Point of Pride Anniversary

Today is the anniversary of my last McGill PhD student's dissertation defence.  On that day, I blogged about all of my McG PhD students who went on to tenure track positions--all but one.  Nearly all are now tenured.  Because there is so much bad news these days, I thought I would update that post, as they have all gone on to doing quite well for themselves.  I find it strange to be proud of their accomplishments because I know that I had little to do with it--they are a bunch of smart, motivated, creative, diligent, fun people.  I am just glad I have been along for the ride.  To be clear, I am proud of my pre- and post-McG students, so I will include them below as well. 

• Sam Stanton, my only TTU PhD student, was my first former student to chair his department at Grove City College.
• Brent Sasley is tenured at U of Texas at Arlington.  He has published two books on Middle East politics and a number of articles on a variety of topics including ... blogging. 
• Jonathan Paquin is tenured at Université Laval, has published books on Foreign Policy Analysis, the Decline of US Hegemony, and on US-Canadian relations plus many articles on a range of topics.
• Suranjan Weeraratne is tenured at Southern Illinois U Edwardsville. He faced a health crisis that he overcame with much tenacity.  SIU-E was most supportive.  He has manged to publish a number of articles ranging from Islamist extremism in Nigeria and ethnic migrants in Southeast Asia.
• Amy Cox wrote her dissertation on why some separatists use violence and others do not.  She is now a realtor. 
• Ora Szekely is tenured at Clark University. She's published books on Militant Group Survival in the Mideast and Insurgent Women with Jessica Trisko and Alexis Henshaw.  She suckered me into contributing to an amazing book on doing Fieldwork in Political Science, and we are working together on an article (and book project?) that examines bureaucratic politics from a different perspective. 
• Jessica Trisko is at American University and has recently been a Fellow at American Enterprise Institute in Washington, DC.  She has published two books, one on the subversive impact of foreign aid and the other being the aforementioned Insurgent Women.
• Aisha Ahmad is up for tenure this year at the University of Toronto and it is a slam dunk.  Her book Jihad & Co.: Black Markets and Islamist Power has done quite well including spinning off an award-winning International Security article.
• Sarah-Myriam Martin-Brûlé has not only published a book on Evaluating Peacekeeping Missions, but has also served as an adviser to the United Nations.
• Maya Dafinova is my first Carleton PhD student to have survived me and the process.  She compared the whole of government efforts in Afghanistan and is now working at a non-profit in Ireland. 
  

Yes, one reason I moved to NPSIA was to reduce the number of PhD students I supervised.  Not because I had bad experiences before but because I feared that the academic job market would mean that the run of nearly full employment would end.  This strategy mostly worked as I only had one PhD student at Carleton for a while.  She finished, but now I have four PhD students in different stages of the process on a range of issues:

• Russian intervention policy
• Canadian defence decisions
• understanding the failures of the Afghanistan effort
• the effects of external election interference.  

What they share in common is again a great imagination and hardly any Saideman disciples among them.  They are more likely to be headed to the policy world because that is the nature of the NPSIA program.

Overall, I have been the primary supervisor of more than three dozen students and have been on the committees of another two dozen or so.  I have learned so much from these folks over the years, including how to whine about literature reviews over and over again.  Because I have students who do stuff that is mostly different from what I do, I learn much more about the world, and I see it from a variety of perspectives.  Given that I got into this business because I am excessively curious, I am most grateful to these folks for opening my eyes to all kinds of stuff. 

