 And aloha. My name is Mark Shklav. I'm the host of Think Tech Hawaii's Law Across the Sea program. Today we're going across the sea to the Middle East. My guest is Nicole Grove. Nicole Grove is an assistant professor of political science at the University of Hawaii at Manoa. Her interests include international relations and transnational Middle East politics. She is a recipient of the 2016-2017 Fulbright Scholar Award in the Middle East and North Africa Regional Research Program and was a visiting scholar at Abu Dhabi University from January to May 2017. Nicole is the author of a recent article, interestingly titled Weapons of Mass Participation. Social media, violence, entrepreneurs and the politics of crowd funding for war. This article appeared in the European Journal of International Relations and discusses the appearance of non-state combatants fighting ISIS in Syria and Iraq. She refers to them as violence entrepreneurs and suggests that they may be a new generation of violence and a new way of warfare in many respects, especially in the use of crowd funding and social media to raise funds for their activities. Nicole, welcome. Thank you. Thanks for having me. Thank you for being here. I want to ask you first, how did you get this interest in the Middle East and politics there in these different areas? What brought you to that? I would say I think I came into my, began coming into my political life as a young adult in New York City in the kind of mid to late 1990s around the time of many anti-police brutality protests in New York and later after 9-11, I was a part of the anti-war movement there. I think one of the things that I felt very conflicted about and wanted to try to understand was at that time how quickly the people around me really felt like they were ready to go to war and also a lot of the violence that was being committed against particular communities, where I lived based on the way that people dressed or where they lived and so the way that I tried to make sense of that is I started studying Arabic at NYU and then I eventually traveled to Egypt to do that and did some more traveling around the region. I think I found that the way that we hear about or read about this particular part of the world on the news is very different from what it actually is like. If you go there to travel there, visit there, interact with the people who live there and so that's something that I try to communicate in my own research and to my students when I teach. So your personal involvement with people in those areas kind of has shaped your feelings and you had a desire to find out what was really happening. Is that an accurate statement? Yeah, I think yes. I think that's accurate enough. Yeah. Okay, and now, violence entrepreneurs. I mean, I never heard that term before. Yeah. What does it mean? What are violence entrepreneurs and take us into your study and your article? So violence entrepreneurs is a concept that I developed to try to describe what I was seeing as a different kind of irregular combatant from the way that they are often described in international relations literature. So irregular combatants are not soldiers that are participating in a kind of formal armed forces for a country. So usually when we think of non-state combatants, we think of them as, for instance, private military contractors which are entering into some type of agreement. Like mercenaries or something, is that correct? Like private military contractors, they're just private enterprises that enter into contracts with governments and participate in these conflict spaces in different ways. They could be providing food for troops. They could also be interrogating people for the army. But they're formal companies of some sort, I see. They could also be mercenaries, right? So people who are hired to assassinate someone or occupy a village, they can be what Danny Hoffman calls labors of the battlefield. So these could be people who are being forced to fight or are fighting in a conflict because this is really kind of the only option for them or is one option in a kind of limited range of options that they have available for their own survival. So other people might fight, other non-state combatants might fight to regain a territory that they've lost. There are other reasons. These particular fighters don't really fit that category at all. They're not entering into contracts with the government. They're not being forced to fight. They're volunteering. They have no clear kind of ideological motivation or territorial aspirations. They really seem to be doing it for the fight, right? For the kind of enjoyment. A personal type of a feeling. Is this a gratification of violence? Is that what you're telling me? Yeah, a lot of different reasons. A lot of different reasons, yes. But they don't fit in these other categories, which I think Wyatt necessitated a new kind of concept to try to understand. So they're not employees of a company that has been hired and they don't live in the territory per se. No. They are private people who for some personal reason are undertaking this. They'll be compelled to engage in conflict on their own terms. Okay. And where did this happen and where is it going on and what have you discovered in your research? So I looked primarily at people who identified as anti-ISIS combatants. So these were people who were traveling to Northern Iraq and Syria to engage in combat operations against the Islamic State. Why was that focused? Why did that come to your attention? It came to my attention in part because so much of I think media coverage of this particular issue was really focused on people who were leaving their home countries to go and fight with ISIS. And I can't speak to the numbers specifically in other countries, but I know that in the U.S., while there were a number of people who were being profiled in the media for going to fight ISIS, there weren't many at all, if any, that actually were actively fighting with ISIS in those particular areas. And so I wanted to try to understand why that was, but also how we could think about these particular individuals in a kind of more global context and an international context. So what did you find