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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

The collateral damage of performance metrics

The collateral damage of performance metrics

by | 12 August, 2015 |

This is a guest post from Daniel Mügge who is an associate professor of political science at the University of Amsterdam and the lead editor of the Review of International Political Economy. In two recent posts, Cullen Hendrix, and Daniel Nexon and Patrick Thaddeus Jackson, have tabled important pros and cons of Google Scholar (GS) as a base for measuring of academic performance. And the flurry of reactions to their blogs reveal just how central and touchy and important an issue this is. The debate so far concentrates on gauging the "quality" of an individual scholar, and how different...

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Open Foreign Policy Thread Tonight on GOP Debate

Open Foreign Policy Thread Tonight on GOP Debate

by | 6 August, 2015 |

I will be live-tweeting the foreign policy dimensions of the GOP debate tonight here. Readers may want to chime in here on this open thread with the pre-, during, and post-debate reactions. It may be the silly season in the GOP primary, but with the Iran deal pending before Congress, these are consequential times. Yesterday, I live tweeted President Obama's address on Iran and will be synthesizing my observations on the deal and the politics surrounding it in coming days. Get your popcorn and laptop out tonight and stay tuned for the main attraction on your TV. BTW, as ever, I encourage...

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A Storify post on Cecil the Lion

A Storify post on Cecil the Lion

by | 30 July, 2015 |

People who follow this blog know that I'm not jumping on the wildlife conservation bandwagon. I taught a course on global wildlife conservation and have blogged about it repeatedly here on the Duck. So, here are my thoughts on Cecil the Lion, the lion killed by an American hunter in Zimbabwe, where I wade in to advocacy, sport hunting, the value of animal life compared to human life, why we have an emotional reaction to iconic wildlife but not animals we eat, Internet vigilantism, and more. These include a series of tweets and exchanges I had with others over the past several days. My main...

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7 Further Thoughts on Being A Better Job Market Candidate

7 Further Thoughts on Being A Better Job Market Candidate

by | 23 July, 2015 |

Amanda in her inimitable style has written some very persuasive guidance about the job market. Let me add a few thoughts about what else you can do to prepare. If you've already been socialized to want an academic job, then you better be ready for a rough slog. Unless you happen to be among the  handful of students who get all the attention and plum interviews this job market season, you are likely to get a couple of interviews and at worst none at all. As Amanda said, most of this is out of your control. The job market sucks. There are thousands of people chasing too few jobs. Imagine you...

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4 Things the US Can Do to Reinforce China’s Actions on Climate Change

4 Things the US Can Do to Reinforce China’s Actions on Climate Change

by | 21 July, 2015 |

Sarang Shidore and I have a new paper for the Paulson Institute on what the US can do to encourage China to do more on climate change (in English and Mandarin).  China recently reaffirmed its pledge to peak emissions around 2030 and to increase non-fossil energy to 20% by the same year. China also announced a new target to reduce CO2 emissions per unit of GDP (its carbon intensity) by 60 to 65 percent below 2005 levels. How can the US ensure that China sustains and even accelerates progress in this direction? Our starting premise is that air pollution is a more salient issue in China than...

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Thoughts on Subjectivity in Writing about Israel

Thoughts on Subjectivity in Writing about Israel

by | 16 July, 2015 | ,

This is a guest post from Mira Sucharov, an  Associate Professor at Carleton University.  Particularly in areas of contested politics — controversial policy issues, protracted conflict, clashing narratives, and the like — how much responsibility do authors have to remain unbiased? It’s a problematic word, bias. It’s almost always used either in the context of accusation or in ingratiating self-deprecation. But what if we shift from the term bias to the more encompassing — and less value-laden term — subjectivity? I recently reviewed four books on Israel and Israeli-Palestinian relations for...

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You Are Doing It Wrong

You Are Doing It Wrong

by | 10 July, 2015 |

The former Greek finance minister Yanis Varoufakis (also a former colleague) has compared Greece's situation to "fiscal waterboarding" at the hands of its creditors. Thomas Piketty has accused Germany of forgetting its own post-World War II experience with debt relief. When I read some of the appeals to Germany and the European Union on Greece's debt situation,  I thought as an act of strategic framing that Greece/Syriza (and to a lesser extent those of its supporters like Piketty) might be going about it wrong. As I wrote about in my first book Moral Movements and Foreign Policy, in the...

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Free Data, Get Your Data Here

Free Data, Get Your Data Here

by | 29 June, 2015 | ,

For the past two years, Jon Monten, Jordan Tama, and I have been working with the survey team at the Chicago Council on Global Affairs (Dina Smeltz and Craig Kafura) to revive the leader surveys that the Council used to run alongside their  foreign policy opinion surveys of the American public. Because of the expense and the difficulties of getting responses, the Council discontinued those surveys in 2004, leaving academics with really limited options for comparing public and elite attitudes. With the release of a Council report and a  recent piece ($, DM me for a PDF) in Foreign Affairs, we...

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Additional Arguments Against Legalizing the Trade in Rhino Horn Pt. 3

Additional Arguments Against Legalizing the Trade in Rhino Horn Pt. 3

by | 8 June, 2015 |

In my last two posts (here, here), I wrote about a recent Foreign Affairs piece that proposed lifting the ban on trading rhino horn and the political and substantive reasons why such an idea is problematic. Are there reasons to think that a one-off sale or even a permanent normalization of the trade might go well? While Save the Rhino is against one-off sales, it is a little more equivocal on a semi-permanent regulation of the trade (though I doubt this is where other NGOs are): Save the Rhino International is generally in favour of sustainable use, believing that conservation efforts must,...

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