Draft evasion

Draft evasion or conscription evasion (also referred to pejoratively as draft dodging) is avoiding a government-imposed obligation to serve in the military forces. Sometimes draft evasion involves refusing to comply with the military draft laws. Illegal draft evasion is said to have characterized every military conflict of the 20th and 21st centuries, in which at least one party of such conflict has enforced conscription. Such evasion is generally considered to be a criminal offense, and laws against it go back thousands of years. There are many draft evasion practices. Those that manage to adhere to or circumvent the law, and those that do not involve taking a public stand, are sometimes referred to as draft avoidance. Draft evaders are sometimes pejoratively referred to as draft dodgers, although in certain contexts that term has also been used non-judgmentally or as an honorific. Practices that involve lawbreaking or taking a public stand are sometimes referred to as draft resistance. Although draft resistance is discussed below as a form of "draft evasion", draft resisters and scholars of draft resistance reject the categorization of resistance as a form of evasion or avoidance. Draft resisters argue that they seek to confront, not evade or avoid, the draft. Draft evasion has been a significant phenomenon in countries as different as Belarus, Colombia, Eritrea, the Netherlands, Canada, France, Russia, South Korea, Syria, Ukraine, the United Kingdom and the United States. Accounts by scholars and journalists, along with memoiristic writings by draft evaders, indicate that the motives and beliefs of the evaders cannot be usefully stereotyped.