Four Years of CDSN-ing

Our first dinner of Co-Directors and HQ

 While we could choose the day we got the big SSHRC Partnership grant as the anniversary of the Canadian Defence and Security Network, I prefer to use May 24th as it is the anniversary of our rollout and associated reception.  It is hard to believe that we are more than halfway through the first grant.  To be clear, we are not halfway through the life of the CDSN because we fully intended to keep on going after the original source of funding ends.  We have a variety of ideas for making that work, but that is for later.  Today, we celebrate heaps of researching, connecting, and amplifying!  Melissa Jennings, who started out as our Communications Officer and is now our Chief Operating Officer, came up with Research-Connect-Amplify as our mantra when she built our website. 

In terms of research, we started out with five themes/focal points, went down to four, and are now up to eight thanks to the grant from DND's Mobilizing Insights in Defence and Security program.  We are focused on military personnel, civil-military relations, CAF operations, security broadly defined, supply chain vulnerability, global health, climate security, and domestic emergency operations.  One of the ironies of this effort is that our funding from DND has helped us meet the promise of the S in our name by addressing a variety of contemporary security issues, whereas our initial focus was more on the D.  Our research teams have produced articles, books, edited volumes, special issues, policy paper, datasets, surveys, and other hunks of research.  We have also supported three post-doctoral scholars as they move beyond their dissertations--Linna Tam-Seto (now a co-host of one of our podcasts), Johanna Masse, and Thomas Hughes.  We have also organized book workshops to turn the work of junior scholars into publishable books. Stephanie Martel was our first victim and is the first to publish her book.  We have run one big survey and a few smaller ones to ascertain Canadian attitudes about defence and security. 

Connecting refers to building and sustaining the network.  We have started with 34 partner organizations from government, academia, the private secure in Canada and beyond.  We have added twelve since then.  We have also worked to foster new organizations such as Women of Colour Advancing Peace and Security-Canada.  I am not sure exactly how many individuals who have joined the CDSN, but our mailing list has grown exponentially.  Even four years into this, we are still figuring out our partnership strategy to move beyond my initial Borg-like assimilate all idea towards a more strategic effort to bring in organizations that help facilitate our goal of making the Canadian defence and security community more diverse, equitable, and inclusive.  Another key effort has been the hosting of military officers at Carleton's Norman Paterson School of International Affairs.  The idea is that we help these officers on their research projects, while they give us advice for making our work relevant to the defence and security community.  We have had four officers, and each one has brought heaps of insights and useful advice.  The pandemic and then renovation of NPSIA's kitchen have disrupted this a bit, so we have had less lunchtime chats than we did at the start.

Amplifying refers to helping our partners and our researchers get the word out on what they are doing, what they are producing.  One of the first ways we did this has now bloomed into multiple channels--our podcast has become a podcast network with four different programs: BattleRhythm, Conseils de Sécurité (en français) in partnership with Réseau d'analyse stratégique, SecurityScape, and soon NATO Field Notes.  All are available at all the usual podcast outlets and including Apple via the CDSN Podcast Network.  Our annual Capstone event brings together some of the best speakers from our partner's events from the previous year and has also connected us with some of the sharpest folks in the next generation of defence and security scholars and scientists.  We have also held a variety of conferences and workshops--traditional, virtual, and hybrid.  

There have been small bumps in the road, some turnover at our headquarters, and, of course, the challenges posted by the pandemic, but, overall, we are very happy with what we have achieved and are excited about what we plan to do both over the remaining three years of the original grant and how to sustain ourselves beyond that.  I am so very grateful to the hard work, fantastic ideas, and energy we get from our co-directors, our advisory board, our research teams, and especially the team at our headquarters: the aforementioned Melissa Jennings, our amazing Grants and Partnership Coordinator who has been handling our finances and increasingly our event planning, Racheal Wallace, our research assistant for the past couple of years, our rotating teams of MA research assistants, and the folks at NPSIA.  We are more a network of people than of institutions--that everyone involved has made this effort fun, insightful, dynamic, relevant, and delightful.  

Let us know what we can be doing more/better!