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

Climate Change and #APSA2016

by Josh Busby | 3 September, 2016 | ,

With the G20 set to commence in Hangzhou, the United States and China today ratified the Paris Agreement, making it increasingly likely that it will enter into force by year's end. This is a momentous occasion in climate diplomacy and speaks to the increasing political salience of this topic. Yesterday, here at APSA, there was a fantastic roundtable on what political science has to say about this issue. The roundtable included some of the leading up and coming scholars writing about climate change including Jennifer Hadden, Johannes Urpelainen, Jessica Green, David Konisky, and Steven...

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What Am I Reading? Inaugural Feature on Global Health #1

What Am I Reading? Inaugural Feature on Global Health #1

by Josh Busby | 22 August, 2016 |

I'm on leave this year so my regular blogging might be a little scant, but I thought I'd introduce a new feature which is a periodic series "What Am I Reading?" I'd like to flag what I'm  reading on different topics, namely health, the environment, and foreign policy. This first one is on health. Zika Last week I had a piece on the Monkey Cage in the Washington Post on the Zika virus, presenting some empirical work on what frames might generate public concern and, in turn, more impetus for Congressional funding for Zika control My colleague Abigail Aiken finds a potential increase in demand...

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Persuading Republicans to Dump Trump

Persuading Republicans to Dump Trump

by Josh Busby | 5 July, 2016 |

I have one more Trump post I have to write. My first bemoaned how Trump could possibly be competitive in the presidential race and the second lambasted Trump's positions on domestic and foreign policy. I have no illusions that I'm convincing anyone who isn't already convinced he is a danger to the republic. However, should you read this and have friends in your orbit who are flirting with supporting Trump, here is some ammunition for your Facebook feed, dinner conversation, passenger pigeon, what have you. Basically, my hunch is that people will listen to you because they know you, but they...

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Trump on Policy: Consistently Self-Serving

Trump on Policy: Consistently Self-Serving

by Josh Busby | 5 July, 2016 | ,

In my last post, I lamented that Donald Trump is the presumptive GOP nominee, despite his outrageous series of slurs against different groups, his lies, and unscrupulous business practices. Before exploring what arguments might persuade Republicans and undecideds to vote against Trump, what other substantive objections are there to Trump? Trump has policy stances and utterances, based on some gut check about what outrageous thing might rile a receptive audience and keep him in the news so that he doesn't have to pay for TV ads. His style is based on improvisation and pandering, so he...

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Emotionally Trumped

Emotionally Trumped

by Josh Busby | 4 July, 2016 |

Is there such a thing as blogger's block? I suppose there must be. I've found the whole Donald Trump saga to be emotionally exhausting. It's hard to write more than 140 characters about this presidential race. How is it possible that he could or will be the nominee of a major party? Which groups has he not offended? This weekend it was the Jewish community's turn after Trump retweeted an anti-Hillary picture that featured a six-sided star and a background of dollars. A news organization tracked down the origins of the image on a neo-Nazi thread on a message board.  This is not the first...

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The UK and the EU Referendum

The UK and the EU Referendum

by Josh Busby | 22 June, 2016 |

The UK's vote on whether to remain in the European Union is tomorrow. I'm having trouble squaring a fearful nativist UK with the country I knew when I lived there from 1993 to 1995 completing a second undergraduate degree in international development. The UK I knew was eclectic and increasingly multicultural, with its cultural scene perhaps even more comfortable than the United States in drawing on diverse influences to produce fantastic art. This was pre-Cool Britannia and pre-Tony Blair (and also before the Iraq War and the global recession), and there was an undercurrent of optimism that...

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China’s Great Contradiction

China’s Great Contradiction

by Josh Busby | 18 June, 2016 | ,

This is a guest post from Barry Buzan, Emeritus Professor at the LSE For the past decade or so, China has been in the grip of a growing contradiction (in the classical Marxist sense) between a Chinese Communist Party (CCP) still deeply Leninist in its outlook, and the increasingly capitalist society that the CCP’s highly successful economic reforms have created. As Jonathan Fenby has argued, the CCP remains unbendingly committed to remaining in power in perpetuity. Yet as knowledge, wealth, organization, information and connectivity spread through Chinese society, that society becomes...

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Foreign Policy Salience and the 2016 Election: Evidence from the ANES Survey

by Josh Busby | 23 May, 2016 |

With each passing week, Donald Trump, the presumptive Republican nominee, makes statements that challenge the basic operating assumptions of U.S. foreign policy, whether it be through his nonchalance about a trade war with China, repudiation of alliance commitments to NATO and Japan, or honoring the countries' debts. The question that emerges from this: does the American electorate care? While presidential candidates have to pass some semblance of a commander in chief test of credibility with the electorate, the conventional wisdom is that foreign policy rarely matters much in U.S....

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