Abstract
Why do jihadi foreign fighters leave local insurgencies? While the literature on jihadi foreign fighters has mushroomed over the last decade, it has largely covered the perspective of individual motivations to join jihadi foreign fighter groups. The critical question of why individual jihadi foreign fighters leave local insurgencies, de facto recognizing the failure of their initial motives to join a distant armed conflict, has remained understudied.
Drawing on the case study of Russo-Chechen wars, this article shows that a combination of popular hostility, loss of status, and poor living conditions urged jihadi foreign fighters to abandon local armed conflict.