AIDS and Multilateral Governance

Abstract

A massive study of AIDS in the world begins with three observations: no community or country in the world already affected by AIDS can claim that the spread of HIV has stopped; HIV is spreading and sometimes rapidly spreading to new communities and countries around the world; the epidemic becomes more complex as it matures: the global epidemic is composed of thousands of smaller, complicated epidemics.² From these observations, it is clear that worse is yet to come. What the world has witnessed so far is only the birth of a disaster with potentially devastating consequences for humanity. Projections of the epidemic by the year 2000 range from WHO’s conservative estimate of 30–40 million³ HIV infections up to 110 million.⁴ The vast majority of HIV cases will be in developing countries, as high a proportion as 90 per cent according to some predictions. Given that is about 80 per cent of the total population by the year 2000, the designation of HIV as a major problem seems an understatement.

This research has been conducted as part of a larger project on ‘International Cooperation in Response to AIDS’, a transnational collaborative endeavour involving Leon Gordenker, Roger A. Coate, Christer Jönsson and the author. Funding for the project has been provided by the Rockefeller Foundation, the Ford Foundation, and the Bank of Sweden Tercentenary Foundation. The results of the larger project have been published under the title International Cooperation in Response to AIDS (London: Pinter, 1995). I owe greatly to my colleagues for letting me use materials collected by us all, as well as for continuous discussions and debates on how to understand this process.