Joshua W. Busby

One effect to rule them all? A comment on climate and conflict

A recent Climatic Change review article reports a remarkable convergence of scientific evidence for a link between climatic events and violent intergroup conflict, thus departing markedly from other contemporary assessments of the empirical literature. This commentary revisits the review in order to understand the discrepancy. We believe the origins of the disagreement can be traced back to the review article’s underlying quantitative meta-analysis, which suffers from shortcomings with respect to sample selection and analytical coherence. A modified assessment that addresses some of these problems suggests that scientific research on climate and conflict to date has produced mixed and inconclusive results.

Who Cares about the Weather?: Climate Change and U.S. National Security

Is climate change a national security threat to the United States? This question remains a subject of debate in academia and has received renewed emphasis in the policy community. Even taking a narrow definition of national security, climate change already constitutes a national security threat to the United States, both in terms of direct threats to the country as well as its broader extraterritorial interests. While some of these purported threats—abrupt climate change and sea-level rise—have been overstated by advocates, several concerns, mostly related to the effects of extreme weather events on the United States and its strategic interests overseas, are sufficient enough that they already constitute security threats. That climate change potentially poses a direct threat to the U.S. homeland and its overseas interests suggests the subject warrants serious attention.

Locating Climate Insecurity: Where Are the Most Vulnerable Places in Africa?

Africa is widely recognized as one of the continents most vulnerable to climate change. The continent’s vulnerability is partly driven by unfortunate geography, where the physical effects of climate change are likely to be among the most severe on the planet. It is also largely due to the low adaptive capacity of many African states, a product of problems in their economies, healthcare and education systems, infrastructure, and governance.

Climate Change and Insecurity: Mapping Vulnerability in Africa

Many experts argue that climate change will exacerbate the severity and number of extreme weather events. Such climate-related hazards will be important security concerns and sources of vulnerability in the future regardless of whether they contribute to conflict. This will be particularly true where these hazards put large numbers of people at risk of death, requiring the diversion of either domestic or foreign military assets to provide humanitarian relief. Vulnerability to extreme weather, however, is only partially a function of physical exposure. Poor, marginalized communities that lack access to infrastructure and services, that have minimal education and poor health care, and that exist in countries with poor governance are likely to be among the most vulnerable. Given its dependence on rainfed agriculture and its low adaptive capacity, Africa is thought to be among the most vulnerable continents to climate change. That vulnerability, however, is not uniformly distributed. Indicators of vulnerability within Africa include the historic incidence of climate-related hazards, population density, household and community resilience, and governance and political violence. Among the places in Africa most vulnerable to the security consequences of climate change are parts of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Guinea, Sierra Leone, Somalia, and South Sudan.

Without Heirs? Assessing the Decline of Establishment Internationalism in U.S. Foreign Policy

Is establishment internationalism in decline? Conventional wisdom is becoming that structural shifts in the international environment along with generational, demographic, and cultural changes within the United States are inexorably leading to the decline of the broad, post-war internationalist consensus that dominated American foreign policy after 1945. Despite the frequent assertion that this change has taken place, very few studies have analyzed the extent to which establishment internationalism is in fact in decline. To answer this question, we first track trends in congressional foreign policy votes from the American Conservative Union (1970–2004) and Americans for Democratic Action (1948–2004). Our second set of indicators tracks the state of birth, educational profile, and formative international experience of a cross section of the U.S. foreign policy elite. Our third and fourth sets of indicators track elite attitudes as represented by presidential State of the Union addresses and major party platforms. We find support for increasing partisan polarization in Congress on foreign policy as well as increasing regional concentration of the parties. However, there is only mixed evidence to suggest that internationalism has experienced a secular decline overall. Support for international engagement and multilateral institutions remain important parts of elite foreign policy rhetoric. Moreover, we find that social backgrounds of U.S. foreign policy elites—save for military service—have not substantially changed from the height of the internationalist era.

