Cutting Edge Civil-Military Relations Amid the Carnage

 This weekend, I was in Reston, Virginia for my second IUS--the Inter-University Seminar on Armed Forces and Society.  Founded by one of the biggest names in the earliest civ-mil era, Morris Janowitz, the IUS is the premiere American gathering of civ-mil scholars.  It ultimately led to IUS-Canada and I think the European Research Group on Armed Forces and Society--ERGOMAS--and maybe a few others. Folks were surprised it was only my second, but I started doing civ-mil halfway through my career and it took me a while to figure out the landscape.

And I am glad I did.  The civ-mil community and IUS in particular is just a hive of kindness, generosity, and insight.   Usually, when I go to a conference, I skip more than a few panel sessions as there are often timeslots where there isn't anything that engages me that much.  At IUS, I go to nearly all of the panels I can, and I get a bit frustrated when stuff is cross-scheduled.  This year, there were fewer conflicts in the schedule because, alas, far fewer folks attended.  Many scholars from outside the US were deterred because of Trump's border madness.  Most scholars from American professional military education places--the military academies, war colleges, etc--were either prevented from attending due to the shutdown or Hegseth's anti-academic engagement policies.  Some folks from outside the US and from PME places showed up anyway and brought a heap of insight and, yes, fun.

I participated in two panels--the first where I presented my paper about how joining NATO shaped Swedish and Finnish civil-military relations differently--and the second I will discuss further below.  I had a lot of fave presentations, but a few stick out.  Polina Beliakova of American University is simply one of the sharpest of the next gen of civ-mil scholars.  She presented a devastating bit of work--that many scholars keep citing that 3/4s of democracies have been felled by coups but if you take democracy seriously as more than just elections, that finding goes away.  Specifically, she focuses on a different coding of democracies, focusing not just on elections but on freedoms of press/association/speech and developed civil societies.  This is important because these might be the democratic equivalent of coup-proofing (we study more autocracies and how they coup proof by altering the ethnic balance of the armed forces, by setting up paramilitary organizations, by promoting due to loyalty and not merit, positioning party loyalists [commissars] next to senior military leaders] institutions/strategies dynamics.  Polina showed that if you include those kinds of measures, suddenly most of the places counted as democracies drop out, leaving very, very few (2) democracies being felled by coups.  Which means we need to look elsewhere for what might cause democracy to end.  Insert foreshadowing music here.

The second paper on that panel was by private citizen Lindsay Cohn, who has spent much time myth-busting Posse Comitatus.  She discussed the origins of PC and showed that it did not really reduce the use of US military forces in the US in law enforcement--it just moved it outside of the South.  That is, it was aimed at reducing the enforcement of Reconstruction against the racist people who wanted to deny civil rights to the newly freed Black people.  Her larger point is that using the military domestically is a political problem that the courts will not solve for us. I felt for Lindsay and Polina as both were doing vital myth busting that was compared to killing Zombies--that the arguments they were confronting have been attacked multiple times but are hard to kill.  Kind of like Huntington's stuff that has done a heap of damage both to civilian control of the military and to the study of civ-mil.  I pointed out after the panel that it is not that hard to kill individual Zombies, but it is hard to eradicate the Zombie virus.  

As a Brooksian, I should note that Risa Brooks presented a number of papers that all were super insightful and pushed me to think harder about stuff including one on accountability: 
 

 

 

 

 

 

The Kori Schake book panel was a heap of fun because Heidi Urben and Peter Feaver and Kori know each other well and like to give each other plenty of friendly grief.  Kori's book is a selected history of American civil-military relations (I haven't read it yet as the mail in Canada has been disrupted by strikes and always moves by ox-cart).  Heidi gave an incredibly sharp assessment of what the book adds to our understanding and what the book could have addressed better.  Peter asked a series of questions, many of which Kori claimed where poli sci and she's an historian (her degree is in Poli Sci).  It was just a delightful roundtable that raised a bunch of interesting questions.

