Mission Accomplished? Um, Maybe More So than Bush

Today is not only Canada Day, but it is also the first day "back" for folks on sabbatical in many places.  Yes, my penultimate sabbatical ended in rain and cinnamon rolls as I was touristing around Stockholm before the start of the ERGOMAS (European Research Group on Military and Society).  I had a great year as last summer involved two intense months of finishing the book with Dave and Phil on parliamentary oversight over the armed forces (more on that in a second), the fall mean a week in South Korea asking about their civil-military relations, the winter involved awesome skiing in Utah, Japan, and Austria, and then heaps of fieldwork in Germany and Finland and presentations in Germany and Austria, and the spring meant more fieldwork in Germany and some touristing on the roads of central Germany and in northern Italy.  But did I do what I set out to do?

Let's check the plan, remembering that no plan survives contact with the adversary (which probably refers to myself in this case[blue for plan kept, red for plan not kept, purple in between]):

1. With the legislature book project winding down, I am hoping to make progress on the Steve, Phil, and Ora project: comparing defence agencies around the world.  What roles do ministries and departments of defense see for themselves?  How are they viewed by the militaries they interact with?  This project will merge with the aforementioned bureaucracies project--what is the nature of each democracy's policy marketplace? [Turns out the first step in this two step project is more ambitious/harder so I don't think we will complete the second step]
   
1.  This fall, I am probably headed for shorter trips to South Korea and Denmark, but that could change.
2. I do plan to spend much of the winter somewhere, with the contenders right now being Rome, Berlin, and Taipei. 
   
2. I plan to do a better job of keeping my promise re smaller projects.
1. There is the aforementioned policy relevance piece that will have new data soon. [Nope, no data]
   
2. There are a few surveys of the Canadian public I am working on with JC Boucher, and we hope to push out those results this year.
3. Start the work to organize a workshop on the uses and abuses, pro's and con's of using principal-agent theory in Canadian defence/security stuff on Canadian civil-military relations.  I took over editing a volume on CA civ-mil due to expected happenings.  We held the workshop a few weeks ago, and I am very psyched to have it come together with submission in the fall.
   
4. A few other things that are on the edges of my attention right now.  This turned out to mostly be the aforementioned parliamentary oversight book, which did not find much favor from the first press/reviewers.  So, a hunk of this winter was spent revising it and preparing for resubmission elsewhere.  We are now awaiting word of that.
   
3. CDSN-ing!  We have a variety of new and continuing stuff to execute--the Summer Institute, the Year Ahead, the Capstone, the various other opportunities plus a Meeting of the MINDS workshop for the leaders, project directors, and students associated with the nine MINDS networks.  Oh, and I will start prepping the next big grant application to keep us going beyond the first seven years [This involved drafting the very first draft of the main doc and heaps of networking to get individual scholars and partner organizations to share their ideas and to ready themselves for the SSHRC webwork ahead]..
4. 
   
   Read!  This time, I mean it.  I have a stack of great civ-mil books that I want to catch up on.  I am going to try to set aside one day each week just for reading.  Let's see if that is a pie crust promise!  Some progress (awesome books by Feaver, Robinson, Fazal, MacKenzie, a couple of ed volumes and some articles) but the stack is still very tall.
5. What else?  Since I didn't know last July where I was headed, I couldn't say what would be the other stuff I would do wherever I ended up. But ending up in Berlin meant, in addition to doing much of the work on the German case and traveling to at least one other spot in Europe (turned out to be Finland) for another case study, getting a sense of how Germans and other Europeans have been thinking about the twin perils facing them--Russia in the East and Trump in one possible future.  I should have asked more about China, but will rectify that next year when I go back for another three months.

I would have liked to have researched another case study done, but the Humboldt award included a time commitment to hang out in Bamberg and the talk in Vienna was just to talk, not to add Austria to our list of cases. I would have liked to have completely written up the South Korean case study and made progress on the writing of the Finland and Germany cases.  And, damn, I would have loved not to have had to revise the parliamentary oversight book.  But has the song goes, we can't always get what you want, but if you try real hard, you get what you need.

The sabbatical was just what I needed after six years of heaps of grant-writing, administrating, teaching, and researching. I am looking forward to the next one already, which might involve far less research and far more teaching... if I can find a good place to squat.  But those are plans to work on after the current set of plans and the set beyond those.  And, yes, I will be spending three more months in Berlin next winter as part of the Humboldt award, which will probably mean two additional cases--Sweden and perhaps the Netherlands.

Yes, I am lucky, and I love my job. These sabbaticals make it easier to love the job not just because I get a cool year every seven years, but it does help recharge for the years in between.  Woot!