ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the historical development of multilateral efforts in global health governance to frame HIV/AIDS as a security issue to be included on national and international political agendas. Until the Industrial Revolution of the 19th century, state-centered interventions to limit the spread and impact of disease focused mostly on isolated epidemic outbreaks. This was the case with the quarantining of people and goods suspected of carrying infectious disease, a practice that originated in the Port of Venice during the plague epidemics of the 14th century. Securitization was formally problematized in Political Science discourse in the 1990s, when Ole Wæver, Barry Buzan, and other members of the so-called Copenhagen School coined the term to advance discourse regarding security “beyond a focus on the nation-state and on the provision or analysis of military security issues only”. AIDS only became a biomedical issue in the 1980s, and then only appeared on the global public agenda in the 1990s.
