Fighting for Rights

Military service, Ronald R. Krebs argues, can play a critical role in bolstering minorities' efforts to grasp full and unfettered rights.

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.

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.

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.

Charles Moskos, Northwestern University, author of A Call to Civic Service:

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.