Dr. Joshua Busby, winner of the 2026 Grawemeyer Award in World Order, is Professor of Public Affairs at the Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas-Austin. He is also a distinguished scholar at the Strauss Center, nonresident fellow with the Chicago Council on Global Affairs, and a senior research fellow at the Center for Climate & Security. He was on leave in 2021–22 serving as a Senior Advisor for Climate at the U.S. Department of Defense and served in a part-time capacity in that role through June 2023.
In his Grawemeyer Award-winning book States and Nature: The Effects of Climate Change on Security (Cambridge University Press, 2022) Busby explains how the combination of state capacity, political exclusion and international assistance determine the degree to which the impacts of climate change affect security for a country’s citizens.
Dr. Busby has published widely on climate change, global health, transnational advocacy movements and U.S. foreign policy for various think tanks and academic journals, including International Security, International Studies Quarterly, Security Studies and Perspectives on Politics. His first book, Moral Movements and Foreign Policy, was published by Cambridge University Press in 2010. His second book, AIDS Drugs for All: Social Movements and Market Transformations, with co-author Ethan Kapstein, was published by Cambridge University Press in 2013 and won the 2014 Don K. Price Award (the American Political Science Association’s award for the best book on science, technology and environmental politics).
Dr. Busby was one of the lead researchers on a five-year, $7.6 million project funded by the Department of Defense called “Climate Change and African Political Stability” (CCAPS). He is the principal investigator of another DOD-funded project, “Complex Emergencies and Political Stability in Asia” (CEPSA) — a three-year, $1.9 million grant. He is a life member of the Council on Foreign Relations. He received his Ph.D. in political science in 2004 from Georgetown University.