The last panel I will highlight was one of the last of the conference: I was on a roundtable on what can we learn about American civ-mil from the comparativists and vice versa.  I was the chair and I started the conversation with a few slides.  I raised the question of whether the US example is relevant for the rest of the world:

Yes:

• Most folks including most militaries still rely on Huntington
• Most militaries want a heap of autonomy and think the civilians are amateurs
• Military effectiveness is hard to measure
• Principal-agency theory applies everywhere, and all militaries hate it despite the fact that they apply it every single day.

No

• The US model doesn't apply everywhere
• 
  It doesn't apply to the US
• I self-promoted by invoking our recent book 

I then suggested that the classic phrase of comparison being the thief joy is wrong. Envy is bad but comparison is joy.

I took inconsistent notes for the rest of the panel (sorry), but some of the key points:

Will the American troops fire on Americans?  Maybe, as it depends on such stuff as the ratio of protestors to troops (the bigger the protests, the less likely troops will fire); non-violence begets a non-violent mil response, is the crowd's composition (ethnic/racial) similar to the troops (maybe best for white folks to do the protesting?).   They also spoke on how Trump/Hegseth are trying to get an obedient military via ethnic stacking (making the military whiter), loyalty tests, counterbalancing by building up ICE, paying the military when no one else is getting paid, etc.

One scholar focused on militia-state relationships--borrowing from Staniland's work--will Trump's regime suppress the far right militias, contain them, collude, or incorporate.  We all voted on incorporating.  They also pointed out that we need to look at beyond the military to the ecology of the security sector--the balance of power among the various actors. Maybe the military will be left out of internal security stuff to marginalize it.  They reminded us that we civ-mil folks tend to ignore the National Guard (as does the regular military), so we need to think about them.  

Another scholar pointed out several lessons/warnings and a question: 

1. to deal with illegal acts is to take it to court, but this is a political problem, courts won’t save us, need political actors to take political steps—dems in Congress
2. how quickly norms can erode, failure of imagination about this regime, envision worst case scenario and then think worse than that
3. we focus so much on norms governing the military, we have not thought much about civilian norms, US case shows when civilians violate norms
4. we have to have correct concepts on the US case—Posse Comitatus for example.  We have to get this stuff straight, duty as a community to ensure that we are not spreading misinformation

Their question: have we lost the thread as a community of civ-mil scholars?  What are civ-mil norms for in democracies?  The norms serve a political outcome, at what point does the military become complicit for the fall of the republic by hiding behind norms?  

Which led to a conversation about what the military should be doing: the senior officers should be talking about what the oath means, that retired officers now have a reason to speak , don't comply in advance, governors should be getting legal advice about their national guard units and tlaking to them.

 The entire weekend was full of insight and camaraderie.  I am not going to say this community is more supportive, kind, and generous because it has more women in it than other parts of International Security, but I am going to imply that it does...  I am lucky to have found this field, mostly by accident. The work is fascinating and relevant, and the people are terrific.  It has made the second half of my career not just more interesting and more successful, but much fun as well.  The only downside is that IUS is biannual, so the next one is in 2027.

   

 

Sparse But Spectacular: APSA 2025

 The consensus in Vancouver was that every American Political Science Association annual meeting should be in Vancouver.  The weather was terrific, the views were amazing, the food was great, and it cost Americans about 25% less than they thought.  Usually, the APSA is somewhere on the east coast in a swamp with excessive heat and humidity.  Not this year.  

But the downside was that it was as smaller conference.  Why?  Some guesses:

•  Lots of American academics have lost funding due to their universities losing NIH funding and other federal $ streams.
• Those from American military academic institutions may not have been able to get permission to go since SecDef "Too Drunk to Function" Hegseth is opposed to all knowledge-related events.
• East coast bias--there are simply more schools on the east coast and Vancouver is far, far away.
• Border challenges--non-Americans working in the US may be concerned about what might happen when they try to return from the conference after APSA.
• Border challenges, part deux: Canada absolutely sucks in processing visas so many folks may not have gotten visas to come for the conference.
• And maybe a bit of an illusion given the spread of the event between two wings of the convention center and a handful of hotels.

