Politics and Policy of HIV/AIDS » Human Security

Is AIDS a security threat?

joshbusby — Sun, 07 Jan 2007 17:51:48 +0000

Journalist Stephan Faris has a nice essay in the recent Atlantic which looks at why the Pentagon ranks AIDS as a major security threat. The piece quotes from Sue Peterson’s paper (which we discussed at our Princeton meeting last year) that found a statistical connection between AIDS and a decline in socio-economic indicators which, in turn, were correlated with increases in violent conflict and human rights abuses. Faris’ piece reviews some of the security worries associated with AIDS: what happens when you have 25 million AIDS orphans raised without much adult supervision?; the high rates of AIDS in African militaries that may undermine state sovereignty and their deployment as peacekeepers; the risks of those same soldiers passing the virus during deployments; and the general risk of instability if AIDS affects such a large proportion of the population.

There is no shortage of studies looking at the links between AIDS and security (the Council on Foreign Relations has a long study, Tony Barnett at the LSE has another, Stephan Elbe has a long piece in International Studies Quarterly, and P.W. Singer has a piece in Survival). There is also the famous National Intelligence Council report warning of the next generation of AIDS cases in China, India, and Russia. We’ve also blogged (and here) about the links between HIV and security. Despite these purported links, Alex de Waal in his recent book makes a pretty strong case for why AIDS hasn’t been much of a political issue yet which I think also causes us to wonder about whether or not AIDS will become a security challenge.

African publics have not mobilized much on AIDS because they have so many other pressing problems to worry about. As writers on environmental security have noted, depravation on its own does not cause people to fight. If that were the case, we’d see more conflicts than we do. Interestingly, some of the places with the highest prevalence of AIDS in Africa–South Africa and Botswana–have not erupted into violence or human rights abuses. Countries with lower AIDS levels in West Africa and the Horn are the ones experiencing the most conflict. What are we to make of this?

I think there are efforts by advocates in the West to make a stark case for the security risks stemming from AIDS, in part because this way of framing the problem may have more appeal to policymakers after 9/11. I have done similar work on climate and security, and as one concerned about climate change, I can see the temptation. That said, I’m a little worried that it is possible to make too strong a case. I think an important question we have to ask, as de Waal does, is why haven’t we seen more politicization of AIDS in Africa and conflict in countries with high AIDS prevalence? While we tend to think of violent conflict negatively, the shockingly low level of attention by most African policymakers to the disease should be a source of political contestation. Amy Patterson, in her recent book, suggests AIDS is starting to become part of the electoral calculus in Africa, but this is long overdue.

As I have written elsewhere, my own sense is that even if great parts of Africa were to fall apart (as Darfur is), the actual threat to U.S. security would be modest, but it would be a grave moral failure on our part to sit back and watch hundreds of thousands (or millions) die. That’s why I have consistently championed the moral calling by Christian conservatives on AIDS and other issues because I think morality is more likely to serve as a legitimate and sustainable basis of mobilization. That said, people get concerned about these issues for multiple reasons. Security has every right to be part of the mix, but it’s also good to keep these lingering concerns about the links in perspective.

More on African militaries, AIDS, and the Security Threat

joshbusby — Fri, 02 Dec 2005 17:07:24 +0000

I posted a comment on TPM Cafe about the link between AIDS and U.S. National Security. Here it is:

The hollowing out of African militaries due to AIDS is a significant problem, and one that, as the author points out, bodes ill for peace-keeping operations as well as African solutions for African problems. What this means for American national security is another question. I think there may be a temptation to overstate what state failure and governance problems in Africa mean for the U.S.

I fear that advocates who use national security language do so because they think the issue won’t get enough attention otherwise. The striking thing about HIV/AIDS it seems to me is that moral concerns have been important drivers for this White House to do something significant about the disease. The question becomes, would they have done that much less if concerns about state failure and terrorism (and wanting to project a benign face of America) not been other important considerations? To put it bluntly, did it take 9/11 to get PEPFAR?

Given the mobilization of Christian conservatives on this issue, along with more liberal AIDS activists, I think this White House was prepared to do a lot already.

AIDS and African militaries

Nate — Fri, 02 Dec 2005 00:49:24 +0000

At TPM Cafe, Anne-Marie Slaughter posts
a note from a former student working in South Africa on AIDS
Prevention. Estimates suggest 23% of the South African military is HIV+
and that 7 of 10 deaths in the military are AIDS-related. This may make
it much harder for African militaries, the South African military in
particular, to play a role in resolving local problems and supporting
peacekeeping operations. The hollowing out of the military in
AIDS-wracked countries has also been documented by Peter Singer. The posts from some readers project a sort of hopelessness,
particularly given South Africa’s leadership’s puzzling antagonism
towards recognizing both the existence of the disease and viable
treatment strategies. While the scale of the tragedy is enormous, it
would be too easy to write off the entire continent as hopeless. It
would also be unseemly for a rich and generous nation like ours not to
even try.

The impact of the AIDS virus on African militaries is a very serious
problem. It is hard to tell if some of the reports of this overstate
the security implications because they think this is the only way to
get the outside world to care, as if appeals to international morality
will not induce rich donors to spend significant amounts of money. Are
we only be moved to act when we think it is in our national interest? I
think the evidence on HIV suggests the U.S. can be moved to care in the
absence of clear security incentives. We might think the recognition of
the problem of failed states moved President Bush to announce his
5-year, $15bn AIDS plan in his 2003 State of the Union address.
However, as a number of other analysts have demonstrated, Christian
conversatives, motivated by the affront to morality by a disease that
had claimed more than 20 million lives, brought President Bush and
other conservative Republican leaders on board. I recommend Chapter 14
in Greg Behrman’s book The Invisible People and Holly Burkhalter’s Foreign Affairs piece.

I’ll have more to say about a lecture I gave yesterday for World AIDS day.

AIDS/Famine Link in Africa

joshbusby — Fri, 01 Apr 2005 15:26:52 +0000

This 2003 paper by Alex de Waal and Alan Whiteside may give us a better appreciation for why Africa has hade more food security issues in recent years. (Hat tip: Becky). Here is the abstract:

Southern Africa is undergoing a food crisis of surprising scale and novelty. The familiar culprits of drought and mismanagement of national strategies are implicated. However, this crisis is distinct from conventional drought induced food shortages with respect to those vulnerable to starvation, and the course of impoverishment and recovery. We propose that these new aspects to the food crisis can be attributed largely to the HIV/AIDS epidemic in the region. We present evidence that we are facing a new variant famine. We have used frameworks drawn from famine theory to examine the implications. HIV/AIDS has created a new category of highly vulnerable households—namely, those with ill adults or those whose adults have died. The general burden of care in both AIDS-affected and non-AIDS-affected households has reduced the viability of farming livelihoods. The sensitivity of rural communities to external shocks such as drought has increased, and their resilience has declined. The prospects for a sharp decline into severe famine are increased, and possibilities for recovery reduced.

Up to 23% in South African Army have HIV/Aids

joshbusby — Tue, 15 Feb 2005 18:54:10 +0000

“Between 17 and 23 percent of SA National Defence Force members may be infected with HIV/Aids, Defence Minister Mosiuoa Lekota said on Tuesday.”

This official figure from the government has been bandied about to undermine previous reports from a report that said 89% of the military was HIV positive. That figure came from a self-selected group of soldiers who volunteered to be tested as part of a project that was sponsored with the U.S. Department of Defense on HIV/AIDS in the military.

Infection rates among members of the military are a concern for the security field in part because of the worry that efforts to forge regional peace-keeping units within Africa may be compromised. See the piece by Peter Singer I posted in the gems. An older piece by Harvard’s Stephen Peter Rosen looked at this in 1989, particularly with reference to the Cuban military.