Politics in the Corridor of Dying ─ AIDS Activism and Global Health Governance

FEW DISEASES have provoked as many wild moralistic leaps or stringent attempts to measure, classify, and define risk and treatment standards as AIDS. In Politics in the Corridor of Dying, Jennifer Chan documents the emergence of a diverse range of community-based, nongovernmental, and civil society groups engaged in patient-focused AIDS advocacy worldwide. She also critically evaluates the evolving role of these groups in challenging authoritative global health governance schemes put in place by what she describes as overcontrolling or sanctimonious governments, scientists, religious figures, journalists, educators, and corporations

Drawing on more than 100 interviews conducted across eighteen countries, the book covers a broad spectrum of contemporary sociopolitical issues in AIDS activism, including the criminalization of HIV transmission, the fight against "big pharma," and the politics of the President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief. Chan argues that AIDS activism disrupts four contemporary regimes of power---scientific monopoly, market fundamentalism, governance statism, and community control---by elevating alternative knowledge production and human rights

This multidisciplinary book makes specific policy recommendations for the future while revealing how AIDS activism around the world has achieved much more than increased funding, better treatment, and more open clinical trial access. By forcing controlling entities to democratize, activists have changed the balance of power for the better and helped advance permanent social change

"A deeply impressive work, one that will surely make an important contribution to the study of global AIDS activism, as well as to our understanding of the political dimensions of the HIV epidemic and of global health more broadly."---Richard G. Parker, Columbia University, Mailman School of Public Health

"An extraordinary compilation of evidence for the AIDS activist movement and how it has changed the rules not only in the power houses of science and pharmaceuticals but throughout the world in governance bodies and local communities to force authorities to recognize that AIDS care and prevention are human rights issues."---Mary Guinan, University of Nevada, Las Vegas

Jennifer Chan is an associate professor in the Institute for Gender, Race, Sexuality, and Social Justice at the University of British Columbia. She is the editor ofAnother Japan Is Possible: New Social Movements and Global Citizenship Education and the author ofGender and Human Rights Politics in Japan: Global Norms and Domestic Networks.