Louise Mubanda Rasmussen

The Lazarus Effect of AIDS Treatment: Lessons Learned and Lives Saved

During the treatment decade of rolling out antiretroviral drugs (ARVs) in African clinics, new social meanings have been created, and they link local people living with HIV/AIDS to Western communities in new ways. The health of African “others” has taken a central, new, and perhaps quasi-religious role in Western societies. Working on behalf of humanitarian organizations to combat modern emergencies is the contemporary embodiment of an ideal, pure notion of “the good” that is not linked to “old religion” but mimics many of its dispositions and practices. This analysis is based on empirical data gathered during fieldwork as participants and observers in a Catholic AIDS treatment clinic and through interviews with service providers in Uganda. We use these data to think both creatively and systematically about the meanings and limitations of pastoral power and therapeutic citizenship.

The politics and anti-politics of social movements: Religion and AIDS in Africa

In 2012, roughly 23 million people in sub-Saharan Africa were infected with HIV, the virus that causes AIDS. Religious responses to the disease have ranged from condemnation of people with HIV to the development of innovative AIDS-related services. This article utilises insights from the social movement literature about collective identity, framing, resources, and opportunity structures to interrogate religious mobilisation against HIV/AIDS. It demonstrates that mobilisation cannot be divorced from factors such as state–civil society relations, Africas dependence on foreign aid, or the continents poverty. Religious HIV/AIDS activities must be analysed in a conceptual space between a civil society/politics approach and a service-provider/anti-politics framework. That is, religious mobilisation may at times seek to engage the public realm to shape policies, while at other times it may shun politics in its provision of services. Case studies that illustrate these themes and demonstrate the multi-faceted interactions between religion and HIV/AIDS are included.

“To donors, it's a program, but to us it's a ministry”: the effects of donor funding on a community-based Catholic HIV/AIDS initiative in Kampala

Combining social movement approaches to resource mobilization and collective identity, this article investigates the role of external material resources in shaping the direction of collective action against HIV/AIDS within the Kamwokya Christian Caring Community (KCCC), a Catholic community-based initiative in Kampala. From its origins in the late 1980s as a community of Christians providing “holistic care” to people living with HIV/AIDS, the KCCC has in the wake of increasing external funding been transformed into a professional development non-governmental organization (NGO). In the process, the ideals of holistic care have gradually been overshadowed by neo-liberal development rationalities and bio-political concerns. The article therefore argues that successfully mobilizing donor funding can have unintended consequences for the nature of religious collective action against HIV/AIDS.

Celebrity-led development organisations: the legitimating function of elite engagement

Abstract The past decade has seen a frontier open up in international development engagement with the entrance of new actors such as celebrity-led organisations. We explore how such organisations earn legitimacy with a focus on Madonna’s Raising Malawi and Ben Affleck’s Eastern Congo Initiative. The study draws from organisational materials, interviews, mainstream news coverage, and the texts of the celebrities themselves to investigate the construction of authenticity, credibility, and accountability. We find these organisations earn legitimacy and flourish rapidly amid supportive elite networks for funding, endorsements, and expertise. We argue that the ways in which celebrity-led organisations establish themselves as legitimate development actors illustrate broader dynamics of the machinery of development.

In the Name of Sustainability: Contradictory Effects of NGO-Driven Development in Malawi

It is a core principle in non-governmental organisation (NGO)-driven development that interventions must be ‘sustainable’. Individuals and communities are to be ‘empowered’ to take responsibility for their own development in ways that will eventually make donor funding redundant. On the basis of ethnographic fieldwork with NGOs supporting ‘orphans and vulnerable children’ in Malawi, this article explores the practices, social relations and contradictory effects that the vision of sustainability engenders. The article illustrates how the commitment to sustainability paradoxically produces practices that can only be sustained through continuous flows of donor funding. It argues that the persistence of sustainability as an organising principle is connected both to its self-confirming logic and to the ways in which practices of ‘sustainability’ shape the subjectivities of local brokers and come to constitute a central avenue for pursuing personal projects of development.AbstractUn des principes-clés du développement dicté par les ONG c’est que leurs interventions doivent être ‘durables’. Les individus et les communautés doivent être ‘habilités’ à se responsabiliser pour leur développement, afin qu’en futur le financement des donateurs ne soit plus nécessaire. Cet article est basé sur le travail sur le terrain d’une étude ethnographique avec des ONGs soutenant des ‘orphelins et enfants vulnérables’ au Malawi. On explore les pratiques, les relations sociales, et les effets contradictoires engendrés par la notion de durabilité. On illustre comment l’engagement envers la durabilité produit, paradoxalement, des pratiques qui ne sont durables qu’avec un financement soutenu de la part des donateurs. La persistance de la durabilité comme principe organisateur est lie soit à sa logique autonome, soit à la façon dans laquelle les pratiques durables modèlent les subjectivités de courtiers locaux, et constituent un des moyens principaux de développement individuel.

Celebrity Humanitarianism: The Ideology of Global Charity

that Pentecostalism empowers its adherents to ‘understand, describe and control their lifeworlds, as well as their efforts to gain access to resources, represent attempts at survival, rather than transformation or improvement in terms of improving their well-being or addressing wider inequalities’. In my view, this argument probably explains the persistence of many of the challenges confronting Africa today. Pentecostalism may not have all the ‘transformational’ attributes ascribed to it by this book. In effect, this book probably fails to provide the most sought-after answers for Africa’s development. However, the book is well researched and provides very insightful ethnographic perspectives into religion, development and social change in Africa. Other very important contributions of the book include the agencification of religion in development; a clear articulation of the influence of Pentecostalism to the agencification of ‘self’ in personal development and social progression; and the role of Pentecostalism in stimulation social change. The diverse ethnographic case studies provide good geographical coverage across Africa. The book is provocative and provides food for thought for development researchers and agencies interested in Africa’s development.