Missions Accomplished! Beer and Dissemination

Part of display outside Churchill during WWII exhibit near my hotel.  So, of course, it raises the question whether my trip to Dublin and London was worthwhile.  The answer, even if we omit the tourism and the beer, is clearly very much so. 

I presented the diaspora project (collecting data on potential diasporas in the US and then the rest of the advanced democracies to determine why some groups mobilize and others do not) at LSE to a group of folks who study ethnicity and nationalism.  The project could best be described as immature or incomplete.  So, the audience had a heap of questions that forced me to think about the choices we have made and some issues we had not considered.  So, very valuable feedback. 

In Dublin, I presented a finished project--the Dave and Steve book on NATO and Afghanistan.  The good news is that we will have a chance to revise after we get the reviews back from the publisher because the folks in Dublin asked some good questions that we ought to address.  At King's College, I presented the implications of the book for NATO's future--that the plans to coordinate procurement under "Smart Defense" are, well, a bit problematic.  Again, the folks there provided very useful comments. 

There was also some networking with and without beer (ok, mostly entirely with beer). 

And the tourism was not bad either:

I had an hour and the Globe was between my breakfast meeting and my hotel.