Maybe it is a one-off, but I can't help but think of an academic conference career arc: that when I started, I barely knew anyone, and would walk around searching for a familiar face [again, folks don't buy it, but I am shy in large crowds of people I don't know].  Then, as time went on, I didn't have to search as much.  And then I could just stand still and have many interactions with so many people that I have met in previous jobs, workshops, conferences, and my dance card would be full even before I arrived.  And now with friends retiring or passing, and perhaps because of the aforementioned shrinking of APSA, I had more openings in schedule, far fewer familiar faces, and more time to exercise.

Still, it was a good and valuable experience.  I got good feedback on my paper, I talked to an editor about an edited volume project, I met with a co-author about our next survey, I met sharp emerging scholars and served as their discussant, participated in a panel memorializing Brandon Valeriano, and didn't do much tourism as I have been here before.

The big topic hanging over the event was the backsliding of the US into autocracy. The Charlie Kirk assassination happened immediately before the conference, so it was a focus, but the larger concerns focused on the decline of academic freedom (personified by Kirk), the odds of civil war in the near future, Trump's declining health, and how much comparative politics has to say at this moment to the Americanists who have not really been trained to think about autocracy.  The pace of events makes it easy to forget that just a week ago, we faced the real possibility of the Texas National Guard confronting Illinois authorities and the public.  

We have dodged a lot of bullets (sorry, Charlie), that reichstag fire type events are now like streetcars--coming along every few minutes, and our luck is running out.  The right wing is talking about using the Kirk killing to justify suppression/persecution of the left and that does not just mean the far left commies, but everyone pretty much but themselves.  I just read a great piece by Jeffrey Isaac that speaks to our moment and what he has to fear.  I did react to the Kirk killing by noting that political violence is bad and that Kirk incited political violence, noting my privilege to do so as a Canadian.  We have seen Americans lose their jobs because they spoke about Kirk's deplorable stances and activities including his systematic effort to crush academic freedom.  And now Isaac has me thinking a bit about fear and how none of us are immune from either violence or the cowardice of university administrations.

One of the topics of conversation at the conference was, of course, the events at Texas A&M where a lecture, their department chair, and their dean were all fired because they had the temerity to talk about gender in a way that might not be approved of by the Trump regime.  Given my six years in west Texas long ago, yeah, I sighed relief that I got out of there.  I am pretty sure I would have been fired by now.

Anyhow, it was great to see friends, learn about new research, and celebrate Brandon.  We shall see if there is much of an international crowd at the ISA in Columbus in March.  Time to go back home to teach and revise a grant application.

APSA-ing as a Senior Scholar

Philly convention center

 If I had any doubts about my status as a "senior scholar," they were dispelled this week.  I was at the American Political Science Association meeting, and a grad student came up to me and said he was "professor x's last student."  The professor x in this case is not a telepathic leader of a school for mutants, but just a sharp woman whose stuff I read long ago, who I viewed as one of the group of hotshots that were one generation ahead of me.   Yep, she's retiring.  So, it is not just the folks who were senior scholars long ago, but everybody between me and them (well, except those folks who never retire).  

So, yeah, more conversations this time about when my friends plan to retire, when I plan, and all that.  Our jobs are pretty sweet compared to those elsewhere, so many folks do like to hang on for a while.  I will not be one of those, as I have already determined to step down after 20 years at Carleton, which means eight more years.  I might attend conferences to see friends and to keep learning, to keep engaging my curiosity, which is why I got in this business in the first place.  But I won't be teaching (mainly, I won't be grading), I won't be reviewing manuscripts for journals and presses, and I won't be submitting myself to the whims of reviewers.

Anyhow, over the past fifteen years (yes, the Semi-Spew is that old), I have gotten in the habit of posting my reactions to various conferences (including the APSA in Philly eight years ago).  This APSA as the first normal once since Covid.  Last year's post-covid (as if covid is gone, nope) APSA conference was a shell of itself as a hotel strike deterred many folks from attending.  

