Foreign fighters and strategic communications: the Georgian Legion

Abstract

The subject of foreign fighters has invited significant scholarly inquiry, particularly in the wake of the Global War on Terror. However, much of this research has remained limited to studying the motivation for the participation of these combatants rather than the means by which they conduct their efforts. Moreover, foreign fighter scholarship has often restricted the scope of study to those participating in insurgent groups, despite the presence of thousands of foreign volunteer fighters in Ukraine since 2014. This study moves beyond these outdated paradigms in exploring how one of the most prolific groups of foreign fighters in Ukraine, the Georgian National Legion (GNL), made extensive use of strategic communications to accomplish its objectives. Acknowledging the increasingly blurred line between private and public actors in modern conflict, this study makes novel use of concepts from strategic communications literature such as stakeholder theory, branding, and framing in order to analyze collected posts from the GNL’s Telegram channel through thematic coding. The study further applies these concepts in analyzing public interviews from the GNL commander with members of the press as well as the GNL website, ultimately finding that the GNL has developed an increasingly sophisticated strategic communication operation in the face of growing challenges with the onset of Russia’s 2022 full-scale invasion of Ukraine. In addition to illuminating key strategic communications concepts for foreign fighters groups, the study also bears implications regarding the nature of modern conflict in relation to the state and its monopoly on war.