Securitizing the Epidemic: Ideological Adaptations and Illiberal Meanings – Vlad Kravtsov

Abstract

This chapter explores how, why, and with what consequences relevant health actors securitize HIV/AIDS. It proposes that key actors move to protect their contracts with the autocratic principal. They interpret Putin’s illiberal ideological frameworks as a mandate to find and eradicate ontological threats to the country instead of eliminating public health crises. Each empirical section of this chapter delineates the sequence of events, from massive corporate vulnerability crises aggravated by the inability to show unequivocally positive health outcomes of agents’ work to the incremental construction of agency-friendly and exclusively proper knowledge regarding the epidemic. Russian federal narcotic agency, the Ministry of Health, and the Russian Orthodox Church are at the center of my investigation.