Ghosts of International Law: The Figure of the Foreign Fighter in a Cultural Perspective

Heroes and villains, idealists and mercenaries, freedom fighters and religious
fanatics. Foreign fighters tend to defy easy classification. Good and
bad images of the foreign combatant epitomize different conceptions of
freedom and are used to characterize the rightness or wrongness of this
actor in civil wars. This book traces the history of these figures and their
afterlife. It does so through an interdisciplinary methodology employing
law, history and psychoanalytical theory, showing how different images of
the foreign combatant are utilized to proscribe or endorse foreign fighters
in different historical moments. By linking the Spanish, Angolan and
Syrian civil wars, the book demonstrates how these figures function as a
precedent for later periods and how their heritage keeps haunting the
imaginary of legal actors in the present.