Paper short abstract:

Militant mobility is generated by Shai militants who move across the Middle East to fight for various causes and different banners. We should ask the mobility of meanings between the fronts and ever-changing politics of home-ground to understand participation in political violence.

Paper long abstract:

The on-going conflict in Syria has highlighted the mobility of Shia' militants more than ever. There has been discussions about involvement of Iranian state in Lebanon however before 2014. However, there has not much attention on how the rise of conflict has generated the militants without borders in the Middle East. Shia' militants generate ethnic, ideological and territorial mobility in order to justify their movements and contribution to resistance movements and theatres of war. Their boundaries and 'realities' are drawn through the lens of religiosity and theatres of war that are challenged with constant changing politics behind the front lines. Therefore, the question is how these imagined boundaries and combat mobility are produced and coped with between home and fronts? What are the discourse and set of practices after combat that helps them to justify their militancy home grounds ? What is the link between these boundaries and flow of the Shia' militants and regeneration of the Other across the Middle East?

Owing to these questions, I have followed Shia militants through anthropology of resistant movements and observed flows of Shia militants from Afghanistan till Syria. I explore how these militant mobility acquires sacrality in process of its emergence and how battlefield is articulated and justified in the home-grounds.