Dr. Joshua Busby

Non-Resident Fellow

Joshua Busby is an Assistant Professor of Public Affairs and a fellow with the RGK Center for Philanthropy and Community Service as well as the Robert S. Strauss Center for International Security and Law. He is also a non-resident fellow at the Center for a New American Security (CNAS) in Washington, DC. He originally joined the LBJ School faculty in fall 2006 as a Postdoctoral Fellow and Lecturer. Prior to coming to UT, Dr. Busby was a research fellow at the Center for Globalization and Governance at Princeton’s Woodrow Wilson School (2005-2006), the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at Harvard’s JFK School (2004-2005), and the Foreign Policy Studies program at the Brookings Institution (2003-2004). He defended his dissertation with distinction in summer 2004 from Georgetown University, where he also earned his M.A. in 2002.

He is currently working on a book manuscript entitled States of Grace: Moral Movements and Foreign Policy. In his book project, Busby seeks to explain why some countries are willing to take on new international commitments championed by principled advocacy groups and others are not. Substantively, he explores the politics of climate change, developing country debt relief, HIV/AIDS, and the International Criminal Court in selected country cases in the advanced industrialized world. He has also written extensively on transatlantic relations, both in international security and the climate change arena. Busby is the recent author of a report on climate change and national security from the Council on Foreign Relations. His research interests also include U.S. grand strategy, energy security, and the foreign policy of advanced industrialized countries.

Busby is a Term Member in the Council on Foreign Relations and a member of the International Institute for Strategic Studies. His works have or will appear in Perspectives on Politics (forthcoming), Security Studies (forthcoming), International Studies Quarterly, Current History, and Problems of Post-Communism, among other publications.

Busby also has a regional interest in Latin America, having served in the Peace Corps in Ecuador (1997-1999), worked in Nicaragua (Summer 1994, Spring 1996), and consulted for the Inter-American Development Bank (2000). Prior to working with the Peace Corps, he was a Marshall Scholar at the University of East Anglia (Norwich, England), where he completed a second B.A. (with Honors) in Development Studies (1993-1995). He completed his first B.A. (with Highest Distinction) at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in Political Science and Biology.

Areas of Expertise

  • Climate change and energy policy
  • U.S. foreign policy and grand strategy
  • international development and global health policy
  • international organizations and global governance