From Contention to Engagement: French Social Science and the Politics of HIV/AIDS
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Review Article
From Contention to Engagement: French Social Science and the Politics of HIV/AIDS Michael J. Bosia Saint Michael’s College, One Winooski Park, Colchester, Vermont 05439, USA. E-mail: [email protected]
The HIV/AIDS pandemic has had a devastating impact, challenged the capabilities of state actors, and empowered a new transnational movement. While the various phenomena linked to the disease too often have been overlooked by American political science, French scholars have responded to the politics of AIDS as it related to contestation over the direction of the state and as it has yielded new opportunities for engaged theory building and empirical exploration. French Politics (2007) 5, 96–105. doi:10.1057/palgrave.fp.8200116 Keywords: AIDS; social movements; mobilization; activism; identity politics; blood safety; public health; political accountability
Introduction Nearly 30 million people have died as a result of the global AIDS pandemic — conservatively, more than 35,000 in France and 500,000 in the US.1 It has been 25 years since the first reports of what was called a mysterious new illness, and to mark World AIDS Day on December 1, 2006, activists coordinated local and national events via email, listserves, and conference calls. ACT UP in Philadelphia and New York and other AIDS advocates pressured the US government to expand support for the global health care infrastructure necessary for the provision of HIV-related treatments. From Canada to South Africa, the Treatment Action Campaign called for greater access to antiretroviral drugs for the majority of people with HIV who still do not receive them. Act Up Paris, working through an international network spanning Africa from Cameroon to Uganda and across the globe to Thailand and Cambodia, joined with European and global organizations to pressure the G8 on the eve of the German summit to reexamine TRIPs (Trade Related Intellectual Property Rights) that limit access to cost-effective generics, and to fulfill existing obligations to debt reduction. After 25 years, the global AIDS movement demonstrates a unique durability and resilience while facing indifference and ideological divisions, suffering, death, and loss. However, American political scientists have remained
Michael J. Bosia From Contention to Engagement
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unimpressed with the variety of theoretical questions raised by the empirical story of HIV/AIDS and the global movement produced in response (Densham, 2006). With truly only a few exceptions,2 political science in the US has for more than 25 years largely ignored those states that have either succeeded or failed in responding to HIV/AIDS, the actors who have created a transnational network of institutions and movements, and the desperately ill who have risked their lives to fight against the global regimes that limit access to treatment. The historic mobilizations of (or failure to mobilize) peoples and communities, states, resources, and medicine, and the deployment of AIDS as a symbolic and very real weapon in conflicts over citize
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