Risking Lives: AIDS, Security and Three Concepts of Risk (original) (raw)

This article analyses the conjunctures of risk and security that have recently emerged in the securitization of HIV/AIDS. Although these partially corroborate Ulrich Beck's notion of risk society, important elements of the securitization of HIV/AIDS resist his understanding of risk as a 'danger of modernization'. The article therefore turns to François Ewald's alternative theorization of risk as a 'neologism of insurance', and shows that insurance is a risk-based security practice widely used to manage the welfare of populations. Such a biopolitical approach to risk is also valuable for analysing the securitization of HIV/AIDS, which, even though it is unfolding outside the domain of insurance, similarly draws upon multiple risk categories ('security risks', 'risk groups' and 'risk factors') in efforts to improve the collective health of populations. Analysed through a wider concept of risk as a 'biopolitical rationality', the conjuncture of risk and security in the securitization of HIV/AIDS thus emerges as a principal site where the institutions of sovereign power in international relations are being absorbed and integrated within a wider biopolitical economy of power. Keywords AIDS • biopolitics • risk • security • UNAIDS G LOBAL HEALTH ISSUES are a frequently overlooked area of international relations around which the languages of risk and security have recently converged, especially in the case of the AIDS pandemic. The latter is not the first international issue to witness such a convergence. Nor is the application of risk categories to the AIDS pandemic novel in and of itself, as national and international policy frameworks for addressing the disease have long been infused with the language of risk. What has changed over the past couple of years, however, is that these risk-based frameworks have also begun to deliberately draw upon the language of international security. This 'securitization' of HIV/AIDS was inaugurated symbolically on 10 January 2000, when the United Nations Security Council temporarily abandoned its longstanding concern with regulating the deployment of