Fighting for Rights: Military Service and the Politics of Citizenship

Acknowledgments

Acknowledgments This book is about militaries and about minorities, but ultimately it is about communities. Political communities often establish high barriers to entry, to nurture the mutual trust that sustains exchange and to ensure that membership remains valuable and desirable. Intellectual communities, however, require a different mix. They thrive only when the barriers to entry are low and when diffuse reciprocity is widely practiced—that is, when a broad spectrum of people hawk their wares in the marketplace and when generosity is extended without certainty that the favor will be returned. Given this peculiar combination, it is a wonder that intellectual communities exist at all. Yet thankfully, somehow, they do. Scholarly research is often solitary, but it would be impossible without community. Healthy communities require good citizens. During this project I have been fortunate to have encountered many of them. The end product is far better as a consequence, and I have accumulated many a debt that cannot possibly be repaid. I met my first model of good citizenship early on in my academic career , at Princeton University. A man who could never say no, Dick Ullman soon became my mentor and eventually a friend, and his copious comments on drafts of my senior thesis set the standard to which I aspire as a teacher myself. Dick paved the way for me to obtain a one-year position as an assistant editor at Foreign Affairs, and there I met Fareed Zakaria, who (wisely?) advised me to abandon law school and give graduate study in political science a try. At Columbia University, I was blessed with advisers who cared about me and my research. Bob Jervis and Jack Snyder’s catholic approach to the discipline , combined with their habitual constructive skepticism, gave me just enough rope to hang myself. In the years since the dissertation, I have been grateful for their continued mentorship. Ira Katznelson always drew me back to the big picture, asking probing questions I would have avoided if left to my own devices. For whatever contribution this book makes, all three deserve much credit. Numerous individuals read portions of this book in its various incarnations and sought, at times unsuccessfully, to save me from the error of my ways. For their (usually) gentle criticism and (always) useful comments, I am grateful to Deborah Avant, Michael Barnett, Gabi Ben Dor, Dick Betts, Henry Bienen, Bill Boettcher, Bill Childs, Consuelo Cruz, Mike Desch, Alex Downes, Amitabh Dubey, Amitai Etzioni, Sam Fitch, Eric Foner, Hillel Frisch, Hein Goemans,Arman Grigorian, Jim Guyot, Chris Howard, Jacques Hymans, Bob Jervis, Ben Judkins, Aaron Lobel, Ira Katznelson, Beth Kier, Phil Klinkner, Margot Krebs, Shira Krebs, Mark Leff, Jack Levy, Kim Marten, Joel Migdal, Dan Nexon, David Pion-Berlin, Steve Rosen, Robert Saxe, Shy Shankar, Allan Silver, Jack Snyder, Chuck Tilly, Monica Duffy Toft, Leslie Vinjamuri, Ken Waltz, and Naomi Weinberger. Particular thanks are due to Patrick Jackson with whom, in the course of writing a coauthored article, I rethought many of this book’s theoretical claims; to Jim Burk and Steve Walt, who carefully reviewed the manuscript for Cornell University Press and made extraordinarily helpful suggestions; and especially to Dave Edelstein and Stacie Goddard, who went far above and beyond the call of duty in reading the entire manuscript and helping me shape it in the final excruciating stages. For any flaws that remain, I have only myself to blame. In recent years, I have enjoyed the collegiality of the University of Minnesota ’s Department of Political Science. I have been surrounded by models of good citizenship, and many colleagues—too many to enumerate—have given me valuable advice on this project. Fellowships from Harvard’s John M. Olin Institute for Strategic Studies, the University of Virginia’s Miller Center of Public Affairs, the United States Institute of Peace, and the Eisenhower World Affairs Institute freed me from teaching and allowed me to write. Funding from the Institute for the Study of World Politics, the Dwight D. Eisenhower Presidential Library, and Columbia ’s Institute for War and Peace Studies made possible extended research trips to archives in Israel and the United States. The Olin Institute, Columbia’s Institute for Social and Economic Research and Policy, and Harvard’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs provided me with office space and, more important, a nurturing intellectual environment. Thanks are also due to the many archivists in Israel and the United States who aided my research and to the many current and former government...