THOMAS HEGGHAMMER, of Oslo's Norwegian Defence Research Establishment analyzes the phenomenon of the Muslim foreign fighter to explain what drove Muslims to fight in transnational wars for each other, mostly after 1980 and posits that the phenomenon was a violent offshoot of the pan-Islamist identity movement that arose in 1970s through a process of elite competition. In an article for International Security, "The Rise of Muslim Foreign Fighters: Islam and the Globalization of Jihad", he states that the transnational Muslim fighter and the al-Qaeda operative were different in their political preferences although they hailed from the same pan-Islamist ideology, with the Muslim fighter having a stronger popular support base, and concludes that undermining pan-Islamism and promotion of state nationalism or other local forms of identification were key to an effective counter-strategy.
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