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

What, Me Worry? The Trump Administration and Pandemic Preparedness

What, Me Worry? The Trump Administration and Pandemic Preparedness

by Josh Busby | 4 February, 2018 |

Imagine if your town had been especially fire prone with fires that threatened to spread to the rest of the city. City officials created a fire prevention fund for nearly 40 parts of town prone  to fire.  While work remained to be done, the funds ran out. Elected political leaders decided that since the town had not experienced a significant fire for two years, there was no need to spend any more money. That strategy make little sense, but it appears to be the one the Trump administration is adopting by failing to renew funding for CDC and USAID disease prevention efforts in about 40...

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The Return of Geopolitics

The Return of Geopolitics

by Josh Busby | 12 January, 2018 |

Geopolitics has returned with a vengeance. The end of the Cold War wrought a moment in which there was no credible alternative to liberal democratic capitalism. Russia was seemingly fatally weakened, and China was not yet the economic powerhouse it would become. By the late 2000's, Russia, with power and resources concentrated  in the hands of Vladimir Putin, was newly assertive in its near abroad and attempted to restore its authority over Georgia and Ukraine. It would seek influence over events further afield by supporting the Assad regime in Syria and through vigorous efforts to...

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Turning the Lights Out on American Leadership

Turning the Lights Out on American Leadership

by Josh Busby | 11 January, 2018 | ,

What a time to be alive. By some accounts, we are witnessing a power transition between the United States and China, with the United States voluntarily relinquishing its claim of global leadership despite having a sizable advantage in hard power over all of its rivals. Evan Osnos, who spent many years in China writing for the New Yorker, has a provocative piece that sums up his view of Trump’s foreign policy one year in, “Making China Great Again.” The Chinese, he writes, have a clear-eyed assessment of what the Trump administration has become: After the summit, the Pangoal Institution, a...

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ICAN’s Road to the Nobel Peace Prize

ICAN’s Road to the Nobel Peace Prize

by Josh Busby | 8 December, 2017 |

This is a guest post from Rebecca Gibbons, a Visiting Assistant Professor at Bowdoin College.  On Sunday, December 10, the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN) will accept the 2017 Nobel Peace Prize for calling attention to the “catastrophic humanitarian consequences” of nuclear use and for promoting the recently adopted Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons. This movement grew out of great frustration with a lack of progress on nuclear disarmament through traditional channels such as the 1970 Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT) or the Geneva-based Conference on...

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Philosophy of Law and the Decline of War

Philosophy of Law and the Decline of War

by Josh Busby | 2 December, 2017 | , ,

This is a guest post from Simon Cotton, Australian National University, where he is a Visitor in Philosophy, and the University of New South Wales, Canberra, where he teaches in Humanities and Social Sciences. Much of the commentary on Oona Hathaway and Scott Shapiro’s recent book, The Internationalists, including at Duck of Minerva, has focused on the empirical basis for their controversial thesis. Hathaway and Shapiro do not just claim that much of the decline in major interstate war that we have seen since the Second World War is down to mere reformulation of black-letter law, but that...

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2018 Duckies

2018 Duckies

by Josh Busby | 29 November, 2017 |

This is a guest post from Laura Seay, among other things chair of the Online Media Caucus for ISA. It’s Duckies time! ISA 2018 is right around the corner. The Online Achievement in International Studies Reception and Awarding of the Duckies will take place on Friday, April 6 at 7:30pm.  We’ll feature three speakers in the ever-popular Ignite series and enjoy honoring our winners together.  The ISA Online Media Caucus (OMC) appreciates the generous support of SAGE Publishing in sponsoring the awards. Now is the time to submit your nominations for the 2018 Duckies.  Send your nominations...

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Can the EU regain its international climate policy leadership lost in Copenhagen?

by Josh Busby | 12 November, 2017 |

This is a guest post from Axel Michaelowa  from the University of Zurich. He is also the lead author of the chapter on international agreements in the 5th Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. This is the second in the series from our Bonn panel on leadership in the climate regime.  For over a decade, the EU was the undisputed leader of the international climate policy process. It had a grand vision for a universal international climate policy agreement modelled on the Kyoto Protocol. This was to be "crowned" during COP 15 in Copenhagen 2009. So the shock was...

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Leadership in the Climate Regime without the US Federal Government

by Josh Busby | 12 November, 2017 |

I am just back from the climate negotiations in Bonn where I organized a side event at the German Development Institute (DIE). The event was co-sponsored  by the Council on Energy, Environment and Water (CEEW). These are my opening and closing  remarks from the session. In subsequent days, I'll post additional interventions from some of the other panelists.  Panelists included Aimee Barnes, Senior Adviser to Governor Brown of California; Sander Chan of DIE; Arunabha Ghosh, CEO of CEEW, one of India's leading think tanks on energy and climate; Angel Hsu, of Yale-NUS campus; and Axel...

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Planet Politics and International Relations

Planet Politics and International Relations

by Josh Busby | 12 November, 2017 |

This is a guest post from Hannes Peltonen, Senior Lecturer in International Politics at the University of Tampere The State of the Discipline International Politics/Relations (IR) has allegedly failed, a claim publicized periodically. Barry Buzan and Richard Little began this millennium by highlighting the discipline’s intellectual failure in the journal Millennium. More recently, an influential 2013 forum in EJIR on IR theory, edited by Tim Dunne, Lene Hansen, and Colin Wight, concludes something similar. IR theorists seem to consider that IR has failed, because it has a one-way...

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Democratic Weakness and the Secessionist Impulse

Democratic Weakness and the Secessionist Impulse

by Josh Busby | 4 November, 2017 | , ,

This is a guest post from Katy Collin, who is a post-doctoral research fellow at the Brookings Institution and an adjunct instructor at American University's School of International Service. Her research is on the use of referendums in peace processes. In the last few weeks, international borders have been challenged around the world. Secessionists and great powers are undermining the norm of territorial integrity, or border fixity. In the Middle East, East Asia, sub-Saharan Africa, and in Europe, international boundaries are being pushed from within and between states. Respect for...

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