These wars taught me the importance of defending the inherent rights and value of all people, and the social and personal impoverishment that ac-companies the loss of diversity. In these places, politicized differences actively manifested into violent conflict at the hands of political entrepreneurs, between ethnic Albanians and Serbs in Kosovo and then Arabs and Kurds in Iraq, as well as sectarian fault lines between Sunni and Shia. I also witnessed how the participants in communal violence could, at other times, live side by side as neighbors, even valuing each other's
These wars taught me the importance of defending the inherent rights and value of all people, and the social and personal impoverishment that ac-companies the loss of diversity. In these places, politicized differences actively manifested into violent conflict at the hands of political entrepreneurs, between ethnic Albanians and Serbs in Kosovo and then Arabs and Kurds in Iraq, as well as sectarian fault lines between Sunni and Shia. I also witnessed how the participants in communal violence could, at other times, live side by side as neighbors, even valuing each other's