However, it was not so normal for me as it was my first real trip to Philly since my mother passed away last May.  I am so familiar with this part of the city as my mother lived near by, and we almost always stayed at this hotel next to the convention center and the Reading Terminal Market.  So, I knew where to go for great bagels, excellent french toast, cheesesteaks, and all the rest.  And I did spend some time at my mom's place, as I went through stuff with my eldest sibling--what jewelry made sense for my wife and such.  Oh, I hosted the regular APSA poker game at my mom's apartment since it had an excellent table and we were unlikely to attract hotel security.

The conference itself was the usual mix of panels and meetings.  Bluesky has replaced twitter as my way of meeting new people--an excellent ice breaker.  So, I had many coffees and a few beers with both old friends and new acquaintances and learned what they were up to.  I had a few meetings that were part of the CDSN 2.0 grant application preparation.  JC Boucher and I presented a paper (co-written with Charlotte Duval-Lantoine and Lynne Gouliquer) on whether discrimination against historically excluded groups affects public attitudes towards the Canadian military.  Yes, it does and people care more about discrimination against some groups than others.  We got some good feedback and learned much from the other panelists and their cool projects.  I went to a couple of other panels to learn what folks are doing in civ-mil these days and to learn more about the Ukraine war as I have an appointment in two weeks to testify before the House of Commons Standing Committee on National Defence.

Carrie and Max at the civ-mil table

I organized a civ-mil hangout at a bar near the convention center, and it went very well.  The civ-mil community is full of sharp, fun, sweet people, so it is always great to get together. As the old guy at the table and as the old guy on the panels, I appreciate so much how great it is to hang out with younger, livelier, more creative folks.  As I indicated above, I might crash post-retirement APSA's and ISA's as I get energized every time I go.  

Dani and Alexandra at the civ-mil hangout

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

A big highlight was a reception at a local Irish bar celebrating three UCSD profs getting lifetime achievement awards.  I got to see some friends from long ago as well as meet some of the folks who went through the place after me.  I am so grateful for lucking into that place--it was and is a terrific community of sharp, sweet, generous, silly people.

Fun sign at the last place I had dinner

City hall is pretty at night

Interesting mural on the way to a steak place

A very good steak sandwich, just wished
they had pizza sauce.

Great way to finish up APSA is dining with JC and Sara

Fried oreos were amazing!

Sweden is More Than Meatballs and Vikings: There's Mead As Well

 Last week, I attended the European Research Group on Armed Forces and Society biannual conference in Stockholm.   ERGOMAS is a sharp, interdisciplinary group working on civil-military relations and related topics.  ERGOMAS is a partner of the CDSN, but we haven't done that much together thanks to the pandemic.  I had only been to it once before, in Lisbon, five years ago (part of that magic summer trip--Lisbon-Barcelona-Paris-Normandy-Paris).*  That meeting was hosted by Helena Carreiras, who later became the Minister of Defense of Portugal.  So, an academic who studies civ-mil then did it.  I hope to have her on the podcast later this year.  Anyhow, ERGOMAS was in Stockholm, and I haven't been there since 1990, the summer I had an IGCC travel fellowship to work on what was my dissertation topic at the time--arms transfers.  While there, I had many epiphanies--that I didn't want to do arms transfers, that the international relations of ethnic conflict would be far more interesting (a realization that played out well for me), that Stockholm is super-expensive, and California budget shenanigans were a pain as I didn't get my funding until I got home.

Anyhow, I didn't have that many memories of enjoying Stockholm, so I was eager to try out the place again.  I didn't return to the Vasa Museum, which will always be a tribute to crappy defense procurement--the 1600's (I think) ship sank just after it was launched--it
was too heavy with too many cannons.  They found it and got it out of the water, refurbished it, and now there is a museum dedicated to it.  Instead, I went to the open air museum that was part zoo, part Williamsburg or Upper Village Canada.  I enjoyed the zoo part more as I was basically an arms length away from an entire reindeer family and just on the other side of the glass from two very playoff baby bears.  I went to a silly viking museum which taught me that the vikings didn't just head west to England, Greenland, and North America but in the other direction as well.  The Abba museum had too long of a line, so I went to a Spirit Museum, where I learned that Sweden had prohibition too, less severe as it was more about rationing than banning, but led to the same criminal dynamics.  I also went to the Nobel prize museum, which was small but quite interesting.  Hollywood Spew recommended the Modern Art museum, which had some great displays.  So, heaps of museums.

