'Alternatives to Development' and Acute Dependency: HIV/AIDS as a Blind Spot of Post-Development Theory?

Abstract

AIDS control in Tanzania is nearly entirely donor-funded. The fact that an increasing share of the country’s population directly depends on foreign aid for survival raises dependency concerns with unprecedented acuteness. Based on fieldwork conducted between 2007 and 2009, this article confronts post-development theorists’ calls to ‘end aid’ with the Tanzanian reality. It argues that HIV/AIDS poses a serious challenge to post-development thought. While an exclusively humanitarian focus on the sole preservation of life makes radical critique of aid impossible, genuinely emancipatory critical theory must grapple with, rather than shy away from, the contradictions and tensions that arise from its confrontation with empirical situations where ‘bare life’ is immediately at stake for millions of people.