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.

Website

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

Is Rio + 20 Going to be a Waste of Time?

by | 19 June, 2012 |

This was the tone of an op-ed I pitched regarding the Rio+20 environmental summit. Below the fold, I offer a slightly more nuanced argument ...Rio+20, the twentieth anniversary of the 1992 Earth Summit, kicks off the formal part of the negotiations tomorrow as leaders of 130 countries arrive to take part. It strikes me as a misguided nostalgia tour and will probably achieve even less than the tenth anniversary that took place in South Africa. Environmental indicators continue to deteriorate but sending 50,000 people to Rio (40,000 of them environmentalists) is a waste of time and energy...

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Politics on the Water’s Edge: U.S. Elites and Multilateralism

by | 1 June, 2012 |

Are there major differences between Democratic and Republican elites on multilateral cooperation? This question animates a new study that I carried out with my frequent collaborator Jon Monten and my colleague William Inboden.  In mid 2011 and early 2012, we were able to conduct a unique survey of about 20 Democrats and 20 Republicans, nearly all of whom had served in fairly senior positions in the U.S. government, mostly the Executive Branch.On the Foreign Affairs website, we report on the results of that survey. There are a few surprises, both in terms of areas of shared attitudes but also...

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Just a Physician? Jim Kim’s Candidacy for the World Bank

by | 29 March, 2012 |

My colleague Kate Weaver has written a nuanced take on this blog on the race for the World Bank presidency, that whoever succeeds Robert Zoellick will have an especially tricky go of it ensuring the organization's relevance at a time of fiscal austerity and changes in the global balance of power.Since Kate's post, opponents of the U.S. nominee Dr. Jim Kim, currently head of Dartmouth College and formerly head of the World Health Organization's AIDS initiative, have become more vocal. There is something unseemly about the criticism being leveled against Dr. Kim, and for the record, I'd just...

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What to Do? The Climate Security Policy Conundrum

by | 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 | 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 | 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 | 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 | 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 | 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 | 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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