^aSaint Michael's College, One Winooski Park, Colchester, Vermont 05439, USA. E-mail: mbosia@smcvt.edu

Abstract

The HIV/AIDS pandemic has had a devastating impact, challenged the capabilities of state actors, and empowered a new transnational movement. While the various phenomena linked to the disease too often have been overlooked by American political science, French scholars have responded to the politics of AIDS as it related to contestation over the direction of the state and as it has yielded new opportunities for engaged theory building and empirical exploration.