HIV/AIDS, Security, and the United States of America

This paper debates on how pandemics like HIV/AIDS have become an important security concern for many countries and especially the United States of America. While the focus here, is on this particular epidemic, which has shaken international politics since the 1980s, it takes a more generic approach to what measures states undertake when it comes to protecting their interests, their jurisdictive geo-spatial spaces and the people governed by them. The humanitarian side of it is of course acknowledged, but along with that comes state interests, which transcend humanitarian beliefs and ethics. The relationship between humanitarian ethics and security has been kept so ambiguous and blurred informal writings on the subject, that the various dimensions of security are often ignored by states. Often, under the pretext of economic growth and military expansion, the individual wellbeing of the people being governed is equated merely with the state’s interest in productivity. The stronger states, in their efforts to alleviate the weaker ones, customarily patronize the latter, thereby creating a wider gap and disparity, leading to further dependence