Foreign Volunteers - Reasons For Volunteering

Reasons For Volunteering

Three main reasons for volunteering can be identified:

  • Ideology - the volunteer believes in a cause and volunteers to fight for it.
  • Adventure - the volunteer joins a foreign army to see action.
  • Long-term personal or family benefit - the volunteer serves in order to qualify for non-financial benefits, such as forgiveness of sins, citizenship or to acquire an education.

This is a simplistic analysis and, in many cases, a volunteer will be influenced by two or more of these reasons. It follows, therefore, that a unit of foreign volunteers may contain soldiers with different, or different combinations of, motivations.

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