ABSTRACT
This chapter demonstrates that despite the exceptionalism of international mobilisation against AIDS in Africa, most public policies were subject to the same matrix – one constituted by international organisations; international, national and local non-governmental organisations; and bi- and multilateral development agencies. Political science has in fact collaborated with sociology, and for such a long time that in the United States it has generated a specific subfield: political sociology. The issue of access to new drugs heightened the critical turn. Whether British, North American, or French, these studies increasingly involved a double radical critique: that of public health as a discipline and, more generally, of “politics”, local and international. In fact, the contradiction arising from the relative absence of interest groups able to compete with the biomedical sector and transform AIDS in Africa into a political issue changed somewhat after the mid-1990s.
