Creating a Crisis: Canada and the Foreign Fighter Phenomenon

The phenomenon of informal combatants – à la Spanish Civil War where approximately 1,500 Canadians and thousands more Britons went – appears to have a “romantic” tone in the minds of some nations and perhaps especially in Western countries (ostensibly the liberal democracies), and one should be overwhelmingly concerned for the legality and the impacts on human rights, claims against the state, and even the child soldier phenomena.