The AIDS epidemic in sub-Sahara Africa has been perceived as a threat to security. The panel aims to explore the relationship between HIV/AIDS and issues of human security from an interdisciplinary perspective and to illustrate this relationship by drawing on case studies.
The AIDS epidemic in sub-Sahara Africa has been perceived as a threat to security – globally as well as on national, local and individual levels: as HIV infection rates continue to rise the AIDS crisis weakens economies; leads to the depletion of the workforce; impoverishes families and communities; leads to shortages in food supplies; and finally creates a generation of orphans which lacks social as well as educational support and which even is predicted to turn into criminals roaming the streets of African towns.
This panel aims to explore the relationship between HIV/AIDS and issues of human security from an interdisciplinary perspective and to illustrate this relationship by drawing on case material from sub-Sahara Africa. On the one hand, we want to explore the empirical ground of the developments mentioned above: Have high infection rates among army members or among state employees endangered people`s security? Has the rising number of orphans caused an increase in criminality rates? On the other hand, we intend to find out what strategies states, communities, families and individuals have developed in order to cope with different kinds of human insecurity: How have households come to deal with the illnesses and deaths of numerous people? How do communities and state organs respond to cases of deliberate HIV-infections?
Contributions to the panel should bring into play the shift in the security discourse that has been relocated from its emphasis on social security based on national interest to human security as the security of the people.
The Commission on Human Right Report affirmed that, "People's security around the world is interlinked - as today's global flows…highlight." Poverty, ill health and conflict are underscored as the greatest challenges to human security in the new millennium. No nation/location is an island as global cooperation enhances interdependence and "externalities" such as AIDS can have ripple effects trans-nationally. The current depth and spread of the AIDS pandemic call for urgent concerted frameworks and methodologies. The paradigm shift from social to human security is timely especially in Sub-Saharan Africa. UNDP's 2004 Human Development Index shows a reversal in human development and AIDS as the greatest indicator, "a global crisis with impacts that will be felt for decades to come." It is a contemporary apocalypse, a scourge "more debilitating than war." It threatens current and future social stability and dignity.
In Nigeria as in many Sub- Saharan African nations, a more inclusive multivalent approach is desirable since the impact of biomedical, demographic approaches and mainstream models is limited. This paper revisits the interface between the complexity of dynamics including moral, socio-cultural attitude to sexuality, feminisation of poverty, political lethargy, knowledge gaps and the female face of AIDS
The number of children that are orphaned by AIDS is increasing in the countries of sub-Saharan Africa. The figure of those African AIDS orphans (under the age of 15 years) is estimated to increase from the current number of 11 million to 20 million within the next seven years. By that time, 15 to 25 per cent of the children in a dozen African countries will be orphans. An increasing number of those children will be growing up beyond traditional extended family networks (as their capacity is exhausted). But apart from catastrophic scenarios, the phenomena of crisis also paves the way for social innovations, which are likely to be overlooked. Out of the AIDS crisis, completely new social forms are arising which differ fundamentally from the vernacular organisational mechanisms of southern African societies that were based on the authority of the elders and on kinship. Thus, in the middle of the crisis, with its cruel impacts on local communities, another reverse side to the catastrophe can be observed. This formation of structures which have been missing so far in civil society, the flourishing and mushrooming of local social initiatives on a grassroots level, opens up new doors to strengthen communities and individuals to cope with and to mitigate the impacts of AIDS.
Eighteen years of war have excluded Northern Uganda from experiencing the exemplary reduction in HIV prevalence witnessed in the rest of the country. While HIV prevalence has plummeted to 4.1% overall in Uganda, official estimates demonstrate that the HIV rate in Northern Uganda has remained near 12%, if not higher, since 1998. The entanglement of HIV and insecurity in Northern Uganda exemplifies a bi-directional, inverse relationship between the level of security and the prevalence of HIV. Consequences of the war –displacement of 1.6 million people into Internally Displaced Peoples (IDP) camps, twenty-five thousand mostly child “night commuters” walking unaccompanied into the relative safety of municipalities every night, rape of women by Ugandan soldiers, lack of economic livelihoods, a dentrimental impact upon mental health, prostitution of young girls, and the employment of child soldiers by the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) insurgency movement – have, indeed, created an insecure social climate ripe for the spread of HIV. Conversely, HIV continuously destablizes society in Northern Uganda by contributing to deepened insecurity through the disruption of social networks and parental guidance, the collapse of economic infrastructure, and the straining of healthcare systems.
HIV/AIDS is a symptom of prior human insecurity (as much as it can be a subsequent cause), and in particular where behaviour is influenced by (genderised) alcohol or drug consumption, where misconceptions and stigma are prevalent and where disease may be historically and culturally linked with beliefs such as witchcraft. That is, the phrase 'threat to human security' implies a prior state of 'security' which it could be argued is often precarious at best, but an understanding o f which, including its institutional contexts, is essential if the impact of HIV/AIDS is itself to be understood. This also has implications for policy based upon rational choice models of human behaviour.
In the context of processes of globalization – which comprise (partial) market integration, an integration into modern communication systems like mobile phones and radio/TV as well as processes of democratic transition – the power and communication structures within local communities in Southern Africa are changing radically. These processes of societal transformation articulate in the agency of local actors in the context of HIV/AIDS. Three focal-groups should be considered:
- Indigenous authorities in tendency have partially lost their legitimate power. In order to find a new legitimate basis they feel the need to adopt to “modern” messages (like e.g. the appeal to discuss the HIV/AIDS-problem openly). At the same time they feel still bound to indigenous rules of handling social matters – and find themselves in a dilemma.
- Youth has lost its social role of obedience and submission. Faced with new responsibilities and some autonomy within the communities the young generation in the communities must be considered not only as “highly vulnerable” – but as “decisive actors” within the context of HIV/AIDS.
- The political agenda towards democratic decentralization has not jet been realized in the communities in a way that would accept “ownership” with respect to HIV/AIDS initiatives. This is due, one the one hand, to differing concepts of HIV/AIDS and “development” and, on the other hand, the lack of democratic transparency.