Inspired by Female Scholars

I can't help it when I see a good twitter thread, so after seeing this

This #InternationalWomensDay we want to hear about the women that inspire you. Look out for testimonials from our allies all week, and join the conversation! Let's celebrate women experts in political science this #IWD2019! ✨#womenalsoknowstuff pic.twitter.com/XtDJ2xuUlL

— womenalsoknowstuff (@womenalsoknow) March 4, 2019

I decided to write about a series of poli sci women who have made a big difference in my career.* 

1. Isebill Gruhn was a visiting prof at Oberlin when I took her Intro to IR class.  She helped turn me from a Chemistry major into a Government major and a fan of IR.  She was so sharp and pretty demanding, so getting good grades in that class meant a big deal.  I never did end up being as good as she was in running discussions.  I will always be thankful to her for turning me onto this IR thing.
2. Lisa Martin was on my dissertation committee during her brief time at UCSD.  She was so quick with thorough, insightful comments that she set an example that I have never been able to match but something to aspire to, nonetheless.  
3. Debbi Avant was three or four years ahead of me in grad school, and she deftly managed to welcome the younger folks while balancing two kids and being the leading edge of a relatively new program.  It is funny that my work started to rely on hers late in my career, but the way which did her work influenced me from the outset.  Debbi's passion for the stuff was almost as important as the amazing community that she helped to build.
4. Erin Jenne was one of my first co-authors, helping me to figure out the international relations of ethnic conflict.  She has always inspired me to be more critical.
5. Cherie Maestas (the token Americanist in this list) taught me much about building institutions even around, over, or thru a broken landscape.  She was really the Colonel Hogan of Texas Tech, even though I liked to think I was.
6. Juliet Johnson inspired me with the most memorable (ok, most positively memorable) job talk I have witnessed, and then she became an amazing colleague, doing far more than her fair share of damn near everything.  I could only win teaching awards at McGill in the years she was not eligible for whatever reason.  She is a hell of a role model as well.
7. Pattie Weitsman, whom I met at a job interview (I didn't get it), became a conference pal.  Her work on alliances pushed me to think harder about my work in that area.  We lost her way too soon, but she will always inspire me with her humor, her intellect, and how she fought her fight.
8. Sara Mitchell is one of the most prolific scholars of my generation, but what inspires me is how much community she has built, how much she has broken the path and assisted the next generation of women.  Oh, and her laugh is almost as loud and as piercing as mine.  I'd like to think I inspire her to laugh a bit louder.
9. Stephanie Carvin, even though she is much junior to me, inspires me, not just with her amazing baking abilities, but her energy and drive to engage in pretty much every direction, via twitter, her podcasts, her classes and all the rest.  I wish I had her energy.
10. My PhD students, Aisha, Sarah-Myrium, Ora, Jessica, Amy and Maya, who inspired me with their dedication, determination, and deliberation.  See my TeamSteve page for their publications.

*  There are plenty of other women who inspired me along the way, including those I never met, but these are the ones that inspired me the most.  Oh, and if you can't spot the Harry Potter reference, too bad.

Proud and Humbled

I was in Toronto yesterday for an awards ceremony.  Aisha Ahmad, one of my Phd students from my time at McGill, was receiving an award for best article on an international security topic in 2016.  She was supposed to heave received it last winter at the ISA meeting in Baltimore, but that took place shortly after Trump announced his Muslim ban.  So, I accepted the award on her behalf, and we decided to hold an event in Toronto to recognize her.

Of course, Aisha decided to take advantage of the moment by doing two things: schooling us on doing research and on highlighting her students.  After big IR poohbah Robert Keohane (whose last name gets mispronounced more frequently and in more ways than mine) had a few comment and insights, Aisha discussed positionality in research, especially in fieldwork, making it clear that everyone has a distinct position from where they ask questions, but it seems that only brown folks and women folks tend to be asked about their position and how it affects their work.  She had a great example from real life as her white male colleagues interviewed the same guy she did on the same day but in a different context and got a very different perspective of that same guy.  Really very clarifying discussion. 

Aisha then had a series of her students--undergrad and grad--to discuss their work briefly, and they knocked our socks off.  I have always been impressed with her diligence and her dedication, but mentioning that would have turned my Harry Potter reference (three d's of disapparition) into a Dodgeball reference (five d's of dodgeball).

After she talked, Barnett Rubin moderated, David Dewitt and I said a few things.  David talked about Aisha's article and spiffy new book. I talked about Aisha and how truly impressive she is and how far she has come.  The path has not been easy for her, but she has walked it (or ran it, I guess) with grace and fire. 

