Seven Years of CDSN-Ing? Not Over Yet

 Yesterday, April fools day, the Canadian Defence and Security Network helped the Embassy of Türkiye hold an event about the future of NATO.  Türkiye is the host of the next NATO summit (if it happens, see my next post), and they wanted to have an event in Ottawa to help set up the forthcoming event.

This event happened precisely day after our seven year SSHRC Partnership Grant officially ended.  Seven years ago, the PG grant funded the creation and operation of the CDSN.  It is a seven year grant, so I wanted to mark the official end of it.  To be clear, this is not the end of the CDSN.  We have DND funding via a MINDS Collaborative Grant to continue operating until at least January 2027 and perhaps another 18 months beyond that.  Moreover, we are waiting for the news about CDSN 2.0: the Civil-Military Relations Network.  We couldn't simply ask to be renewed--the SSHRC requires any 2.0 of a PG to be different--bigger/narrower, more ambitious/more focused. The CMRN will include more partners from around the world (bigger/more ambitious) and focus on civilian control of the armed forces at a moment were politicization of the armed forces is a significant danger to many democracies (narrower/more focused).  The odds of getting this second PG grant are quite good given the reviews of the earlier stages we have received, given the moment we are in, and given that the SSHRC is apparently funding more of these projects.  

Back to the event, we got asked by the embassy to help organize this event as we did something similar last year for the Embassy of the Netherlands in advance of the NATO summit in The Hague.  The CDSN has done a great many things over the past seven years (see below) with helping embassies in Ottawa connect with Canadians one of the frequent but unanticipated efforts.  Our grant application didn't have anything proposed in this vein, but by creating a comprehensive, national network linking academic institutions with military and government agencies, non-governmental organizations, and firms and having great staff, we have developed a reputation for reliably facilitating these kinds of events.  The grant funds, among other things, two amazing staffers, Melissa Jennings and Sherry LaPlante, and a rotating team of graduate student assistants, so we have much capacity to do things that were beyond the scope of the original grant.  

What have we been doing over the past seven years?  Well, we will put out the full and official final report this summer, but I can listicle:

• Five Summer Institutes that have helped to bridge the divides between the worlds of the academy, military, and government (it would have been six if not for the pandemic).
• Seven Podcast programs. We had planned on one and then in partnership with the Network for Strategic Analysis we started a podcast in French and then it exploded from there to creating our own podcast network
• Seven Capstones where we brought together the best speakers from our partners' events to network with each other and to help our partners extend their events beyond the time and place of the original conference or panel or whatever.
• Six Post-Docs: Linna Tam-Seto, Johanna Masse, Thomas Hughes, Ryan Atkinson, Manu Ramkumar, and Sanjida Amin.  They all brought much energy and intelligence and creativity to our events and activities.  Linna and Thomas are now co-hosts of our BattleRhythm podcast, and Manu is destined for podcast greatness if we get the next grant
• Annual Year Ahead Conferences helping those in the capital anticipate the events and dynamics in the near future.
• Several Book Workshops helping emerging scholars get feedback and publish their work.  
• About a dozen Undergraduate Excellence Scholars, which was an effort to encourage undergraduates from historically excluded communities to get more involved in defence and security. 
• A heap of surveys as we did both traditional surveys about Canadian attitudes about defence and security and survey experiments to assess, for instance, what forms of discrimination most greatly impact attitudes about the CAF. 
• Four research teams producing several books, heaps of articles, many papers on military personnel, security, operations, and civil-military relations. 
• and a whole lot more, including two MINDS Network Grants that expanded the areas of our research to include global health, supply chains, domestic operations, and climate security.

For the initial grant, we had to establish our objectives:

• Creating a coherent, world-class network. ✅
• Advancing the body of knowledge✅
• Tailoring research initiatives, directly informing policymaking✅
• Facilitating cross-sector information and data sharing✅
• Improving the defence and security literacy of Canadians✅
• Building the next generation of experts with an emphasis on equity, diversity, and inclusion.

As the✅'s indicate, I think we have achieved our objectives.  As Melissa put it in our first webpage, we sought to Research, Connect, and Amplify, and we did that in a big way.  We maintained our independence as we didn't receive any defence contractor money, and we consisitently spoke truth to power.  The best example of that might have been my op-ed calling for the firing of the Minister of National Defence in 2021 at the same time we had a grant application under review at the Department of National Defence.

 I am very grateful to the entire CDSN team and network.  I learned a lot, mentored a lot of students and emerging scholars, made a lot of new friends, got to travel a bunch, and I am pretty sure that the CDSN will be the most important thing I will have done in my career.  Some folks asked me about the Partnership Grant process, and when I told them about it and that I was working with the team to do it again, they noted that I must like this stuff.  Indeed, I do.  It has been a lot of work, but it has been incredibly meaningful. 

So, I hope to hear good news soon so that we can do this again for another seven years.