Abstract
This chapter sets out the rationale behind the book and describes its conceptual underpinnings. It focuses in particular on the idea of politics, which grounds my approach to understanding both the nature of Global AIDS and its implications. Jacques Rancière’s work provides the conceptual framework for the chapter. This highlights the importance of considering the politics of ‘Global AIDS’ rather than the global politics of AIDS at a time when the sustainability of the lives of people living with HIV is becoming a major concern for the future concern. Using such an approach, the chapter analyses the practices associated with Global AIDS in a number of policy areas. Following this, the methodological grounds that make possible an analysis of the politics of Global AIDS – developed through an engagement with Niklas Luhman’s systems theory – are outlined.
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Notes
- 1.
One of the central issues raised about sustainability is about the sustainability of the treatment interventions over time (Shadlen 2013).
- 2.
My understanding of sustainability is broader than just particular Government’s ability to maintain what has been done by the Global AIDS system (Pereira 2013). I consider sustainability as a political process which enables people to maintain their wellbeing. This no doubt needs engagement with governments among other actors but it requires more than lobbying to maintain the status quo. It is about having the ability to influence change as experiences of HIV and AIDS change in different contexts.
- 3.
The idea of AIDS movement makes sense according to Charles Tilly’s definition of social movement. He considered social movements as having number of aspects. They have campaigns, repertoires of contention and Worthness, Unity, Numbers and Commitments (WUNC) (2004).
- 4.
Here, the issue is the way in which AIDS is framed as a problem that needs global attention to locate it as a policy concern in competition with other problems in various contexts, both nationally and internationally (see Hoppe 2011: 2–8).
- 5.
An interesting example of this is the important work by Lesley and Len Doyal (2013). My approach to politics is an attempt to take their argument further to identify the mechanisms as to why things remain unanswered in the system independent of policy campaigns and statements to include people’s needs.
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Seckinelgin, H. (2017). Introduction. In: The Politics of Global AIDS. Social Aspects of HIV, vol 3. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-46013-0_1
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