Saving Lives in Africa: AIDS Treatment, Religion and the Politics of Life

By Louise Mubanda Rasmussen

In the last decade, access to AIDS treatment has rapidly increased across Sub-Saharan Africa. Saving Africans with AIDS medicine has come to represent the "best of our international development efforts." But what are the unintended effects and local implications of this life-saving project? What happens when the humanitarian imperative to alleviate suffering is implemented through local organisations in landscapes characterized by political and social inequality?

This book focuses on local Catholic organisations in Uganda, examining how the employees and volunteers in these organisations mediate and translate the medical and governance technologies of AIDS treatment. This analysis takes us into "the engine room" of how a localized form of Global AIDS treatment takes shape. It charts how Catholic ideals and practices are negotiated with the logic of individual choice and responsibility.

The book shows how Global AIDS treatment contributes to the local production of new inequalities. The way in which the numbers of "saved lives" serve to legitimize the provision of AIDS treatment, while glossing over the continued importance of social, economic and gendered inequalities, illustrates one of the central disconnections of development and humanitarian practice today: the contradiction between the increasingly positive and simplified ways in which development organisations market their achievements and the persistent difficulties they face in fundamentally addressing the structural causes of poverty.

The book will be of interest to students and scholars in fields such as Global Health, African Studies, International Development Studies, medical anthropology, as well as development practitioners and policy makers.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1138672416
• ISBN13: 9781138672413
• Release Date: January 2026
• Publisher: Routledge
• Length: 160 Pages