out? Who are these people and what's their backgrounds? Can you generalize it all? I mean, is there something about, is this generational, is this gender-based, is this age-based? What did you find out and who are these people and what are they doing? So I think it's very hard to generalize them. They are really quite different in terms of, again, motivation, but also age. Many of them are younger, but some are older. They come from different countries. A lot of them are coming from the United States, Canada, but also places like Australia, New Zealand, the U.K., the Netherlands, Denmark, a number of other countries. And so I think it is difficult to say that they are coming from one place over another. I did find that many of them, specifically anti-ISIS fighters, a lot of them were former veterans, a lot of them were white men, but not all of them, certainly not across the scope. It seems like most of them are coming from western countries, is what I've heard. You say, is that accurate? Yeah, based on the research I've done so far, yes, I would say that. That's accurate. Okay, so as opposed to those joining ISIS from various countries, these violence entrepreneurs are fighting ISIS. And that's what your study is focused on. What are some examples? Who are some of these folks and what are they doing to fight ISIS? They're somehow enjoying the violence, or that seems to be somewhat of a motivation. That's what I hear you saying. What are they doing? So I think what they're doing exactly on the ground is a very good question, and that's not always clear. I think we often have to rely on their own statements in interviews or with other media outlets on what they're doing, because there's not a lot of transparency around their activities on the ground. So I think this is also one of the problems that is part of what we're seeing, which is individuals going off to sort of determine and then fight their own wars, this question of transparency, but also accountability. I think that a lot of them seem to be located in terms of their activities in northern Iraq or Iraqi Kurdistan and northern Syria. This may also be in part because they do have some or had some institutional support in working with the YPG, which were the Kurdish People's Protection Unit. So a lot of them were kind of networking with that group in particular. And are they actually fighting on the ground? Are they actually taking part in battles? Are using guns and weapons? Yes, I mean, based on what they've said in interviews, yes, they're taking part in combat. They've admitted to killing members of ISIS. But again, a lot of this information is based on the statements that they've made to the press. And they are not visually in the United States. I mean, how are they known in the United States? How do we hear about them? Well, so how do we hear about them? I think I'm going back a little bit further than this particular time frame that I was looking at in the article that you mentioned. But Christian, who is a UCLA student, decided he was going to fight with Libyan rebels just a couple of years before. I think that this particular phenomenon really started gaining more attention in the media. And he said that he went to do it on his spring break to have an adventure. So he'd previously done some volunteer work abroad, something that we might conventionally think of as more kind of volunteer work. But he wanted to go fight with the rebels in Libya to kind of have a real or authentic experience. And that I think is really, when I heard about that and also saw that he was being interviewed when he came back on Good Morning America, it was kind of astounding to me. I sort of wondered, like, how someone could go and do this and then come back and be interviewed on morning television and then kind of go back to work. It was very different from what we call dark tourism, which is maybe going to, like, former conflict sites or war memorials or things like that. Like, this is actually taking part in battle in a way that's very real and immediate and has consequences. So that was the kind of, I think, the first, my first kind of introduction to this. And then I think the anti-ISIS fighters was really kind of where I picked up in the concept development. All right. So and who are some of them and how are they using the social media? How are they getting their word out? So one group, the Lions of Rojava, was organizing on Facebook. They were using their Facebook page. They were working with the YPG to recruit people, to come and join them. Also, people used Facebook to kind of express their support, even if they couldn't fight. They wanted them to know that they really appreciated what they were doing. They also used crowdfunding campaigns as well. So they're using Kickstarter, GoFundMe to raise money, to buy plane tickets, buy armor, just to get themselves over there. And we have an image on screen. What's this? So this is a crowdfunding page that I found by, I believe he's a former veteran from Clarksville, Tennessee. And so he was trying to raise $4,000 so that he could, as it shows, take the fight to ISIS. And at the time that I had taken that screenshot, that was in 2015 he had raised about $880 from small private donations on the platform. Okay. And the next photo, let's take a look at that one. So this is Jamie Lane, ISIS Hunter. He was also crowdfunding on GoFundMe. He was, this particular crowdfunding page was set up. It doesn't look to me, just from the details of the page, buy Jamie Lane but buy a friend who was trying to organize some funding for him on his return. I think he was in Northern Iraq, so it was a kind of payment, kind of a gesture of appreciation for fighting ISIS and when he returned to the US. All right. And so we have these violence entrepreneurs, folks that for some personal motivation are going to Syria or Iraq and fighting ISIS. A little different than those joining ISIS. And there's some questions that we have. I have about what happens to them. Now, we'll take a little break. Okay. We're going to take a one minute break and then come back. And I want to ask you, what happens to them? This fellow that spent his vacation fighting ISIS admitted it. What happens