 

 

But this trip was more than just tourism.  I presented two papers: the Phil/Steve/Ora defence agency project and the JC/Charlotte/Lynne/Steve diversity and public attitudes about the CAF paper.  We got very helpful comments for both.  The first is still in the early stages, so that the feedback was super useful for figuring out where to take the project.  This is the one that has me traveling to places all over the world (so far South Korea, Finland, and Germany) to ponder the role of departments/ministries of defense.  The second paper considers whether stories of discrimination in the military reduce trust in the armed forces, reduce support for defense spending, or reduce support for folks joining the military.  And, yeah, we find that it does, but that Canadians discriminate in their discrimination--some groups (women, Francophones) produce stronger results than others (Indigenous, LGBTQ2S+).  This paper is nearly ready to be submitted, so the comments were helpful in the final steps of framing and developing implications, too late to shape the survey.  

ERGOMAS was also a handy place and time to bring together potential partners and members of the next iteration of the CDSN. The CDSN is now in its 6th year, which means we need to find funding to keep it going past the 7th year of the big grant.  We are going back to the SSHRC Partnership Grant program, which does not have a renewal process but 2.0's have to be bigger but more focused.  So, we are going to use the heart of the CDSN to build an international research network on civil-military relations (still trying to figure out a new name).  We want to do a better job of involving our international partners, so we consulted with them, and we got a lot of great ideas.

 

If I remember, |
this is David Kuehn's slide.

Speaking of great ideas, I did go to a lot of panels (most conferences, I ditch most panels to make new connections and renew existing ones), and I learned a lot about a lot.  The best part was the democratic backsliding panel--not because I am a fan of democratic backsliding but because the panel was a sharp group doing great work AND Risa Brooks, who was one of the presenters, will be leading one of the research teams in CDSN 2.0--the one on the role of militaries when democracies face the threat of backsliding.  That was the last piece of the research part of the puzzle, and now I have a good idea of how it fits in.  

Conferences generally get me energized, and this one was no exception--I am pretty jazzed about where the CDSN is headed, I have a clearer idea of where we are going with the defense agencies project, and I got to drink mead and eat a heap of cinnamon rolls.  Woot all around! 

*  Despite not much history with the group, I was nominated for President, and managed to finish second (of three candidates). 

Tips for Those Headed to APSA in Montreal 2022

Great views from the top of Mont Royal. 
Yes, the hill is what the city is named after, and
it is a great way to spend some time--walking up
and down.

 

 

It has been a grand tradition here at the Spew to offer unsolicited advice when conferences are in Canada.  A big caveat: I haven't lived in Montreal in ten years, so stuff has changed.  But the most relevant changes are national, not provincial or municipal, so I can still provide some useful guidance.  

First, to get into the country (yes, Canada is a different country, with its own border stuff and everything including roaming rates for your phone), you need passports (this ain't the 1980s) and to have filled out the ArriveCan app.  You can download it via your phone, either android or iphone, and then you input a heap of information within three days of your entry into Canada.  You have to do it shortly before you come to Canada.  Airlines may check that you have done so, you definitely will be checked at the border posts either via land or air.  Downloading the app feverishly filling it out as you wait in the border line in NY or Vermont is not a great strategy as it will require info and maybe even pics of your covid vax records.  The good news is that you won't need a test (that changed last spring). 
Update: I forgot to mention that masking in Canada is ... not consistent.  The mandates went away but a fair amount of people still mask indoors. 

