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

Thursday Morning Linkage

Thursday Morning Linkage

by Josh Busby | 28 February, 2013 |

I'm going to be filling in with some morning linkage in the coming weeks/months, so you'll probably see some posts with a smattering of U.S. foreign policy, global health, climate change, and whatever strikes my fancy such as the following: - the triennial meeting of CITES, the Convention on Trade in Endangered Species, opens in the next few days in Thailand (preview in Nature here) amidst a global crisis in rhino and elephant poaching; here is a podcast by Julian Rademayer, author of an expose on the illegal rhino trade; and another two on sharks and manta rays from the Pew Environment...

read more

Beyond Reading the Tea Leaves: Using Data to Understand Partisanship and Foreign Policy

by Josh Busby | 27 February, 2013 |

My frequent collaborator Jon Monten and I have a guest post on the new Chicago Council on Global Affairs blog Running Numbers. As our readers likely know, the Chicago Council runs periodic surveys about public attitudes towards foreign affairs and has historically run a number of important surveys of elite opinion. I'm cross-posting our piece here. For many observers of American politics, the fight over the nomination of Chuck Hagel as the next Secretary of Defense is indicative of growing partisan acrimony in the conduct of US foreign policy. However, concerns about intensifying...

read more

Can IR Theory Free this Student?

by Josh Busby | 25 February, 2013 |

Omid Kokabee is a University of Texas PhD student from the Department of Physics who was arrested in 2011 when he returned home to Iran over the winter break to visit his family. Though he is by all accounts apolitical, Omid was sentenced to 10 years for conspiring with foreign governments and given additional time in jail after he earned some money teaching other prisoners foreign languages and physics. His fellow students in the UT Physics Department have launched a campaign to try to free him. They asked my wife, also a political scientist, about what they should do.  Can we learn...

read more

When does social change happen? Revisiting How to Survive a Plague

by Josh Busby | 13 February, 2013 |

With the Oscars fast approaching, one documentary How to Survive a Plague is a likely winner (though may lose out to my second favorite documentary of the year Searching for Sugar Man).  How to Survive a Plague is, as I described in my earlier review, an emotionally redolent account of ACT UP's mobilization to move the U.S. government and the pharmaceuticals industry to bring life-extending AIDS drugs from the labs to market and into bodies. Josh Barro makes the case that the reason why ACT UP succeeded is because they made concrete demands, which echoes the argument Ethan Kapstein and I...

read more

A Short History and Critique of Climate Negotiations: All Climate Politics is Local

by Josh Busby | 13 February, 2013 |

I gave a guest lecture for undergraduates on the state of global climate negotiations yesterday for a law school colleague here at the University of Texas. In light of the president's strong but ambiguous comments in the State of the Union last night threatening executive action if the Congress doesn't act, I thought I'd share my notes here and would welcome comments from others about whether I've done justice to the arc of negotiations. My aim was to bring a group of 20 year olds up to speed so that they could understand how we got from the 1992 Framework Convention to last year's...

read more

Obama 2 and Foreign Policy Partisanship: Results of a New Survey of Congressional Staff

by Josh Busby | 29 January, 2013 |

Last May, Jon Monten, Will Inboden and I published on Foreignaffairs.com the results of a survey of about 40 U.S. foreign policy professionals, split equally among Republicans and Democrats with nearly all of them having served in some capacity in the Executive Branch. As I discussed here on the Duck, we found some surprising sources of strength for bipartisan support for certain aspects of international cooperation, namely for Bretton Woods institutions, NATO, and on international trade. We wondered if Executive Branch folks were somehow different from their peers who served in a similar...

read more

World AIDS Day 2012: A Moment for Optimism?

by Josh Busby | 1 December, 2012 |

Today is World AIDS Day, an annual opportunity to take stock of the state of the epidemic. Despite a decade of incredible mobilization of finance for and visibility of the AIDS pandemic, UNAIDS estimated that the number of new infections last year 2.5 million still far outstripped the 1.4 million people who received treatment for the first time. There has been some good news. 8 million of the 15 million people thought sick enough to need treatment now have it, up from 200,000 in the early 2000s. New infections of HIV and deaths from AIDS have dropped significantly in a number of countries....

read more

Climate Policy After Sandy – What Should be Done? Part III

by Josh Busby | 27 November, 2012 |

Huzzah! Barack Obama in his re-election night valedictory speech finally acknowledged that climate change is a problem we may have to attend to: We want our children to live in an America that isn't burdened by debt, that isn't weakened by inequality, that isn't threatened by the destructive power of a warming planet. I seem to recall that candidate Obama said something audacious calling on the global community to prevent the oceans from rising and to save the planet. After four years of America's sausage grinders whittling away at hope and change, can the president finally deliver measures...

read more

Why Does John McCain Hate Susan Rice? Republicans and Benghazi

by Josh Busby | 22 November, 2012 |

I've been curious why John McCain is pursuing Susan Rice with such a vengeance for her inopportune remarks on Sunday talk shows in September about the not-so spontaneous attacks on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi. As I think about other prospective nominees to lead the State Department like John Kerry, John McCain actually has more in common with Ambassador Rice. Susan Rice has been one of the Obama Administration's more ardent interventionists on Libya, Syria, and Darfur. Like McCain, Rice is willing to use military force to prevent atrocities and defend American interests. Liberal...

read more
Sandy and Climate Change: Part II

Sandy and Climate Change: Part II

by Josh Busby | 1 November, 2012 |

In my last post, I noted that Hurricane Sandy has finally triggered a vigorous discussion about climate change, prompting much speculation about whether climate change had some role in causing the storm. I expressed some doubt whether this is the right question to ask, as it frequently has triggered feuds among climate analysts about the science of climate change and diverted limited attention from mobilizing people to act. But, let us suppose it would be politically useful to have some greater certainty that extreme weather events like Sandy are related in some fashion to climate change....

read more