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

Principles and Strategies for Bridging the Gap: Part I

Principles and Strategies for Bridging the Gap: Part I

by Josh Busby | 25 February, 2017 | ,

At the recent ISA meeting, I had the good fortune to participate in a roundtable on bridging the policy-academic divide organized by Jim Goldgeier, the Dean of the School of International Service at American University. Fellow panelists included Bruce Jentleson and a powerhouse trio from American University, including Susanna Campbell, Nora Bensahel, and Jordan Tama. All of us in some capacity have participated in the Bridging the Gap project over the years. I wrote my remarks up in a long form but I thought I’d roll them out in a series of six blog posts beginning with this one. I’ll come...

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Are You Ready for Some ISA?

Are You Ready for Some ISA?

by Josh Busby | 21 February, 2017 |

Many of us are Baltimore bound for ISA, and other than the Duckies this Thursday night, what are you looking forward to? What panels, receptions, events, new books have caught your attention? Mike Horowitz winning the Karl Deutsch prize? PRIO folks, Ida Rudolfsen and runner-up Jonas Nordkvell,  winning the Jacek Kugler paper award on demography and geography for work on food price shocks and unrest and rainfall and conflict? Exciting stuff. (I mostly want to use this post to test our new Facebook auto-post image, but serious responses, including self-nominations most welcome). I've got an...

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Academic Freedom

by Josh Busby | 17 February, 2017 |

The FAKE NEWS media (failing @nytimes, @NBCNews, @ABC, @CBS, @CNN) is not my enemy, it is the enemy of the American People! — Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) February 17, 2017 President Trump tweeted this on Friday. Even before he issued this egregious tweet, I had prepared a thread on Twitter of my observations from a recent trip to DC. This builds on my post from earlier in the week on how to defend democracy from the perch of the Ivory Tower. After my trip to DC, it occurred to me that academics, particularly tenured ones, have the freedom to resist this administration and speak out in...

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Trump’s Randian Foreign Policy

Trump’s Randian Foreign Policy

by Josh Busby | 15 February, 2017 |

This is a guest post by Zachary C. Shirkey, an Associate Professor of Political Science, Hunter College, CUNY. Attempts by observers to give Trump’s foreign policy some coherence by finding an underlying ideology that motivates it have largely focused on Jacksonianism. Certainly, aspects of Trump’s outlook and those of a number of his advisers fit the description of Jacksonianism. Jacksonians see US interests in white ethno-nationalist terms and they emphasize strength, unilateralism, self-reliance, and coercion. Jacksonians also seize upon simple solutions for complex problems. Early Trump...

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Defending Democracy from the Ivory Tower

Defending Democracy from the Ivory Tower

by Josh Busby | 13 February, 2017 |

What is the role of the academic in defending democracy at a moment like this? I am 46 years old and have lived through some politically searing times in U.S. and world history, but the election of Donald Trump to the presidency of the United States feels different. It feels like an existential threat to world order and American democracy like nothing else. It has turned all of us in to news junkies hanging on every inflammatory, norms-busting tweet from POTUS at the expense of productivity and mental health. This is not about partisanship. It is about country (if you are American) over...

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Understanding Trump’s Worldview

Understanding Trump’s Worldview

by Josh Busby | 17 January, 2017 |

Over the weekend, Donald Trump gave an interview with Michael Gove of The Times of London and Kai Diekmann, a former editor of the German newspaper Bild. (The interview is behind a paywall, but you can register for free for access to two articles a week from The Times.) There has been ample coverage in the press (see here, here), focusing on Trump's ambivalence to NATO ("obsolete" "very important"), hostility to the European Union ("Personally, I don’t think it matters much for the United States"), and equal regard for Angela Merkel and Putin ("Well, I start off trusting both — but let’s see...

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Being a Doctoral Student in the Time of Trump: Six Challenges

Being a Doctoral Student in the Time of Trump: Six Challenges

by Josh Busby | 6 December, 2016 |

This is a guest post from Ariya Hagh, Andrew Szarejko, and Laila Wahedi. All three authors are doctoral students in Georgetown University’s Department of Government. Author order is alphabetical by last name. As we consider the broader ramifications of a Trump presidency, it is important to take a moment to consider how we in the discipline are likely to be affected so that we can adequately prepare for the coming years. If past behavior and rhetoric is any indication, which we expect it to be, the incoming Trump administration will present a unique set of challenges to doctoral students in...

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How Are You? On Coping in the Time of Trump

by Josh Busby | 2 December, 2016 |

pic.twitter.com/hOgO7uOmk2 — Robinson Meyer (@yayitsrob) November 30, 2016 I'm not going to assume that all of our readers are non-Trump fans, but let's be honest, Trump support in the social science academy is probably slim. And, if you are like me, you are dismayed by what transpired with the election and continue to try to figure it out, both personally as a human being and as a citizen of whatever country you are from. At moments, you think, maybe it won't be so bad, but then he tweets or says something and you fear it will be worse. I think Americans are often preternaturally disposed...

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World AIDS Day 2016

World AIDS Day 2016

by Josh Busby | 1 December, 2016 |

December 1 is World AIDS day.  Throughout the 2000s, AIDS received unprecedented attention and resources, particularly to support ten of millions of people's access to life-extending anti-retroviral therapy. Attention and resources peaked in recent years, and while the problem in some respects has gotten better, it hasn't gone away. More than 35 million people have died from AIDS already.  And yet,  there are still more than 35 million people living with the virus that causes AIDS, only half of whom have access to ARVs. While new infections and deaths have come down from their peaks, there...

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Climate and Security in the Trump Era

Climate and Security in the Trump Era

by Josh Busby | 30 November, 2016 |

I've been asked by some reporters about the significance of Donald Trump's victory for the agenda of climate and security, the emergent concern that climate change is likely to produce consequences that rise to the level of security challenges for the United States and rest of the world (some background here and here).  Some of my initial thoughts were quoted today in Scientific American and I've expanded on them here.  As I noted in my last post, we've already seen considerable speculation about what the Trump administration might yield on climate change and wider environmental policy....

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