I have much pride for her excellence, but I am also humbled because she works so much harder than I do/did, is so much more diligent and passionate about the work, and is just rocking the profession. I joked that I will take all credit for her success, as is my right as her supervisor, but, we know the truth--it is all Aisha. 

Discussing Post-Paris in Toronto: Ye Olde Students Rock

I went to Toronto yesterday to be part of a panel on the events in Paris and the reactions to it.  Most of my reactions to this event have to do with my old students:

• Within five seconds of arriving in the room, I got to talk to a former research assistant from my McGill days.  She was part of a large team that coded diaspora data, and it was great not just to see her but hear a bit about her internship at the Canada's Embassy to Libya, currently located in Tunisia.
• The next student up was one from my last big Intro class, who is now finishing her MA at Munk.  She had nice things to say about how my class set her on this path, which was really nice to hear even though I know that IR is simply inherently interesting.
• My wife informed me that whenever she bumped into a student from my Intro to IR class (the joy of having a distinctive last name meant that the students would be pretty certain she was Mrs. Spew/Mrs. Prof of Intro to IR), they all cited the same lecture--apples and oranges.  My question, of course, is: do they remember the point of that lecture?  Hmmm.

• The next student was, of course, Aisha Ahmad, a former Phd student of mine, who now teaches at U of Toronto.  She wrote a terrific piece for the Globe and Mail (web now, print maybe this weekend or Monday), arguing that the refugees play an important role in this battle with ISIS, and the smart way to fight ISIS is to accept these refugees.  It would undermine their ideology, their recruitment base, and their financing.  Just a sharp argument articulately made.  And then, of course, she was the one with the best line of the night:

Ahmad: take away #ISIS territory and it "starts to look like every other crappy #jihadi org." in the world #MunkTalks

— CERES at Munk School (@CERESMunk) November 21, 2015

The other panelists--Randall Henson of U of T Poli Sci, Paul Cohen of U of T History, Lorne Dawson of U of Waterloo Sociology, and Stephen Toope, Director of Munk--all had stuff to say that was incisive and made me think seriously about the past week's events and where to go from here.

One other thing: I loved, loved, loved the organization of the event.  The key pieces were:

• Nice array of people: an IR guy (as the NATO guy, I thought I would not have much to say but then I realized I was an IR/Canadian defence guy), a Europeanist, a Islamist politics expert, a sociologist who works on radicalization, an historian, and an international law prof.  We didn't repeat each other much, contradicted each other only sometimes but provided many different angles on the issue.
• We each spoke for only five minutes so that max time could be dedicated to answering question.  We probably could have gone on for another half hour as there were plenty of questions we could have still addressed.
• The various assistants collected questions from the audience on cards they were given, and tweets were also transcribed onto these cards.  Toope then organized the cards and would use a few to ask a thematic question that some of us could address briefly.  This was so smart because:
• It avoided the speechifying problem where folks make long-winded statements that are more comments than questions.
• It avoided the audience just asking one or two panelists questions.
• It integrated the tweets well.
• It keep things moving.

I will definitely be stealing this idea.

Anyhow, always great to see former students, always great to have a dynamic interchange of ideas, and always confused about the next steps ahead.

Oh, and I had the chance to hang out with a friend of mine who went to the same grad school as me but about 15 years later.  Good beer, very good poutine, and great company.

Pretty Proud Adviser Post-Paris

One of the upsides of supervising students whose work is outside my expertise is that I get to be mighty proud when they contribute to debates in ways that I cannot.

Aisha Ahmad was interviewed and said this on the reactions to Paris and our next steps.  Just an excellent perspective.  And there will be more of it as I go to Toronto on Friday to sit on a panel with her and some other folks to talk about the event and the aftermath.  So, if you are in the Toronto area on Friday, November 20th, check it out at the Munk School at U of T.  I will say a few things about NATO's relevance/reactions while Aisha will continue to say far smarter stuff about ISIS, Islamist politics and such.