Identifying hot spots of security vulnerability associated with climate change in Africa

Given its high dependence on rainfed agriculture and its comparatively low adaptive capacity, Africa is frequently invoked as especially vulnerable to climate change. Within Africa, there is likely to be considerable variation in vulnerability to climate change both between and within countries. This paper seeks to advance the agenda of identifying the hot spots of what we term “climate security” vulnerability, areas where the confluence of vulnerabilities could put large numbers of people at risk of death from climate-related hazards. This article blends the expertise of social scientists and climate scientists. It builds on a model of composite vulnerability that incorporates four “baskets” or processes that are thought to contribute to vulnerability including: (1) physical exposure, (2) population density, (3) household and community resilience, and (4) governance and political violence. Whereas previous iterations of the model relied on historical physical exposure data of natural hazards, this paper uses results from regional model simulations of African climate in the late 20th century and mid-21st century to develop measures of extreme weather events—dry days, heat wave events, and heavy rainfall days—coupled with an indicator of low-lying coastal elevation. For the late 20th century, this mapping process reveals the most vulnerable areas are concentrated in Chad, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Niger, Somalia, Sudan, and South Sudan, with pockets in Burkina Faso, Ethiopia, Guinea, Mauritania, and Sierra Leone. The mid 21st century projection shows more extensive vulnerability throughout the Sahel, including Burkina Faso, Chad, Mali, northern Nigeria, Niger, and across Sudan.

Hearts or minds? Identifying persuasive messages on climate change

This article sheds light on what kinds of appeals persuade the US public on climate change. Using an experimental design, we assign a diverse sample of 330 participants to one of four conditions: an economic self-interest appeal, a moral appeal, a mixed appeal combining self-interest and morality and a control condition with no persuasive appeal.1 Participants were then asked a series of questions about their willingness to support advocacy efforts, including such actions as writing a letter to Congress, signing a petition and joining an organization. We hypothesized that for issues like climate change where it is expensive to address the problem, arguments based on self-interest are more likely to be persuasive than moral appeals. Our experiment yielded some surprising results. Knowledge was an important moderator of people’s attitudes on climate change in response to the persuasive messages. We found that among respondents who were more knowledgeable about climate change that the economic frame was most the persuasive in terms of a subject’s willingness to take actions to support the cause. However, among low knowledge respondents, the control condition without messaging yielded the most concern.

Much Ado about Something?Regime Change in Cuba

The Castro regime has survived numerous difficulties and predictions of its imminent collapse, but its greatest challenge will be the inevitable loss of Fidel himself.

Ain’t that a Shame? Hypocrisy, Punishment, and Weak Actor Influence in International Politics

It is now widely understood that one way relatively weak actors compensate for material deficiencies in interactions with more powerful counterparts is by harnessing the power of norms and employing them as nonviolent instruments of persuasion. The most commonly recognized manifestation comprises public exposure of observable gaps between actors’ ostensible normative and legal commitments and their actual behavior, as first outlined and explored in Margaret Keck and Kathryn Sikkink’s (1998) enormously influential Activists Beyond Borders: Advocacy Networks in International Politics. Indeed, an entire literature has grown up around the study of these so-called naming and shaming efforts, much of it quite valuable in helping us understand the role of norms in international politics. Still, more than a decade and a half after publication of Keck and Sikkink’s volume, a shared understanding of the specific causal mechanism(s) behind successful and failed naming and shaming efforts has remained elusive, as has identification of the conditions under which such efforts will be undertaken and when they will succeed and fail.1

Understanding Global Health Governance: A Review of Jeremy Youde’s Book

If you are looking for a comprehensive overview of the history and key actors involved in addressing global health issues, then Jeremy Youde’s book Global Health Governance provides an authoritative survey. Youde documents the initial origins of the field as it emerged from concern about infectious diseases and the potential impact on trade from overly restrictive quarantine measures. He captures the important post-World War II rise of the World Health Organization (WHO) as the central agency tasked to deal with international health issues. He covers its success in smallpox eradication and the organization’s gradual decline as its core budget remained flat and other actors such as the Global Fund and the Gates Foundation emerged. I assigned the first six chapters of Youde’s book for my graduate course this past spring, and for those who need to be brought up to speed in a hurry on the major actors in global health, Youde’s book is a tremendous contribution. The three final substantive chapters cover an eclectic set of substantive issues in global health, surveillance in global health and the International Health Regulations, the risks of framing health issues as security threats, and access to pharmaceuticals, focusing on AIDS drugs.