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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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

Teaching Democratic Erosion

Teaching Democratic Erosion

by | 27 February, 2017 |

This is a guest post from Rob Blair and Jeff Colgan of Brown University. Since Donald Trump was elected last November, there has been no shortage of commentary warning that he represents a unique threat to the quality and longevity of democracy in America. (For just a few examples, see recent articles in the New Yorker, Atlantic, New York Times, and NPR.) Like many scholars and concerned citizens, we have been asking ourselves what we can or ought to do to help prevent this threat from materializing. Although we do not wish to professionally engage in partisan politics, as scholars we are...

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Long-form Writing for Policy Audiences: Part III of a Series

Long-form Writing for Policy Audiences: Part III of a Series

by | 27 February, 2017 | ,

This is the third in a series of posts about bridging the gap between policy and academia. The first focused on principles for engagement. The second on short-form writing, including blogging.   Another way to engage the policy world is writing long-form papers for think tanks. I’ve written for a number of think tanks and held fellowship positions at several (I'm currently a non-resident fellow at the Chicago Council on Global Affairs). Most of them fell in my lap where a think tank approached me because they were already familiar with my work or I knew folks who were there. Think tank...

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Short-Form Writing for the Public: Part II of a Series

Short-Form Writing for the Public: Part II of a Series

by | 26 February, 2017 | ,

This is part II of a series on bridging the gap between policy and academia. In my last post, I laid out some principles for thinking policy engagement as an academic. In this post, I'll talk about one such strategy -- short-form writing for the public -- which includes blogging, Twitter, and other social media. In subsequent posts, I'll review some others. I’ve been blogging on and off since the mid-2000s and since 2011 here on the Duck of Minerva. I’ve also contributed to the Monkey Cage a fair amount in recent years, among other outlets, and have a pretty active social media presence on...

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Principles and Strategies for Bridging the Gap: Part I

Principles and Strategies for Bridging the Gap: Part I

by | 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 | 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 | 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 | 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 | 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 | 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 | 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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