State-Sponsored Activism

State-Sponsored Activism proposes a new model of state-society relations, and explains how social movements can survive over time without falling prey to co-optation. For a broad audience of students, scholars, and policymakers, this is a definitive text for those interested in learning about Brazil's movement to fight HIV/AIDS.

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In State-Sponsored Activism, Rich explores AIDS policy in Brazil as a lens to offer new insight into state-society relations in democratic and post-neoliberal Latin America. In contrast to the dominant view that these dual transitions produced an atomized civil society and an impenetrable technocratic state, Rich finds a new model of interest politics, driven by previously marginalized state and societal actors. Through a rich examination of the Brazilian AIDS movement, one of the most influential movements in twenty-first century Latin America, this book traces the construction of a powerful new advocacy coalition between activist bureaucrats and bureaucratized activists. In so doing, State-Sponsored Activism illustrates a model whereby corporatism - active government involvement in civic mobilization - has persisted in contemporary Latin America, with important implications for representation and policymaking.