Who Fights for Governments?

Exploring why, when and under which circumstances individuals decide to take up arms mobilizing for pro-government militias, Huseyn Aliyev draws on insights from long-standing ethnographic fieldwork among former and active members of Ukraine’s pro-government volunteer battalions, and an original database of militias’ obituaries, to offer this complex and in-depth explanation of the phenomenon of pro-government mobilization. Revealing the patterns and dynamics of individual mobilization into pro-government militias, this study is critical to understanding how the Ukrainian nation succeeded in repelling Russian aggression both in 2014-15 and in 2022, but also essential to explaining how and why hundreds of pro-government militias emerge in the context of armed conflicts in different parts of the world.