ABSTRACT
The HIV/AIDS epidemic has challenged, in complex ways, the normative boundaries of the Westphalian governance architecture. It also has challenged the development orthodoxy as it relates to contemporary relations between Africa and the rest of the world. In little over a decade, the HIV/AIDS epidemic has oscillated within a tripartite multilateral governance structure, first as a programme within the World Health Organisation (the Global Programme on AIDS). Second, its governance shifted to a joint venture of nine United Nations system organisations under the Joint United Nations Programme on HIV/AIDS (UNAIDS). Third, the global governance of the epidemic shifted to a context which included private-public sector partnerships through the Global Fund to Fight HIV/AIDS, Tuberculosis and
Malaria.4 Despite these multilateral initiatives, the global governance of HIV/AIDS in the early twenty-first century is in a state of crisis. Applied to the perceived or actual high prevalence of the epidemic in Africa, the Westphalian governance architecture raises conundrums in postcolonial African development discourse. While Scholars of international law, global health, development experts, multilateral organisations, and civil society activists have explored the global HIV/AIDS crisis from a variety of perspectives: human security, development, and human rights. It appears, as Farmer put it, that ‘our response to AIDS has so far been a failure’.5
