Fight, Flight, Mimic

Fight, Flight, Mimic: Identity Mimicry in Conflict is an edited collection (co-edited by Thomas Hegghammer and Diego Gambetta) that develops a theory and game-theoretic model of deceptive mimicry and surveys its historical and modern uses.

The book brings together empirical case studies — including Northern Ireland, 1970s Italy, the Iraq insurgency, the Rwandan genocide, the Naxalite rebellion in India, and jihadi online forums — to show how mimicry enables flight, fight, and false-flag operations.

Contributors analyze the signals imitators exploit, the costs and benefits of mimicry, and how audiences infer credibility in low-bandwidth environments like the internet.

The volume is aimed at scholars of conflict, security practitioners, and policymakers interested in how identity manipulation shapes violent politics.

Its cross-disciplinary approach blends sociology, political science, and game theory to explain when and why mimicry succeeds or fails.