Rights and gun sights: Military service and the politics of citizenship

Scholars and statesmen alike have often maintained that military institutions define the boundaries of the nation. Yet despite much suggestive commentary, a theory laying out the conditions under which and the causal pathways through which military institutions exert such effects is still lacking. This dissertation tries to develop such a theoretical framework and empirically illustrate its dynamics.; To capture the politics of nationality, the first conceptual move is to abandon apolitical and individualist models and instead center the analysis on citizenship. This also suggests a more tractable research question: under what conditions and how does the design of the armed forces shape minorities' efforts to garner the rights associated with first-class citizenship? Two answers are suggested here. First, military service makes available a potentially powerful claims frame stressing the minority's collective sacrifice for the nation. Whether this frame will force the state's tongue, and ultimately its hand, depends on the nature and content of the discursive structure. Second, the military manpower policy may, under identifiable conditions, serve as a strong signal of how the state would respond to the minority's demands for citizenship, thereby shaping the timing, objectives, and tactics of the minority's political activity and in turn the form and degree of citizenship the minority may attain. The dissertation then explores these mechanisms in two macro-cases (and several intra-case comparisons): the Israel Defence Forces and Arab minorities; and African-Americans, military service, and the quest for civil rights.; This dissertation seeks to make four contributions to the study of politics. First, it aims to fill separate potholes in the literatures on civil-military relations and nationalism and to bring these two fields into dialogue with each other. Second, it is yet another building block in the burgeoning research program on "policy feedback." Third, it suggests rethinking the role of rhetoric in the explanation of political and social phenomena. Rhetoric, it argues, is neither epiphenomenal nor potentially persuasive, but potentially coercive. Finally, it argues for a tighter intertwining of culture and rationality in the analysis of politics.