement.