Q1: Alex de Waal

Q1: Can pressure from citizens ever add a foreign policy issue to the list of traditional national interests? Or can citizens only impact the sense of urgency around an issue that was already a traditional national interest to start with?

Alex de Waal:

Let me briefly look at two recent examples of how citizens’ activism put a new international issue on the agenda and shaped foreign policies. One is the landmines campaign, the second is HIV/AIDS.

When the idea of banning landmines was first mooted in 1990, it was on no-one’s horizon. It was taken up by a network of existing NGOs, plus a couple of newly-established land mine action NGOs, which appealed to a broad constituency. They made effective alliances with some leaders of medium-sized nations (e.g. Canada) and gained advocates in larger states (e.g. the U.S.) and changed a global norm.

As a foreign policy issue, the ban on anti-personnel landmines came from nowhere. It converged with and built upon other more established foreign policy concerns and practices. But there is no doubt that citizens’ activism raised the issue, defined it and mobilized sufficient pressure for it to meet certain goals, including the global ban on anti-personnel mines and increased international funding for landmine clearance efforts.

The second example is global HIV/AIDS activism. Before the 1980s, HIV/AIDS was not a foreign policy concern because there was no epidemic. But in a wider sense, health had never been a major foreign policy preoccupation for western countries, save in the defensive manner that quarantine and other restrictive measures were imposed on migrants, borders and trade routes. In the 1990s, international HIV/AIDS activism-a direct offspring from domestic U.S. AIDS activism spearheaded by the gay community-achieved something quite remarkable. First, it put health in general and AIDS in particular on the foreign policy and development agenda. This unlocked undreamed-of resources. Second, for the first time in history, the international response to an infectious disease-and moreover a lethal sexually-transmitted disease-has protected and promoted human rights, rather than being a pretext for restriction on civil liberties. HIV/AIDS set a new paradigm for involving civil society in health policymaking and for putting human rights at the center of responses.

The framing of HIV/AIDS as a global issue tuned into an emergent foreign policy concern of the U.S. government.  The State Failure Task Force report (1996) found that the health status of a population was one of the most powerful statistical indicators of the likelihood of state failure. (Alone among the foreign affairs and intelligence establishment, demographers had seen the signs of collapse in the USSR in the 1980s, in the form of rising infant mortality rates.) U.S. concern with state failure contributed to the National Intelligence Council report on the infectious disease threat (1999), the UN Security Council debate on HIV/AIDS as a threat to international peace and security (2000) and the creation of the President’s Emergency Fund for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR)-the largest ever U.S. commitment to international health-in 2003.

The ability of the HIV/AIDS issue to resonate with U.S. government policy agendas is a double-edged sword. Without doubt it spurred an initiative that unlocked immense resources. But the price of success was that the Bush Administration also used PEPFAR to pursue certain ideological agendas such as abstinence-only HIV prevention programs.

Alex de Waal – is a program director at the Social Science Research Council, engaged in projects on HIV/AIDS and Social Transformation and on Emergencies and Humanitarian Action. He is editor of the blog Making Sense of Darfur