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.

Website

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

Pressing Politics: The #Metoo movement and the IR Discipline

Pressing Politics: The #Metoo movement and the IR Discipline

by | 19 June, 2018 |

This is guest post from Nina Hall, an Assistant Professor of International Relations at Johns Hopkins SAIS (tweets @ninawth) and Sarah von Billerbeck is a Lecturer in Politics and International Relations at the University of Reading (tweets @SvBillerbeck). The authors would like to thank the other Pressing Politics panel co-organizers: Christine Cheng (@cheng_christine), J. Andrew Grant (@jandrewgrant), and John Karlsrud (@johnkarlsrud). We hope to host another Pressing Politics panel at the 2019 annual convention on a topic ISA members deem most pressing. This is the first post in a series...

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Seven Reasons We Use Annotation for Transparent Inquiry (ATI)

Seven Reasons We Use Annotation for Transparent Inquiry (ATI)

by | 15 May, 2018 |

This is a guest post from Paul Musgrave, Assistant Professor of political science at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst, and  Sebastian Karcher, Associate Director of the Qualitative Data Repository at Syracuse University. Recently, the Qualitative Data Repository launched “Annotation for Transparent Inquiry (ATI)” as a method to add transparency to scholarly research. ATI is a new approach to communicating scholarly evidence that employs electronic annotations to specific passages in scholarly articles—a sort of amped-up academic version of Genius.com’s annotations to song lyrics. The...

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Climate and Security: Bridging the Policy-Academic Gap

Climate and Security: Bridging the Policy-Academic Gap

by | 4 May, 2018 | , ,

In March, I argued that the connections between climate change and security are complex, contingent, and not fully understood.  Most of the academic literature has firmly focused on conflict onset with the broader security consequences largely understudied . For policy audiences, the nuance can be frustrating. It is difficult to know what to do with such complexity, other than talk broadly of climate change as a "threat multiplier." However, the policy community does not have the luxury of waiting for academics to reach some consensus on climate-conflict links that might never materialize....

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A Jacksonian Moment in U.S. Foreign Policy: Will it Last?

A Jacksonian Moment in U.S. Foreign Policy: Will it Last?

by | 6 April, 2018 |

I had the good fortune during my brief appearance at ISA to take part in a roundtable on “Jacksonianism” in U.S. foreign policy. Organized by Jon Caverley, the roundtable sought to assess whether the Trump presidency represents a new equilibrium in which a Jacksonian foreign policy orientation has if not pride of place a more vaunted position than it once had. Excited to roundtable (is that a verb, yet?) with @jcaverley Lene Hansen @busbyj2 @MeganhMackenzie @swatipash about Trump, IR, and the new Jacksonian moment in world politics — at 1:45 PM today at #ISA2018 (Hilton Continental 4) — Josh...

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A Global Response to Climate Change: In, through, and for Cities?

A Global Response to Climate Change: In, through, and for Cities?

by | 6 April, 2018 |

This is a guest post from Sander Chan[1], David Gordon[2], Emma Lecavalier[3], Craig Johnson[4], Angel Hsu[5], Fee Stehle[6], Thomas Hickmann[7], Jennifer Bansard[8], Paty Romero-Lankao[9] Cities have been wildly successful over recent years in positioning themselves at the center of the global conversation on climate change. For example, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) recently convened the Cities & Climate Change Conference (CitiesIPCC) in Edmonton, Alberta. The conference -- hosted by a city that once advertised itself as Canada’s oil capital -- brought together a...

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Are the Kids Alright? The March for Our Lives as a Social Movement

Are the Kids Alright? The March for Our Lives as a Social Movement

by | 27 March, 2018 | ,

Tom Nichols, he of Death of Expertise fame, raised a few hackles over the weekend when he said marches really hadn't achieved anything since the Civil Rights Movement. News flash: You're not John Lewis or MLK, and this isn't Selma. And frankly, that was about the last time marches - led with dignity and respect because MLK demanded it of the protesters to showcase the inhumanity of the opponent - was about the last time marches did much. https://t.co/LWRYvLOdPh — Tom Nichols (@RadioFreeTom) March 24, 2018 He's not a fan of kids being coopted by adults for the adults' pet causes, which evades...

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Reactionary World Politics

Reactionary World Politics

by | 25 March, 2018 | ,

This is a guest post from Joseph MacKay,  a Research Fellow in the Department of International Relations at Australian National University, and Christopher David LaRoche, a PhD candidate in the Department of Political Science at the University of Toronto. Growing nationalist and populist parties and movements across the developed West and elsewhere are prone to a common nostalgic rhetoric: the political consensus of recent decades has eroded national boundaries, traditions, and identities. The past, they argue, was better than the present. And what is most needful now is a return to that...

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Fear-Mongering about U.S. Power

by | 20 March, 2018 |

This is a guest post from Clifford Bob, Professor and Chair of Political Science at Duquesne University.  A free press is a major check on shoddy government policies and bad ideas, but if journalists refuse to think critically about government pronouncements, that civic function fails. Worse yet, if the media magnifies and exaggerates official errors, a veneer of objectivity is cast onto poor quality or biased government information. We have learned this lesson many times in U.S. history, notably in the lead-up to the Iraq War. Robert Wright’s excellent Intercept article of last week makes...

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The State of the Field in Climate and Security

The State of the Field in Climate and Security

by | 16 March, 2018 | , ,

After nearly fifteen years of study, what do we know about the relationship between climate change and security? I recently attended a Woodrow Wilson Center event organized by the Peace Research Institute Oslo (PRIO) on the state of the field. Along with Geoff Dabelko, Halvard Buhaug, and Sherri Goodman, I offered my take on the field (the video is embedded below). In this blog post, I wanted to focus on five different causal pathways that I think represent the frontier of research on the study of climate and conflict, which include agricultural production and food prices, economic growth,...

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Remembering Lee Ann Fujii, a Friend and a Fighter

Remembering Lee Ann Fujii, a Friend and a Fighter

by | 10 March, 2018 |

This is a guest post from Erin Tolley an assistant professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of Toronto. Professor Lee Ann Fujii passed away unexpectedly in Seattle on March 2, 2018. This loss is personal because it has robbed me of a brilliant friend and colleague, but it is also public because of all that Lee Ann contributed to the discipline and to her scholarly community. Lee Ann was an expert on race, ethnicity, and political violence. Her first book, Killing Neighbors: Webs of Violence in Rwanda, focuses on the social context of the Rwandan genocide. She shows...

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