when he comes back? But let's talk after the break. Okay. And Aloha. My name is Calvin Griffin, the host of Hawaii Uniform. And every Friday at 11 o'clock here on Think Tech Hawaii, we bring you the latest on what's happening within the military community. And we also invite all your response to things that's happening here. For those of you who haven't seen the program before, again, we invite your participation. We're here to give information, not disinformation. And we always enjoy response from the public. But join us here, Hawaii Uniform, Fridays, 11am here on Think Tech Hawaii. Aloha. Hey, Stan Energyman here on Think Tech Hawaii. And they won't let me do political commentary. So I'm stuck doing energy stuff, but I really like energy stuff. So I'm going to keep on doing it. So join me every Friday on Stan Energyman at lunchtime, at noon, on my lunch hour. We're going to talk about everything energy, especially if it begins with the word hydrogen. We're going to definitely be talking about it. We'll talk about how we can make Hawaii cleaner, how we can make the world a better place, just basically save the planet. Even Miss America can't even talk about stuff like that anymore. We got it nailed down here. So we'll see you on Friday at noon with Stan Energyman. Aloha. Welcome back. My name is Mark Shklov. I'm the host of Think Tech Hawaii's Law Across the Sea. And I am with Nicole Grove. And we are talking about violence entrepreneurs. Young people, old people, all different types of people from different countries who are going to Syria and Iraq for their own purposes. And they're raising money on the internet to do this. And Nicole, take me through this some more. What are they doing? What are these folks doing? How does the internet function for them? You showed us a few photos before about people that have gone on for crowdfunding and that type of thing. What's going on? So I think that the crowdfunding is, I think, a particularly important aspect of this because it really shows there's a kind of shift in both the organizational structure and the funding structure of the way that we think about how wars are fought. Usually states will use tax dollars to fund military operations. And here we see individuals who are declaring their own wars based on their own personal motivations in these spaces, in these conflict zones where it's not clear how and when the law is applied. It's a kind of nebulous space in a lot of ways which allows them to engage in certain kinds of behaviors that might not be permissible elsewhere. Right. Private individuals who are admittedly going off to kill people. Yes. Right? Now let's take a look at the next slide that we have. What is this? So this is a screenshot that I took from the Sons of Liberty International web page. The Sons of Liberty International was founded by a man named Matthew Van Dyke who is a self-proclaimed freedom fighter and protector of Christian communities in Iraq and Syria. He had also fought with Libyan rebels as well. He's now started, he's back in the United States, and has started what he calls the first non-profit security provider in the U.S. And so this page was from his website. And you can see individuals can go online or they could. This page is no longer on there. But you could go online and, for instance, donate $700 to put a camouflage film on a pickup truck, or you could pay for someone's gear, right, a full approved vest, or even a GoPro camera so that people could video record what they were doing, right, on the ground. And so it was a way for the public to participate. Vicariously. Yes, yeah. But in a way that was very specific to how they wanted to participate. And they knew what was happening. Yes, they knew what was happening. You can now go online and I think you can choose which missions you want to support. But at the time that I took this particular screenshot you could also choose, even down to the types of equipment you could fund for people. Okay, so you have individuals and their motivation is a little unclear to me. And you can, I think it's unclear to you too, even though you've studied it. It's hard to figure out exactly where they're coming from. But they've gone off to do some activities against ISIS. And there's also people who are supporting ISIS that I guess are doing the same thing. We've seen those people prosecuted, the folks that are supporting ISIS. What happens to people in, well let's say an American goes off and crowd funds to support himself or herself fighting ISIS. Admittedly killing people. Yeah. And admittedly doing something that normally a state does. What happens to them? Is there any repercussions from this? So when, it's illegal to go and fight for ISIS. So I think that that's not a question. You can't go overseas and fight for a terror, an organization that's been labeled a terrorist organization and then come back to the United States. So when we think about what a violence entrepreneur describes, it's difficult to try to create a kind of diagnostic where we could just apply it to a particular individual to say this person is a violence entrepreneur or this person isn't. It's more of an activity, a formal versus informal set of activities or practices. So like for instance, when Sons of Liberty formalizes themselves as a nonprofit, I would see this as moving outside of the violence entrepreneur category because they are now sort of implicated within the institutional structures that are already participating in these conflict zones in ways that are kind of more permissible. So like for instance, I think there was, you know, if for instance somebody decides that they were switching sides, right, maybe they worked for the military. Formerly this individual, Ikaika Kang, I think, is someone that you brought up to me in a separate conversation. And I think if someone, I also don't think somebody's switching sides to fight for ISIS because they support ISIS is a violence entrepreneur either. I think the whole point of being a violence entrepreneur is that you're on your own side and you're not necessarily pro or against anything, right? Okay, so how does the government deal with them? I mean, if that person, and you talked about a young man who appeared on TV and I think we have some slides of him, let's show those slides. Oh, sure. Oh, so he was not fighting ISIS, he was fighting with Libyan rebels. But as far as, so this was really kind of an earlier iteration of this, but I think he fits the profile right to the extent that there's a profile. But he just went and kind of had this adventure and maybe or maybe didn't shoot people were not clear on that. And then he was allowed to return to the United States as far as I know, just continued his education at UCLA. And he had a, there's another shot of him being interviewed. Yes. Sorry, it's a bit blurry, but yes, that's him on Good Morning America, I believe. So this is an image of him being interviewed on a morning talk show. And what's the next one? Let's see the next photo. Okay. Yes, a picture of him with the rebels he was fighting with. Okay. And so he came back and as far as I know, no consequences. So I think the consequences are different based on what state the person is a citizen of. So in the US, I'm not aware of anybody who has been prosecuted for participating in these kinds of activities. I'm not aware of it in Canada either. There was a Dutch citizen who had admitted to someone he was giving an interview for that he had killed something like 90 ISIS militants. And when he came back to the Netherlands, he was prosecuted. But there was an enormous public outcry over this. And people had gathered thousands and thousands of signatures to have him released. And he was actually released. But I think that the way that the government dealt with that is that they took away some of his social security benefits. He was no longer entitled to social security benefits from the state. So yeah, I think that it's really, I think it depends really. I think it really depends on the state. So my question is then, are these violence entrepreneurs taking over the role of the government in those countries? And that's why they're not prosecuted. Is that a legitimate question? Taking over the role of the government? Yeah. So I think that I think we could think about it this way. So long as they are beneficial to a government, they're not harming the government in some way or doing something the government doesn't want them to do, I think that there's a certain level of permissibility there in terms of their actions. Now, when they may start sabotaging maybe special operations that are happening there, they become a liability for the government. I think that's when you see the government starting to intervene and maybe stopping people from going on to planes or taking passports. And this did happen to two men who went to Syria. They got there, decided they didn't like what was happening to them and actually went to a special forces unit and asked to be extracted. And the officers there told them that they should leave the way that they came. So I think that we are seeing a kind of shift in how people are talking about them and how easy it is to go over these days and how I think we think about the legal ramifications of what they're doing. Well, it seems to me like whatever their motivation is, and I mean it sounds like they're having some fun or something. I'm just trying to understand it. Maybe it's harder for me because of growing up in a different time period, but I'm trying to understand why they chose this path, what their outcome is sought, what they're seeking from it. Is it just experience? Is it just they're bored with their current life? What are your thoughts? Yeah, I think that for some of the veterans that went back, they had fought in Iraq and lost friends and comrades and felt that this was a way for them to go back and try to make things better on their own terms. And what they saw is the failure of the U.S.'s nation building project there. So that's one person. I get that logic, yeah. But there are other people who say that they got bored, right? That maybe there was some conflict that they wanted to participate in, but that had sort of dissolved, and then this opportunity came about. And so they went there for that reason. Other people who, I think if you look historically at some of the, if you're kind of keeping track of how people give these interviews and the motivations that they give in the different interviews that they that participate in over time, you'll actually even see their motivations changing. So, you know, one, Jordan Mattson, for instance, has given interviews where he talks about being really compelled by and wanting to support the creation of a Kurdish state in that particular area of the world. In other interviews that he's given, he talks about his father being in the military and how he was very disappointed that he didn't get to go off to combat. And so this was his combat moment. So it sounds like personal. Everybody has their own personal motivation. Yes. That's what it sounds like I'm hearing. But they, yes, these are their own individual motivations, which are changing, ambiguous, and fluid, but they are still going off to war, willing to kill and be killed. People. Yes. People are people. We have a minute left. Okay. What have you learned from all this? What are your thoughts? What are your conclusions? I think, you know, my thoughts are that I am really interested in kind of what the inverse of this group is and trying to think about, you know, what would the opposite of a violence entrepreneur be? And I'm reminded of this particular protest group, a campaign called Voices in the Wilderness. And so these were individuals that defied Iraqi sanctions to go over to bring people medicine, toys, food, and even under threat of being arrested and find very large fines by the U.S. government. But they persisted in doing this anyway in order to bring attention to the plight of Iraqi people under sanctions. So maybe there is an opportunity for peace entrepreneurs. Maybe. Yes. Is that it? Yep. Okay. Nicole, thank you so much for coming in. Thank you. It was great. And this is a great introduction. There's lots of questions I still have, but we're going to have to close for now, and maybe we'll come back and talk some more at another time. Thank you. Thank you very much. Thanks. Aloha. Thanks.