Critical perspectives on the 'end of AIDS'

This special symposium critically examines optimistic promises about an imminent 'end of AIDS,' currently circulating in global health discourse and policy. We aim not simply to interrogate the discourse surrounding calls to end AIDS, but to also explore the broader practices, contexts, and policy landscapes that have transformed the global HIV response during the fourth decade of the epidemic and allowed this discourse to gain such political traction. In this introduction we preview the collection's five substantive papers, which delve beneath the 'end of AIDS' rhetoric, bringing greater realism as well as resolve together with empirical evidence about the state of efforts to end AIDS in diverse locations and populations. Taken together, these papers critique not the hope that one day AIDS may come to an end, but the means by which current policy expects to arrive at such ends, particularly in the absence of realistic, sustained commitments to extending treatment, prevention, and broader support in highly under-resourced places and populations.