Читать книгу Military Alliances in the Twenty-First Century - Alexander Lanoszka - Страница 7

In writing this book, I am most certainly standing on the shoulders of giants. I have never met Paul Schroeder, Glenn Snyder, or Patricia Weitsman, and, unfortunately, I will never be able to do so. However, their influence is everywhere in this book even if I am not referencing them directly. Their foundational scholarship has, collectively, been a rich source of inspiration and insight for me. Although this book synthesizes diverse areas of inquiry as regards alliance politics, it ultimately is but a small token of my own appreciation for their pioneering work.

I owe a big debt of gratitude to Louise Knight for proposing the idea for this book in the first place and for pushing me to think hard about which arguments I would like to make. If it were not for her, then this book would surely not exist. I have had much help along the way while writing it. Inès Boxman shepherded the book through the review and publication process. Jordan Cohen offered excellent commentaries on drafts of each chapter. Bradley Sylvestre provided terrific research assistance. Because I wrote this book during the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic, I organized a virtual workshop on its first complete draft. Jordan Cohen, Katherine Elgin, Matthew Fay, and Michael Hunzeker gave incisive and excellent commentary that forced me to clarify and strengthen my arguments. I must also thank Hugo Meijer and Luis Simón for their comments on different parts of the manuscript. Very helpfully, two anonymous readers noted key weaknesses and made useful suggestions for remedying them. Over the years, too, I have absorbed much wisdom and knowledge from various teachers, mentors, friends, and colleagues at Princeton University, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dartmouth College, City, University of London, and the University of Waterloo. They have opened up a diverse set of competing views and ideas relevant to the issues explored in this book. With all that said, I bear full responsibility for any infelicities and errors that sneaked into the finished product.

Lastly, I would like to thank my wife, Emmanuelle Richez, for her extensive support and enthusiasm for the project, even if it meant enduring some of my long discourses over meals (what she would call “rants”). The writing of this book also overlapped with the arrival, and the first year in this crazy world, of our son Maximilien. This book is dedicated to him. His coming into our lives, the pandemic, and the writing of the book almost perfectly coincided in their timing. It was strange to be effectively in lockdown for such a long stretch of time, but he made the experience so much better for us.

Windsor, Ontario