Second, there are multiple ways to get from the airport to downtown--train, bus, taxi.  Downtown is not that far away, but traffic in Montreal sucks with construction season always a challenge (rush hour is not great in the morning and starts early in the afternoon).  If you are driving to Montreal, well, vaya con dios, as the drivers and the structure of the system both are awful.  People will make right turns from the left lane, for instance.  Merging on highways can be a challenge since there may be very little space/time/visibility.  So, my best tip is this: if you are driving and you see a merging sign, head to the far lanes (far right if your lane is on the right side of the merge, far left if you are on the road on the left that is merging towards the right) as this will allow you to avoid being in that magical lane that merges instantaneously.  

Third, it is is a fun place for language politics.  One of the controversies of late has been the tradition of bonjour/hi. That generally service folks in downtown (more so as you go west, less so as you go east, and this might be my most outdated bit of info) speak both English and French and will respond with French if you respond to their bonjour and in English if you respond to hi.  I lived ten years in Montreal (suburbs and McGill, so not the most French of places) and never had to speak much French to get by.  When I got stopped for speeding, I asked the cop if we could it in English since I didn't want to mess up the high stakes conversation, he said "I don't have to" and then we continued on in English.  If you can speak French, go ahead, of course, although the accent may mess you up some. Far more nasal than French French.

Fourth, it looks like a bit of rain next week.  Bring a jacket as we are already in fall with temps in the low 70s as the high and low 60s and even high 50s as the lows.  

Fifth, I mentioned above as an aside but it is serious--Canada's cell system is expensive and your phone will work but at a price, so check your phone provider if they have any deals for roaming in Canada.  No, no worries about moose roaming.

The important thing is Montreal is a great city and easy to get around. The metro system works well, although the whole "underground city" tourist thing is wildly overrated.  The conference is south of downtown so it is close to the Old Port area which has a heap of restaurants and bars.  Quebec beer is better than Ontario beer, and heaps of great crafty stuff is available.  Here's what  I wrote for the 2011 ISA re tourism:

Tourist destinations:

• Old Port area has, well, the older, more European buildings, restaurants, tourist traps. It has the science museum and some other stuff. Plus perhaps even some skating.  Might even be one of the few places that would rent stakes as Canadians seem to be required to own skates (which means that most rinks do not rent).
• Bell Centre.  Hockey is religion here.  The game is always sold out and there are always scalpers selling tickets right out in front before the game.  Bring a heap of cash, and you should be able to find some tickets. 
• Art museum on Sherbrooke is pretty good.  
• If you want to see failed government planning, grab a metro or taxi and head to the Olympic Stadium.  They did productive stuff with some of the other buildings, including turning the cycling arena into Bio-Dome.

Also:

Basic navigation: If you are on Rene Levesque Boul and are looking at the Sheraton--you are looking North, and uphill.  The main east-west streets are Sherbrooke, Maisonneueve, St. Catherine and Rene Levesque.  St. Catherine is the most interesting--it has the most shopping, restaurants, naked lady places, and so on.  If you walk either east or west on St. Catherines, you will find a restaurant or an area that is interesting.  And have much to talk about.  St. Laurent and St. Denis to the east are the main streets with heaps of stuff.  Indeed, they sometimes call St. Laurent "the Main" especially when they are tearing it up.  At the bottom of St. Laurent is a small China town.  There are Vietnamese places there and nearby.

Money: C$ is about US$.80 these days. Lots of places to change money, especially on St. Catherine street (handy for the lap dance places, I guess), but any bank will trade US and CA dollars.  Best bet is just using an ATM.

This gets us to cuisine where there are just a few key rules as almost all food in Montreal is terrific:

1.  The only reliably meh food is Mexican.  Pretty much everything else is terrific.  There are a few key streets that have lots of restaurants--Crescent to the West and St. Denis to the right had heaps of places 10 years ago.  I don't know what the pandemic did.

2.  French, Middle Eastern, Vietnamese are all reliably terrific.  Indian and Portuguese and Thai are all good, too.  My old guide lists specific places but I can't tell you how many of them are still open and good.  My old students commented on the thread and have some great suggestions.

3.  The beer is quite good.  Again, from my old guide:  I like Blanche de Chambly.  Boreale,  Le Cheval Blanc, McAuslan, Dieu du Ciel are all good.  I like some of the more national brands as well: Alexander Keith's and Sleeman's. You can find these two in most places. 

