Brothers in Arms: Foreign Legions, National Armies, and Re-examining Citizenship and Military Service
Open AccessAs of early 2020, thirty-one states recruited foreigners into their militaries—including the world’s most consequential actors, such as India, Iran, Russia, and the United States. These governments have used their foreign enlistees to combat external opponents, support interventions abroad, and suppress internal dissent. Yet, existing scholarship is at a loss to explain why modern states would look beyond their citizenry for soldiers. My dissertation fills these empirical and theoretical gaps, explaining the calculus that has led modern states to recruit soldiers who are neither subjects nor citizens of the government they serve—soldiers termed legionnaires. My project first presents an original dataset of recruitment policies, identifying 172 legionnaire programs that states have implemented between 1815 and 2020. Drawing on government records in multiple languages, I show how these policies have influenced modern history’s major wars and spanned the globe. My project next details and tests a theory that explains how governments select among this fuller spectrum of manpower options. I argue that the selection of recruitment policies—citizen or legionnaire—is a function of how a state perceives its vulnerability to defeat, as shaped by two variables: the severity of external threats that it perceives, and the degree to which the government faces political costs in mobilizing additional citizen soldiers. I use archival evidence to present four case studies that test my argument across the full range of its independent and dependent variable values: Angola (1974-76), Germany (1935-45), India (1962-64), and the United States (1861-64). By re-examining who states choose to execute security policy, my dissertation provides a new prism through which to re-examine fundamental assumptions about how states build their military power, and highlights the dynamism and ingenuity that they exhibit in securing their national interests.
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