A rewarding engagement? The treatment action campaign and the politics of HIV/AIDS

The current spread of democracy has not enabled the poor to use rights to win equity, raising questions about whether the poor and weak call use liberal democratic freedoms to address inequality. An oft-cited model of success, however, is the Treatment Action Campaign (TAC)'s campaign to press the South African government into distributing anti-retroviral medication to people living with HIV/AIDS. This article finds that TAC's strategy of using the rights and rules of constitutional democracy to win gains may offer all exemplar for forms of collective action which call win substantive equality, but that the model remains of limited application.