In 1984, Patrick Magee, a member of the Irish Republican Army, planted a bomb in Brighton’s Grand Hotel, intending to assassinate Margaret Thatcher. Born in Belfast, Northern Ireland, and raised in England, Magee had an authentic English accent, which helped him evade suspicion and security checks, allowing him to plant the bomb shortly before Thatcher’s visit [94]. Johnny Adair, a Protestant and a member of the Loyalist paramilitary, revealed in a demobilization interview that he used to drive women and children around the Catholic enclave of West Belfast in a black taxi while conducting intelligence operations. Aiming to pass as an authentic Catholic, he also reported wearing a Celtic football club top and avoiding conversations with community members [99]. A tactic of offensive deception or a defensive mechanism? Why do wartime actors pretend to be members of the enemy group? And how do they protect themselves against similar acts of deception? These questions are crucial to understanding a broad range of conflict dynamics, from how actors define strategic targets and develop military tactics to how they assess and mitigate risks. Diego Gambetta and Thomas Hegghammer’s edited volume Fight, Flight, Mimic stands out as one of the first collections of studies of diverse cases that address these important questions.
The book presents a micro-level framework for understanding identity mimicry. In the introduction, Gambetta and Hegghammer define it as the strategic manipulation of identity to obtain an advantage on the battlefield by “pretend[ing] to be a different person or a member of a group to which [one] does not belong” [4, my emphasis]. The introduction effectively contextualizes the concept, offering a rich discussion of historical examples. It also expands our knowledge about “deception” as a wartime phenomenon, which the editors conceptualize as having strategic and tactical dimensions. The strategic dimension concerns the object being misrepresented—such as a love affair or a violent event—while the tactical dimension focuses on the means of misrepresentation. Unlike other forms of tactical deception in civil war, such as false pretenses, camouflage behind inanimate objects, or outright lying, identity mimicry has a strategic focus on the misrepresentation of identity. This is a dynamic and relational process involving a mimic who adopts certain appearances or behaviors of the model to deceive the dupe [7]. Gambetta and Hegghammer offer four types of mimicry: (1) individuals mimicking other specific individuals, e.g., a military leader using doubles for personal protection; (2) individuals mimicking members of a different social group, e.g., individual members of an ethnic minority passing as members of the ethnic majority; (3) groups mimicking other specific groups, e.g., rebels using emblems or uniforms to mimic the enemy group; and (4) groups mimicking generic collectives, e.g., rebels passing as civilians [21–22].
In Chapter 2, James D. Fearon develops a formal game-theoretic model of social mimicry to examine the strategic behavior of mimics and dupes and their interaction. Fearon argues that, in equilibrium, a mimic’s expected payoff from attempting mimicry must be roughly equivalent to the payoff of refraining from doing so. When the anticipated payoff of mimicry is higher than that of non-mimicry, more mimics will engage in it, prompting dupes to intensify their detection efforts [27–28]. Conversely, if the payoff is lower, mimicry attempts will decrease. This dynamic relationship evolves as actors learn about each other’s strategies, and as institutional and technological developments enhance either the detection or execution of mimicry. The chapter illustrates the generalizability of the game-theoretic model effectively, using compelling examples, such as fake IDs, tax fraud, and civilian victimization during genocide. However, it takes a detour from the book’s main focus, as most of its examples are unrelated to mimicry in civil war. Later chapters by contributing authors return to Fearon’s model by using it to analyze their research findings.
In Chapter 6, for example, David D. Laitin examines why Tutsis rarely used defensive mimicry to evade capture, torture, or execution during the Rwandan genocide. Drawing on Fearon’s model, he attributes this outcome to the high stakes of success (or failure) for both the mimic (Tutsis) and the dupe (Hutus). This motivated potential dupes to implement institutional mechanisms to detect mimicry, thus significantly raising the level of effort and skill required for mimicry to succeed—and, ultimately, deterring Tutsis from using defensive mimicry. Laitin’s analysis supports the theory of benefit–cost calculation developed by Fearon. However, the evidence in the chapter also raises questions about how shared perceptions about mimicry threats emerge, and what role states play in shaping them. For example, on page 168, Laitin describes how, years before the start of the genocide, the Hutu state had been issuing systematic warnings on radio and television networks against identity falsification. A potential avenue for further research would be to investigate how cultural and social structures—within which dupes, models, and mimics are embedded—provide critical information for assessing and identifying the threat of identity mimicry.
