concern one or another individual facet of the pandemic’s effects upon a society (such as the effect of HIV/AIDS on unemployment
rates). Our purpose is to demonstrate how HIV/AIDS operates across various domains (demographic, economic, and governance) to
(a) destabilize states and (b) threaten their national security. In this context, it must be understood that any agent that directly threatens
to destroy a significant proportion of a state’s population constitutes a direct threat to that state’s national security. Given that the
HIV/AIDS epidemic is projected to take the lives of approximately 20 to 25 percent of the South African population over the next
decade, it is reasonable and prudent to consider that the epidemic constitutes a direct threat to the national security of the South
African state.
While South Africa is also beset with many other infectious diseases that promise to impede its economic development
(tuberculosis in particular), it is the HIV/AIDS epidemic that threatens to destabilize South Africa in the decades to come. For South
Africa, the security impact of the epidemic is already showing. From the civil service to the economy, South Africa’s political and
economic security has been compromised from the strain that the epidemic has placed on resources and manpower. The loss of
manpower will mean that South Africa’s capacity to maintain a regional hegemonic role will diminish in the short term, while in the
long term the impact on South Africa will amount to a human catastrophe unseen in South African history. The long- and short-term
political and economic stability of the entire southern African region will be jeopardized as South Africa becomes less capable of
choices available to the government of a state or to private, non-governmental entities (persons, groups, corporations) within the state.” This redefinition of
security is useful in that it includes non-military threats, such as the destruction of a state’s population by a pathogenic agent such as the human
immunodeficiency virus (HIV).
Convention