4.  Chez Cora has a heap of choices for breakfast.  It is a wonderful Quebec breakfast chain.

5.  Tim Horton's is always super slow so only go if you have time to stand in line and learn how to be polite and patient (you would then be on your way to becoming Canadian).

6. Poutine sounds scary but is really tasty. Not at all healthy but super tasty--fries, cheese curds (WTF?), gravy.  Yum.

7.  Quebec food at nice restaurants features duck, rabbit, and other stuff--very good cuisine in its own right.

8. I didn't mention Montreal bagels because I wanted this to be a nice, positive post.  Smoked meat is also a thing in Montreal, but is not that special. 

So, do get out beyond the hotel--there are plenty of great bars and restaurants. All over the place.

ISA 2021: It Just Isn't The Same

Bob is tired of #ISA2021

 The International Studies Association schedules its conferences up to a decade ahead of time.  So, I spent most of the 2010s looking forward to the pair of meetings in Honolulu and Las Vegas.  The former was cancelled just as the pandemic started to hit North America, and the latter became a virtual event that happened this week.  Yes, I missed the opportunities to enjoy such fun albeit very different places.  But mostly I missed the people, old and new, that I would get to chat with, listen to, learn from, and be inspired by.  I do not go to a lot of panels in a normal ISA year, spending most of my team in meetings with individuals and small groups.  The past several years, I made a deliberate effort to go beyond meeting my former students and former colleagues and co-authors to meeting junior scholars and scholars from groups with whom I have had few contacts.  This year, none of that is happening.  

A virtual conference is like a conference in one's hometown but worse.  When you go away to someplace (nice like Honolulu or, um, less nice like most of the ISA's lineup for the next eight years or so, sorry Baltimore and Columbus), your focus is entirely the conference.  When a conference is in your hometown, you have to trek to the convention center but going home each night means often not taking part of the later receptions and hangouts and maybe early stuff, depending on one's commute and homelife.  When it is virtual, mostly the regular schedule does not change much and one squeezes in the panels amid one's schedule.  I had to re-arrange one class to meet before and after today's Junior Scholar Symposium for which I am a discussant.  Ordinarily, I would just re-schedule the class.  This year's ISA is just a handful of panels and nothing more.  There are no one-on-one's with new scholars or with old friends, no meet-ups with teams of co-authors to conspire on grand applications, article revisions, and book plans.  There are no receptions (ok, there are, but who is going?) to hand out Duckies and meet people.  This is the conference without networking. 

There were debates years ago at the Duck of Minerva about networking--how to do it, whether it is necessary.  For many of us, there is no debate--we need each other, we do better with each other, doing this stuff entirely alone gets old.  So, yeah, I hope this is my last virtual conference, but I am guessing I have at least one more--the American Poli Sci Association that is supposed to be in Seattle in September.  I am not sure I will be able to cross the border then.  I know that this is in some ways more equitable--that it does not cost participants as much as flying and hanging out in an expensive city, and it certainly is better for the environment.  But it isn't the same.

I ran an informal survey on FB page asking if people went to many more panels besides those that they were on, did they go to receptions, did they arrange for one-on-ones or small hangouts.  Nope, nope, and nope were the modal answers.  

So, what did happen at this year's ISA?  I can only speak about the stuff in which I was a participant.  My first panel was one that was on Comparative Civil-Military relations.  Michael Robinson (West Point) presented the results of the survey that he, Takako Hikotani (Columbia), and myself were working on for quite some time.  We finally launched it in Japan last month, and got some cool results.  The Japanese do think that the Diet both should and does have the primary role in overseeing the Self-Defence Forces, which is an interesting finding given that my research in Japan indicates that the Diet is one of the lamest legislatures in terms of doing oversight over the armed forces.  It may be that we differ on what oversight means.  It turns out threats don't impact oversight in Japan the way we might have thought.  

