Fighting for Rights: Military Service and the Politics of Citizenship(Cornell Studies in Security Affairs)

Leaders around the globe have long turned to the armed forces as a "school for the nation." Debates over who serves continue to arouse passion today because the military's participation policies are seen as shaping politics beyond the military, specifically the politics of identity and citizenship. Yet how and when do these policies transform patterns of citizenship? Military service, Ronald R. Krebs argues, can play a critical role in bolstering minorities' efforts to grasp full and unfettered rights. Minority groups have at times effectively contrasted their people's battlefield sacrifices to the reality of inequity, compelling state leaders to concede to their claims. At the same time, military service can shape when, for what, and how minorities have engaged in political activism in the quest for meaningful citizenship. Employing a range of rich primary materials, Krebs shows how the military's participation policies shaped Arab citizens' struggles for first-class citizenship in Israel from independence to the mid-1980s and African Americans' quest for civil rights, from World War I to the Korean War. Fighting for Rights helps us make sense of contemporary debates over gays in the military and over the virtues and dangers of liberal and communitarian visions for society. It suggests that rhetoric is more than just a weapon of the weak, that it is essential to political exchange, and that politics rests on a dual foundation of rationality and culture.

About the Author :
Ronald R. Krebs is Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of Minnesota. He is the author of Dueling Visions: U.S. Strategy toward Eastern Europe under Eisenhower.

Review :
"Fighting for Rights combines historical research and sociological insight with a full command of contemporary developments. With a focus on African Americans in the United States and the Druze in Israel, Krebs brilliantly documents under what circumstances military service can or cannot expand the citizenship rights of racial, ethnic, and other minorities. This book is truly pathbreaking."-Charles Moskos, Northwestern University, author of A Call to Civic Service "This book raises and answers the question: When and how does military service shape struggles by minorities to gain full citizenship rights within democratic states? Fighting for Rights is well-written and makes a unique and interesting contribution to our understanding of the relationship between military service and citizenship status."-James Burk, Texas A&M University "Ronald R. Krebs has taken two disparate topics, security and minority relations, and managed to use them in new and innovative ways to shed light on each other. His innovative framework demonstrates how one minority in Israel, the Druze, was able to signal its intentions and frame its demands in a way that broke down Jewish insularity, while Christian and Muslim Arabs, using different sorts of tactics, failed to make headway. In the United States, Krebs explains how African Americans' challenge to segregation and other forms of discrimination in the military went only so far in addressing their broader disadvantaged position in society as a whole. Fighting for Rights is a must-read for those interested in state-minority relations, as well as those concerned about civil-military relations."-Joel Migdal,