The salience of HIV/AIDS in the current global agenda

Today, AIDS features prominently on the global agenda. The International Conference on AIDS has been held annually since 1985, the most recent of which was themed “Universal Action Now." The AIDS epidemic is a leading issue on the agenda of the UN – it's featured as Goal #6 of the UN’s Millennium Development Goals, and following up on the progress of these goals is one of the 5 main issues to be tackled by the 62nd session of the General Assembly. Additionally, these session is scheduled to complete a comprehensive review of the progress achieved in realizing the Declaration of Commitment on HIV/AIDS entitled “Global Crisis – Global Action.” It is one of the issues currently being tackled by Human Rights Watch, who strongly advocate approaching the HIV/AIDS epidemic as a human rights issue, noting that “a rights-based approach to the epidemic restores the rights of people affected by HIV and AIDS, fights stigma and discrimination, and reduces vulnerability of the world's most marginalized individuals.” By framing it as such, stopping the spread of AIDS and treating its victims has been picked up as a salient issue by women’s rights organizations like UNIFEM and ICW, as well as other NGOs working with the kinds of marginalized groups identified by Human Rights Watch.

The AIDS epidemic did not always carry such weight on the global agenda, however. The first known case of what later came to be known as the AIDS virus surfaced in 1959, but little attention was paid to until it began to spread rapidly in the US in the mid-1980s. In the early years of the epidemic, it was still referred to jokingly as “gay plague” by White House officials, and ignored by President Ronald Reagan despite exponential increases in deaths from the disease before and during his presidency (he finally mentioned in 1985, four years into his presidency and after almost 6000 US AIDS-related deaths) (For an unofficial timeline juxtaposing the spread of the disease with its slow incorporation into the US agenda, click here. The trajectory of the inclusion of AIDS on the global agenda highlights the importance of key actors such as celebrities, national organizations such as ACT UP, and events such as international conferences in reframing the issue in ways that resonate with pre-existing norms.

For example, in her book The Global Response to AIDS, Christiana Bastos writes “The international agencies linked to development, external aid, and the United Nations, oriented since World War II toward understanding and alleviating the painful gaps in the world, took on the double task of defining the global dimensions of AIDS and of framing the regional and macro differences in the experiences of the pandemic . . . Responding rapidly to the prospect of a global health crisis, WHO created the Global Programme on AIDS (GPA)” WHO, along with several other actors, helped to reframe AIDS away from a stigmatized issue involving drug use and homosexuality to a virus affecting those in countries with high levels of poverty, primarily through heterosexual transmission.

Having been “on the agenda” for some time now, beginning in the mid-1980s and growing in salience ever since, the issue of AIDS is much farther along in the global-agenda cycle than is the issue being tackled by CIVIC. An extensive transnational network has been built up around the global AIDS epidemic and it has found prominent places on the agenda of the UN General Assembly. Although somewhat difficult to read, the following is a visual depiction of the density of this network.

Part of this success in issue adoption is due to a long fight in defining the problem and the issue of AIDS as a human rights issue, thus resonating with the existing orientations of such organizations, and identifying clear causes (mainly poverty, as opposed to homosexual behavior as it was originally framed at its onset) and solutions (providing affordable drugs and accessible sex education, as well as general economic development and poverty-reduction). Due to the work of many political entrepreneurs, celebrities, and organizations, it is now accepted that the spread of AIDS is a systemic, rather than an individual problem, and that it is the responsibility of more “developed” nations to provide health services to affected populations.