Throughout the different chapters, the volume also answers the question of why armed actors engage in identity mimicry during civil war. In Chapter 4, Heather Hamill uses the example of the Northern Ireland conflict to show that individuals and armed groups use identity mimicry for both offensive and defensive military purposes, i.e., to gain proximity to/an advantage over a military target and avoid becoming the target of attacks. Moreover, the analytical leverage of studying the manipulation of identity in civil war becomes most apparent across two key chapters. In Chapter 5, Pizzini-Gambetta and Gambetta demonstrate that between 1969 and 1980 in Italy, clandestine groups falsely claimed responsibility for acts of political violence, or falsely claimed that other groups were responsible for their own attacks, in order to influence public opinion. Their aim was to “destabilize the enemy by scaring its supporters; show the enemy’s weakness and induce it to embark on a costly repression bound to foster wider revolt; gain a reputation for self-abnegation and resilience in the service of a cause; and to lure new recruits” [146]. In Chapter 7, Mamidi argues that criminal bands in India that practice extortion exploit the reputation of the Naxals to carry out threats against their victims. To pass as Naxals, they imitate identity markers such as their clothing, stationery, physical appearance, idiomatic usage of Marxist or leftist language, acts of self-harm, use of preemptive violence, and their knowledge of the victims’ personal information [190]. In both the Italian and Indian cases, it becomes clear that civil war actors are “not just marginally concerned with communication, but […] design violence itself [while] taking communicative implications into consideration” [146]. The volume’s focus on identity mimicry draws attention to conflict dynamics at the intersection of the discursive field and the battlefield, including the misrepresentation of violence in public discourse and the use of armed actors’ reputations for tactical purposes.
Across the different empirical chapters, the contributing authors also broaden our understanding of the wartime mechanisms armed actors use to defend themselves from offensive mimicry. In Chapter 3, for instance, Hegghammer illustrates how jihadists have adopted counter-mimicry strategies to build trust among online communities, through strategies such as using reputation systems integrated into the online platform and vetting agencies, a preference for complex media formats such as video, and displays of complex knowledge [74]. Another mechanism is for the potential models to use rituals and behavioral patterns that are hard to replicate, which helps confirm the authenticity of their claims and actions. Examples include the Naxals’ use of third-party authenticators, the Italian Red Brigade’s design of a new group logo with specific “flaws” that only group members could identify, or the use of code words to authenticate attacks by the Irish Republican Army, which were communicated by known group leaders.
The editors successfully achieve their three aims for this book: (1) to deepen our knowledge of mimicry, (2) to refine our understanding of deception in war, and (3) to enhance our insight into civil wars [3]. However, the way in which they expand on these matters is not directly outlined for the reader. While the editors have excelled in providing the contributing authors with clear conceptual and theoretical guidance—resulting in an exceptional collection of empirical chapters—they have missed an opportunity to advance their theoretical contributions by reflecting on the book’s empirical findings. Despite this omission, the volume succeeds in drawing attention to the phenomenon of identity mimicry and its crucial role in helping us understand a wide range of conflict dynamics across both the discursive field and the battlefield.
This work is an exciting contribution to the growing scholarly program on war and society, which not only highlights military tactics and battlefield violence but also broadens its scope to include diverse conflict dynamics and actors beyond the battlefield. The next step would be to identify connections between the various empirical studies in order to address central sociological and interdisciplinary questions. This might involve exploring the relationship between political legitimacy, communication, and violence; examining the impact of disinformation campaigns in contemporary politics; and investigating the micro-, meso-, and macro-level processes that shape cultural resonance, trust, and authenticity during wartime—and how these processes ultimately crystallize into political mobilization and social change.
