Paper short abstract:

Usually described as the most global disease of all times, HIV/AIDS has often been dealt through international public health programmes. How and with what consequences do global anti-AIDS strategies entwine with personal histories, local networks and national institutions and regulations?

Paper long abstract:

Over the past two decades, global AIDS fight has been mostly dealt through internationally coordinated programmes. A thick network of anti-AIDS initiatives have thus spread across the globe, causing a set of allegedly universal principles of empowerment and involvement of HIV afflicted populations - as well as the funds to realize them - to drop from national parliaments, supranational funding agencies and private philanthropic foundations in the West into tiny locales in the South and the East of the world. Passing through the filter of national legislations and institutions, these moneys and ideas hit the grassroots level, conveying an unprecedented amount of resources into the support of thousands little community-based-organizations and small NGOs run by HIV-positive people. In the wake of these facts, a world of opportunities opened up for before widely marginalized populations, endowing them with attention, ambitions, recognition, job and travelling opportunities. Meanwhile, a concurrent set of discourses, connections, tensions and open jealousies have come surrounding the implementation of "bottom up" strategies to confront with AIDS.

Based on a long-term fieldwork among communities of HIV positive heroine users in Southern China, this paper explores the generative power of global anti-AIDS programmes in the context of their implementation. By looking at how internationally funded grassroots public health programmes interweaves with personal histories, state's regulations and institutions, drugs and medical technologies as well as with new narratives of disease and drug abuse, the author wishes here to contribute to the widening of the current anthropological perspective over the transformative capacity of HIV into society.