Jessica Blankshain and Lindsay Cohn of the Naval War College presented an interesting survey and experiment about American attitudes about the use of coercive power by the military in the US.  It turns out Americans are not fans, but partisanship matters.  David Burbach and Naunihal Singh also of the NWC presented a survey of a number of African countries and attitudes about the militaries and roles they play.  Christina Gregory, a grad student finishing up at UC Riverside, presented a really interesting paper about the military in Lebanon--how do armed forces get reconstructed after civil wars.  Erica de Bruin (Hamilton) and Risa Brooks (Marquette) provided very helpful and insightful comments.  I learned a lot from the other papers, and we got good feedback as we try to figure out what we discovered.

On the second day, I was part of a roundtable on Canadian Foreign Policy in the 2020s despite, well, not really writing or studying CFP.  I spoke first so I focused on the difficult years ahead--uncertain where the US will go in 2024, a bellicose China, a military distracted and divided over its own personnel problems, and a government that does not really care much about foreign policy.  Andrea Lane (CFC), Justin Massie (UQAM), Edward Akuffo (U of Fraser Valley), Brian Bow (Dalhousie), Elizabeth Smythe (Concordia U of Edmonton), and Kim Nossal (Queen's) gave their far more informed and studied opinions.  We varied between optimism and pessimism, focusing on domestic dynamics (we are kind of screwed with immature parties) and international dynamics (we are kind of screwed by uncertainty).  We got a good crowd and got some good questions.

My third panel was a roundtable honoring Marc Trachtenberg as the International Security Studies Distinguished Scholar of 2021.  I got the role of chair as I chaired the committee that selected him.  I had never met Marc, but I had read his stuff.  It was always interesting and often contrary to the poli sci arguments on the issue.  The panel had Security gurus Monica Duffy Toft (Tufts), and John Mearsheimer (Chicago) and former students Frank Gavin (SAIS), Brendan Green (Cincinnati) and Galen Jackson (Williams).  I have only gone to a few of these celebratory roundtables, but I will try to go to more in the future, as it was funny, moving, and enlightening.  

Today, I participated in the Junior Scholar Symposium.  This is a relatively new initiative, where small groups of junior scholars meet with a senior prof or two and we have an intense conversation about their work.  Often, junior scholars on normal panels can get ignored as people focus their attention on the bigger names.  The JSS is an effort to offset that potential dynamic.  The assignments are sometimes on target and sometimes random.  This year I shared the discussant role with Movindri Reddy of Occidental to talk with a group of younger scholars whose work, alas, has nothing to do with my own.  I tried to provide the best feedback I could.  I was impressed by all of them--Daniel Rodriques of Universidade Autonoma de Lisboa, Saskia Postema and Jan Melissen of Leiden, Dmitry Chernobrov of Sheffield, and Alina Dolea of Bournemouth.  Ok, the last presenter, Alina is working on diaspora so I had something to say about her stuff.  I like doing this JSS stuff as it is great to see what the latest generation is studying and to feed off of their nervous energy.  But a real weakness of this year's ISA is that they made the panels shorter (a good idea in a zoomed conference) but didn't change the number of people on panels.  So, we had far less time to engage, follow up, answer, etc.  And the portal sucked for getting audience involvement. 

To be fair, ISA tried hard.  They created a Slack to provide some community and help, and that kind of worked.  Lots of people didn't know how to use it, most probably didn't sign up, but people did introduce themselves and did get help they needed.  The trivia games and other stuff probably helped some people.  The business meeting I had was not as fun or as tasty as they usually are, but was mostly the same.  I asked my friends on facebook what they did--did they go to more panels than the ones they were on, did they go to receptions--and the answer is not really.  I think one of the early signs I should have noticed is that the Online Media Caucus, a group I helped to start and one that is, well, adept at online stuff, chose not to do a reception this year.  I think they got it--it ain't worth it.  Next year?  Duckies in Nashville, please! 

I am glad ISA 2021 was not cancelled.  I learned much (which is why I got into this business in the first place--my curiosity), I met some new people despite the problematic platform ISA used, and I got to connect for a bit with some friends.  It was better than nothing, which is what we got last year, but wasn't as useful or valuable as past ISAs.  And now back to grading season.