Why Fight? The Combatant Careers of the Anti‐Kyiv Fighters in the Donbas War<sup>1</sup>
Journal: Sociological Forum
Year: 2023

Based on original qualitative data on the mobilization of anti‐Kyiv combatants during the war in eastern Ukraine (started in 2014), this article suggests an approach for understanding the spontaneous mobilization of nonstate armed groups during contemporary military conflicts. This approach is based on the notion of career as a collective path of mobilization unfolding over time. It explains how different mobilization factors usually proposed in the literature on contemporary civil wars acquire