In July 2014, we survey young men who were volunteering to join the Ukrainian military’s counterinsurgency efforts and compare them to other young men who live in the same community but had not volunteered. In the aftermath of the Euromaidan protests, the Ukrainian government began a widespread campaign to mobilize young men for military service against separatist movements in the Donbas region amid escalating tensions with Russia. We test our hypothesis in the context of the 2014 Euromaidan and subsequent separatist violence in Eastern Ukraine.
We consider whether prior political activism increases the likelihood of engaging in higher-risk forms of violent collective action. Research generally suggests that recruitment for counterinsurgency is challenging, especially when attachments to national governments are weak (Giustozzi, 2007), regional, sectarian, or ethnic parochial divisions are strong (Sambanis, Schulhofer-Wohl & Shavo, 2012), or when counterinsurgency efforts are led by external state actors (Shafer, 2014). In the counterinsurgency literature, research tends to focus on the strategies for battling insurgencies (Fielding & Shortland, 2010 Toft & Zhukov, 2012) and how different strategies might affect insurgent support (Lyall, 2009 Lyall, Blair & Imai, 2013). Finally, in the more specialized literature on insurgency/counterinsurgency in civil war, a number of scholars have examined motivations for joining rebel groups (Fearon & Laitin, 2003 Wood, 2003 Kalyvas, 2006 Humphreys & Weinstein, 2008 Arjona & Kalyas, 2011), and more attention is now being paid to government efforts to recruit civilians into military combat to counter such insurgencies (Jentzsch, Kalyvas & Schubiger, 2015 Staniland, 2015 Forney, 2015 Carey, Colaresi & Mitchell, 2015).
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