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.

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Recent Posts

A Global Response to Climate Change: In, through, and for Cities?

A Global Response to Climate Change: In, through, and for Cities?

by | 6 April, 2018 |

This is a guest post from Sander Chan[1], David Gordon[2], Emma Lecavalier[3], Craig Johnson[4], Angel Hsu[5], Fee Stehle[6], Thomas Hickmann[7], Jennifer Bansard[8], Paty Romero-Lankao[9] Cities have been wildly successful over recent years in positioning themselves at the center of the global conversation on climate change. For example, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) recently convened the Cities & Climate Change Conference (CitiesIPCC) in Edmonton, Alberta. The conference -- hosted by a city that once advertised itself as Canada’s oil capital -- brought together a...

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Are the Kids Alright? The March for Our Lives as a Social Movement

Are the Kids Alright? The March for Our Lives as a Social Movement

by | 27 March, 2018 | ,

Tom Nichols, he of Death of Expertise fame, raised a few hackles over the weekend when he said marches really hadn't achieved anything since the Civil Rights Movement. News flash: You're not John Lewis or MLK, and this isn't Selma. And frankly, that was about the last time marches - led with dignity and respect because MLK demanded it of the protesters to showcase the inhumanity of the opponent - was about the last time marches did much. https://t.co/LWRYvLOdPh — Tom Nichols (@RadioFreeTom) March 24, 2018 He's not a fan of kids being coopted by adults for the adults' pet causes, which evades...

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Reactionary World Politics

Reactionary World Politics

by | 25 March, 2018 | ,

This is a guest post from Joseph MacKay,  a Research Fellow in the Department of International Relations at Australian National University, and Christopher David LaRoche, a PhD candidate in the Department of Political Science at the University of Toronto. Growing nationalist and populist parties and movements across the developed West and elsewhere are prone to a common nostalgic rhetoric: the political consensus of recent decades has eroded national boundaries, traditions, and identities. The past, they argue, was better than the present. And what is most needful now is a return to that...

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Fear-Mongering about U.S. Power

by | 20 March, 2018 |

This is a guest post from Clifford Bob, Professor and Chair of Political Science at Duquesne University.  A free press is a major check on shoddy government policies and bad ideas, but if journalists refuse to think critically about government pronouncements, that civic function fails. Worse yet, if the media magnifies and exaggerates official errors, a veneer of objectivity is cast onto poor quality or biased government information. We have learned this lesson many times in U.S. history, notably in the lead-up to the Iraq War. Robert Wright’s excellent Intercept article of last week makes...

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The State of the Field in Climate and Security

The State of the Field in Climate and Security

by | 16 March, 2018 | , ,

After nearly fifteen years of study, what do we know about the relationship between climate change and security? I recently attended a Woodrow Wilson Center event organized by the Peace Research Institute Oslo (PRIO) on the state of the field. Along with Geoff Dabelko, Halvard Buhaug, and Sherri Goodman, I offered my take on the field (the video is embedded below). In this blog post, I wanted to focus on five different causal pathways that I think represent the frontier of research on the study of climate and conflict, which include agricultural production and food prices, economic growth,...

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Remembering Lee Ann Fujii, a Friend and a Fighter

Remembering Lee Ann Fujii, a Friend and a Fighter

by | 10 March, 2018 |

This is a guest post from Erin Tolley an assistant professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of Toronto. Professor Lee Ann Fujii passed away unexpectedly in Seattle on March 2, 2018. This loss is personal because it has robbed me of a brilliant friend and colleague, but it is also public because of all that Lee Ann contributed to the discipline and to her scholarly community. Lee Ann was an expert on race, ethnicity, and political violence. Her first book, Killing Neighbors: Webs of Violence in Rwanda, focuses on the social context of the Rwandan genocide. She shows...

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International Organizations and the Trump Administration’s New Budget Proposal

International Organizations and the Trump Administration’s New Budget Proposal

by | 10 March, 2018 |

This is a guest post from Tana Johnson, an Assistant Professor of Public Policy and Political Science at Duke University. She is the author of Organizational Progeny: Why Governments Are Losing Control over the Proliferating Structures of Global Governance (now available in paperback, Oxford University Press). Van Nguyen is an undergraduate at Duke University, majoring in Public Policy and Political Science. She is completing a senior honors thesis on inter-governmental institutions and immigrant integration. Within its first year in power, the Trump administration has transformed the U.S.’s...

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Trauma in Common: US Gun Violence and Violence in Armed Conflict

Trauma in Common: US Gun Violence and Violence in Armed Conflict

by | 21 February, 2018 |

This is a guest post by Betcy Jose, Assistant Professor of Political Science at University of Colorado-Denver “This is a really good school, and now it’s like a war zone.” This is how one parent reacted when picking up his son from Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, FL after a shooter murdered 17 students and staff. It is a description often used in the aftermath of mass shootings. At first blush, it seems a remarkable comparison to make, especially given that the United States is not embroiled in anything resembling a traditional armed conflict within its borders. The...

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Are IR Schools Broken? Nah.

Are IR Schools Broken? Nah.

by | 21 February, 2018 | ,

IR program rankings are out in Foreign Policy. Discuss. Steve Walt has a provocative column in the same issue that I'm sure he didn't title that suggests "America's IR Schools Are Broken." The argument isn't strictly the familiar one from him about methods but that scholars seeking influence in policy circles have rallied around conformist consensus positions: But perhaps the biggest limitation in today’s schools of international affairs — at least here in the United States — is their tendency to reinforce the stale bipartisan consensus behind “liberal hegemony” and the necessity for “U.S....

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What, Me Worry? The Trump Administration and Pandemic Preparedness

What, Me Worry? The Trump Administration and Pandemic Preparedness

by | 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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