Recursive

Recursive merge strategy occurs when there is no linear path between the branches. This can happen if you've created a feature branch from the master branch, you've made some new commits and now you want to merge it into master. But, the difference is that in the meantime, someone updated the master branch and created some new commits there. Now, in order to merge the branches, git has to combine changes into a new commit. See the image bellow.

Have a look at how new commit is created when there is no linear path between the branches.