The Motivation to Enlist Among Kurds

• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1177/0095327X211038026
• Published date: 01 January 2023
• Date: 01 January 2023
• Subject Matter: Articles

https://doi.org/10.1177/0095327X20917183

Armed Forces & Society

2023, Vol. 49(1) 48 –69

© The Author(s) 2021

Article reuse guidelines:

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DOI: 10.1177/0095327X20917183

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Article

1134644AFSXXX10.1177/0095327X20917183Armed Forces & SocietyLevy

research-article2022

The Motivation to Enlist

Among Kurds

Matthew Cancian

Abstract

Although humans have voluntarily joined militaries throughout history, research on the

motivation to enlist has increased dramatically since the adoption of the All-Volunteer

Force in the United States. Moskos categorized the motivations to enlist as institutional

(the value alignment of the individual with the military) or occupational (the seeking

of monetary rewards for competencies at market rates). This study explores the

prevalenceof these two traditional motivationsin addition to two less commonly studied

motivations—group mobilization and revenge-seeking—in an important context: the

Kurds of northernIraq. A survey of 2301 Kurdish soldiers (Peshmerga) during their war

against the Islamic State (IS) indicates that institutional motivations are the most

prevalent, although all four motivations are present. The importance of group mobili-

zation and revenge-seeking represent important variations from the better-studied

Western contexts that complicate our understanding of the motivation to enlist.

Keywords

civil wars, military culture, recruitment/retention, Middle East

Introduction

Azad had graduated from a university in the United Kingdom before following his tribe

into battle against the Islamic State in August 2014. He posted on Facebook, “Today

[our] tribe showed up in our thousands…to show them that we are here and that they

Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA, USA

Corresponding Author:

Matthew Cancian, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 770 South Rd., East Greenwich, RI 02818,

Cambridge, MA, USA.

Email: mcancian@mit.edu

https://doi.org/10.1177/0095327X20917183

Armed Forces & Society

2023, Vol. 49(1) 48 –69

© The Author(s) 2021

Article reuse guidelines:

sagepub.com/journals-permissions

DOI: 10.1177/0095327X211038026

journals.sagepub.com/home/afs

Cancian 49

will never take Kurdistan.”He held a rocket-propelled grenade launcher in the photo he

posted. When Welat was 12, the Baghdad government forced his family to move to

Iran. As soon as he was old enough, he returned to Iraq as a Peshmerga, a Kurdish

soldier. Naqib deserted the Iraqi Army in February 1991 as it was being destroyed by

American forces and returned north. When his fellow Kurds rebelled against Saddam

Hussein in March, Naqib joined them. In contrast, Dilo joined during the relatively

peaceful 2000s: “I was just happy to have a job,”he said of his f‌irst day as a Peshmerga.

These men’s stories provide windows into their reasons for joining the Peshmerga,

the Kurdish soldiers of northern Iraq. The purpose of this study is to explore the

motivation to enlist among soldiers in an under-studied and important context: the

Kurds of northern Iraq. These Kurdish soldiers were instrumental in f‌ighting the Islamic

State (IS) from 2014 to 2017. Over 150,000 Peshmerga deployed (Rudaw, 2017), and

about 1760 died in the f‌ighting (Mostafa, 2017). Previous studies have examined this

case using interviews with a relatively small number of Peshmerga (Nilsson, 2018);

however, larger-scale quantitative data have been lacking.

Besides being strategically important, this case also offers an opportunity to explore

the motivation to enlist in a different context than the well-studied militaries of Western

countries. Since 2003, the Peshmerga have been the legally appointed armed forces of

the Kurdistan Regional Government, although they have a long history of conf‌lict with

the central government in Baghdad (Aziz, 2017). Despite being a legally established

entity, the Peshmerga is less bureaucratized than contemporary Western militaries,

suffering from divided command structures, tribal stacking of units, and a reliance on

personal connections (ISSAT, 2020;Wilgenburg & Fumerton, 2015). This lower

bureaucratization offers pathways for enlistment that are not available in militaries that

rely solely on bureaucratic mechanisms. Previous surveys have focused on highly

bureaucratized armed forces, such as the Belgian (Manigart, 2005), British (Edmunds

et al., 2016), Indian (Singh, 2017), and Turkish (Aydiner et al., 2019) militaries.

Therefore, the case of the Peshmerga offers an opportunity to test the external validity

of theories developed and ref‌ined in those highly bureaucratized contexts. This study

aims to do so using novel survey data, thereby improving our understanding not only of

this important case, but of the general question of why individuals voluntarily risk their

lives by enlisting.

Literature Review

This article def‌ines “enlistment”as an individual’s voluntary decision to join a military.

Although many militaries distinguish between the “enlistment”of non-off‌icers and the

“commissioning”of off‌icers, this article applies the term “enlistment”to both for

simplicity’s sake. The term also overlaps with “recruitment,”although the latter

emphasizes the efforts of the military itself to attract new members versus the indi-

vidual’s own motivations. As the focus here is on the individual’s motivations, “en-

listment”is preferred. The def‌inition used here also excludes coercive induction, such

as conscription or abduction. Finally, motivations inf‌luencing enlistment are separate

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