The Duck of Minerva

Josh Busby

Joshua Busby is a Professor in the LBJ School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas-Austin. From 2021-2023, he served as a Senior Advisor for Climate at the U.S. Department of Defense. His most recent book is States and Nature: The Effects of Climate Change on Security (Cambridge, 2023). He is also the author of Moral Movements and Foreign Policy (Cambridge, 2010) and the co-author, with Ethan Kapstein, of AIDS Drugs for All: Social Movements and Market Transformations (Cambridge, 2013). His main research interests include transnational advocacy and social movements, international security and climate change, global public health and HIV/ AIDS, energy and environmental policy, and U.S. foreign policy.

Recent Posts

A Call for New Guest Ducks

A Call for New Guest Ducks

by Josh Busby | 17 August, 2019 |

We are looking for you! The fall 2019 semester is upon us, and we’d like to bring on a new cohort of guest Ducks. The Duck remains a unique blog in terms of our ability to cover a wide variety of topics from IPE to the environment to health to human rights as well as traditional IR topics such as security. We also have freedom to do more academic introspection on the discipline and higher education writ large. As a guest blogger, you have the freedom to find your voice and the format and length that suits you without an editor. You are free to muse and use the platform to try out new ideas....

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Remembering Andrew Price-Smith

Remembering Andrew Price-Smith

by Josh Busby | 30 July, 2019 | ,

This is a guest post from Jeremy Youde, Dean of the College of Liberal Arts at the University of Minnesota Duluth. Follow him on Twitter @jeremyyoude. Anyone who studies global health security has a copy of Andrew Price-Smith’s 2001 book, The Health of Nations, on their shelf. It’s a staple of course syllabi in global health politics, and its argument helped to cement the importance of recognizing the complex interplay between international security and infectious disease. Sadly, Price-Smith, the David Packard Professor of International Relations at Colorado College and leader of its Global...

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Forget the 800-pound gorilla: the United States is the 300,000-pound blue whale of IR scholarship

Forget the 800-pound gorilla: the United States is the 300,000-pound blue whale of IR scholarship

by Josh Busby | 23 July, 2019 |

This is a guest post from Cullen Hendrix, Director of the Sié Chéou-Kang Center for International Security and Diplomacy and Professor at the Korbel School of International Studies, University of Denver. International relations and international security scholarship have a U.S. bias problem—or so we are told. Ido Oren has argued the modern discipline of political science generally—and international relations specifically—was shaped by U.S. economic and security interests during the World Wars and the Cold War. Writing in the 1970s, E.H. Carr went so far as to say “the study of international...

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Will Republican voters punish Trump for a trade war with China? It depends.

Will Republican voters punish Trump for a trade war with China? It depends.

by Josh Busby | 12 July, 2019 | ,

This is a guest post from Shana Gadarian and Dan McDowell, both Associate Professors at the Maxwell School at Syracuse University. Earlier this month, after Chinese authorities reportedly backtracked on a set of economic reform promises as part of ongoing trade discussions, President Trump announced that existing tariffs on $200 billion of Chinese goods would increase from 10% to 25%. China responded with new tariff hikes of its own on American products. The costs of the escalating trade war are most acute in rural areas where Trump has enjoyed strong political support. While it is possible...

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Why Do Opinion Leaders Misjudge Public Attitudes?

Why Do Opinion Leaders Misjudge Public Attitudes?

by Josh Busby | 11 July, 2019 |

Last week, Dina Smeltz, Jordan Tama, and I had a piece in the Monkey Cage on the results of our 2018 survey of 588 foreign policy opinion leaders. We found that these opinion leaders misestimated public attitudes on (1) US engagement in the world, (2) support for trade, (3) support for military intervention, and (4) support for immigration. I did a thread on the results, which I'll summarize below, but I wanted to follow up with some thoughts based on a thoughtful critique from Ken Schultz that focused on our finding that elites thought the public less supportive of military intervention...

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Are Generic Drugs Safe? Big Claims in a New Book

Are Generic Drugs Safe? Big Claims in a New Book

by Josh Busby | 7 July, 2019 |

I was in the car when the Dallas radio station KERA came on with an interview with the journalist Katherine Eban, author of the new book Bottle of Lies, in which she claims that the generic pharmaceutical industry faces widespread problems of quality. A high percentage of generic drugs come from India and most of the chemical ingredients or raw materials come from China. Generic drugs constitute according to Eban about 90% of the drugs that Americans consume, and about 40% of those generic drugs come from India. For me, this was particularly concerning since Indian drug makers...

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US should support environmental peacebuilding and humanitarian efforts for Palestinians

US should support environmental peacebuilding and humanitarian efforts for Palestinians

by Josh Busby | 6 July, 2019 | ,

This is a guest post from Erika Weinthal, a Professor at Duke University and Jeannie Sowers, an Associate Professor at the University of New Hampshire What is often referred to as environmental peacebuilding – the process of governing and leveraging the use of the environment and natural resources for building a sustainable peace through improving livelihoods, strengthening the economy, rebuilding trust, and fostering cooperation – has been a core component of US-supported projects in Israel and Palestine. As part of the US government strategy to promote a two-state solution in the aftermath...

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White saviors abroad – social doctors at home? Blunt and subtle colonialism in US Global Health education

White saviors abroad – social doctors at home? Blunt and subtle colonialism in US Global Health education

by Josh Busby | 6 June, 2019 |

This is a guest post from Tine Hanrieder who heads the research group Global Humanitarian Medicine at the WZB Berlin Social Science Center. She is the author of International Organization in Time: Fragmentation and Reform. American medicine is globalizing. Medical students request more “things global” on their curriculum, and universities rush to offer global health tracks to a global generation of students. While the types of programs vary enormously between specializations and campuses, most feature short-term experiential learning trips as a core element. These experiences – herein called...

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Understanding Israel

Understanding Israel

by Josh Busby | 16 April, 2019 |

This is a guest post from Brent Sasley, Associate Professor at the University of Texas at Arlington. He tweets at @besasley. Israel holds a prominent place in the American popular imagination. It’s a major source of news reports, as well as an increasingly partisan issue in American electoral politics. Perhaps it’s not surprising, then, that American journalists and western journalists more generally seek out American and western analysts and academics for commentary on Israeli politics, such as the recent election. On Twitter I suggested that western journalists look beyond western...

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Winners of the 2019 Duckies!

Winners of the 2019 Duckies!

by Josh Busby | 2 April, 2019 |

This is a guest post from William Kindred Winecoff, Incoming Chairand Brent E. Sasley, Outgoing Chair of the Online Media Caucus The Online Media Caucus’s 2019 Duckies have come and gone. The reception celebrating Online Achievement in International Studies, generously sponsored by SAGE Publishing, included three fascinating Ignite speakers and the presentation of five awards to very deserving scholars. Ignite speakers: Meg Guliford, PhD candidate at Tufts University, Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, spoke about “Operation Hedge of Protection,” which contains her strategies for dealing...

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