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 to Do? The Climate Security Policy Conundrum

by Josh Busby | 22 March, 2012 |

This is re-posted from e-IR. I hesitated to write anything about climate and security until I had read all (or damn near all 17 articles) of the recent special issue of the Journal of Peace Research.My initial mandate for this post was to talk about the significance of climate and security for militaries, and as part of a project funded by the U.S. Department of Defense, I obviously should have something to say about that. My reaction, however, was that to conceive of climate and security as purely or primarily a military problem would reinforce a narrow understanding of the issue and...

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Primary Politics and Foreign Policy: Super Tuesday Edition

by Josh Busby | 6 March, 2012 |

This is cross-posted from the University of Texas website.As the March 6 Super Tuesday Republican primary looms, foreign policy issues understandably are likely to play a marginal role in the decisions of most voters. Since the middle of 2008, Gallup pollshave found that more than 60 percent of voters identified economic issues as the most important problem facing the country. In their February 2012 poll, for example, less than a half a percent of Americans identified either terrorism or conflict/war in the Middle East as their top concern.Does that mean that foreign policy concerns are...

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Global Implications of the Contraception Kerfuffle

by Josh Busby | 25 February, 2012 |

Our readers are surely aware of the contraception kerfuffle, the outpouring of criticism and controversy engendered by the Obama's administration's efforts to ensure that more American women have access to contraception as part of their health plans. With the insurance schemes of religious-affiliated universities and hospitals often not covering contraception services for women, the Obama administration sought to use the new health care law to extend access to contraception. (It took John Stewart to point out that many of these same plans cover Viagra for men but not contraception for...

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Part II on the AIDS Crisis and Learning from History: Lessons from South Africa

by Josh Busby | 20 January, 2012 |

In my last post, I profiled the Origins of AIDS, Jacques Pépin's masterful study of how the virus that causes AIDS in humans originated in chimps and then jumped to humans and later took off as a result of a complex series of events involving local populations uprooted from traditional practices, the spread of prostitution, and widespread use of injections to fight infectious diseases, among other factors (see Donald McNeil's compact summary review in the Times).If Pépin's book is of a scholar/detective sifting and sorting evidence to advance an argument, Geffen's book represents the history...

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Learning from Histories of the AIDS Crisis

by Josh Busby | 16 January, 2012 |

What can we learn from histories of the AIDS crisis? Jacques Pépin's The Origins of AIDS and Nathan Geffen's Debunking Delusions: The Inside Story of the Treatment Action Campaign are two important contributions to our understanding of a disease that has now claimed nearly thirty million lives.In different ways, both books raise interesting questions about what we can learn from history about causal mechanisms and wider sets of issues. In this two-part blog post, I'll talk about each book and a recent set of review essays in Perspectives on Politics on Evan Lieberman's important 2009 book...

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Addendum: The Use of History in IR and the Causes of World War II

by Josh Busby | 5 January, 2012 |

So, in my last post, I critiqued Rosasto and Schuessler's realist take on the causes of World War II, repeating the IR conventional wisdom of liberal internationalism (that it was reparations and beggar-thy-neighbor policies that worsened the Depression and created the conditions for the rise of Hitler). I ran that interpretation by one of my colleagues at the LBJ School, Frank Gavin, a historian who knows this literature much better than me but also one who has engaged the IR literature quite extensively.I wanted to quote his email to me at length about how historians now understand WWII,...

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Really Real: Take II on the Chicago IR Guys

by Josh Busby | 4 January, 2012 |

In my last post, I offered a friendly critique of Nuno Monteiro's piece on how unipolarity has been less peaceful than other periods (debatable) and that U.S. power alone explains why minor states feel insecure and trigger conflicts with the unipole (same - the domestic politics of the U.S. and minor states are important in my view).   In this post, I want to provide a similar albeit friendlier critique to Rosato and Schuessler's article (not least because Sebastian introduced me and my wife!). Rosato and Schuessler (R&S) make the case that realism can and should be taken as a prescriptive...

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Get Real! Chicago IR guys out in force

by Josh Busby | 3 January, 2012 |

In light of the recent exchange on the Duck about Matthew Kroenig's work on Iran and policy-relevant research, I thought I'd flag a couple of articles from three University of Chicago alums from International Security (where Nuno Monteiro has a piece on unipolarity) and Perspectives on Politics (where Sebastian Rosato and John Schuessler have an article [Ed: behind paywall] prescribing a realist foreign policy for the United States).While I disagree with a number of their conclusions and theoretical observations, these are the kind of pieces that I think will generate a lot of healthy...

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An AIDS-Free Generation?

by Josh Busby | 2 December, 2011 |

Three weeks ago, Hillary Clinton gave a speech at the National Institutes of Health suggesting that because of recent advances in scientific understanding we could finally envision an AIDS-free generation. Wow, fantastic, the beginning of the end! Could it be? A week ago, the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, TB, and Malaria announced that because of insufficient donor funding, it was canceling its next funding round for new projects and that it would likely struggle to maintain some of its existing commitments. On the Huffington Post, Jeffrey Sachs groused that President Obama hadn’t done enough...

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Isn’t there a global climate conference in Durban?

by Josh Busby | 30 November, 2011 |

Durban SkylineWhy aren't you there? You love South Africa. New baby. 'Nuff said.What, there is more? Low expectations. Hard to justify traveling all that way (let alone burn all those hydrocarbons) for a meeting that is likely to be unproductive.*I take it you are not a big fan of big global conferences? Not really. Hard to see how thousands of delegates and NGOs can converge in a single place and actually produce meaningful results.Jealous much? A little.Ok, low expectations aside, what would constitute a "success" and what would be a failure?Here are some headlines coming out of Durban...

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