General Tsadkan Gebretensae Bayre is head of Center for Policy Research and Dialog in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia.

Roxanne Bazergan is the AIDS policy adviser for the UN Department of Peacekeeping Operations at headquarters in New York, previously on secondment from UNAIDS. She is responsible for developing the Department’s policy on HIV and peacekeeping, guiding its strategic response and coordinating and assessing field programmes. She has conducted technical assistance missions to a number of operations including: UNAMSIL (Sierra Leone), MINURSO (Haiti), MONUC (Congo), UNMIS (Sudan), ONUB (Burundi), ONUCI (Côte d’Ivoire) and UNMIK (Kosovo). Ms Bazergan is a member of the inter-agency working on disarmament, demobilization and reintegration (DDR) and was the lead drafter on UN guidance on integrating HIV concerns in DDR programmes, piloting the guidance in Sudan and Côte d’Ivoire. Before joining the UN in 2003, Ms Bazergan was a research fellow with the Centre for Defence Studies, King’s College, London where she designed and led a project analysing the impact of HIV/AIDS on militaries and on peacekeeping operations. Ms Bazergan carried out extensive field research on HIV/AIDS policies in UNAMSIL, presenting her findings at the XIV International AIDS Conference in Barcelona, Spain. She was also member of the UNAIDS Steering Committee on HIV/AIDS as a human-security issue.

• Obtaining reliable data for HIV prevalence and infection patterns in armies is extraordinarily difficult and it is unlikely that ASCI will be able to obtain significant additional military datasets additional to those already available to researchers. However, we shall continue to seek out such data wherever possible.
• The principal research activity for this cluster will be to catalogue how armies are responding to the challenge of HIV/AIDS. This will require research in breadth and depth. The broad research approach is to compile information on programmes and policies with respect to HIV/AIDS across a large number of armies, principally in Africa and Asia. The research agenda will be framed by the analysis of the drivers of prevalence and the determinants of effective policy. Specific questions to be investigated will include:
  1. Testing policies, including testing on initial recruitment and on promotion, and whether acceptance, training and promotion policies are conditional 6 on a negative test, and policies for dealing with individuals who test positive
  2. Prevention policies, including awareness and condom use practices
  3. Treatment policies, including whether military medical practices are consistent with national civilian policies and are integrated with them, and the related question of how the financial burdens of treatment are shared
  4. Whether and how policies with respect to civil-military relations, troop rotation and deployment practices, etc., have been (re-)designed with HIV/AIDS in consideration
  5. Policies with regard to female members of the military
  6. HIV/AIDS programmes relating to the demobilization of soldiers, both routinely as they retire from the army and as part of DDR and military restructuring programmes, with special attention paid to former rebel combatants, and women and children associated with armed groups
  7. The extent to which HIV/AIDS is considered an issue for the medical corps and the extent to which it is a question for the command; and linked to this, whether the AIDS programmes focus on individual factors (knowledge, attitude, behaviour) or whether wider questions of command responsibility and institutional culture are addressed
  8. The incorporation of HIV/AIDS concerns into SSR policies and programmes
  9. The extent to which the military can be a driver of HIV among the general population.
• This research cannot be undertaken by questionnaire. What it requires is a well- placed individual who is able to obtain the relevant information through careful inquiry, including obtaining the relevant documents, interviewing the responsible individuals, and examining how practice may vary. In turn, obtaining this level of cooperation requires a collaborative relationship with the military in question.
• Supplementary to this are the programmes and policies of peacekeeping forces, including the African Union. ASCI researchers enjoy excellent access to the AU peacekeeping forces, especially in Darfur, Sudan, and will be able to monitor how programmes and policies are implemented in the field. Work in other peacekeeping missions will also be considered. It is important to note that peacekeeping missions typically include a substantial number of civilian police officers, raising issues about HIV/AIDS and policing.
• The in-depth research aims to flesh out what these programmes and practices actually mean in detail, by focusing on a few selected militaries. Detailed examination of how policies and programmes are translated into practice will be possible only in militaries in which there are senior individuals who already have, or can quickly gain, a sound working relationship with mutual confidence with ASCI investigators. Possible cases include Ethiopia, India, Malawi, Rwanda, Russia, Senegal, South Africa, Southern Sudan (SPLA) and Thailand, though it is hoped that at least one more Asian military will be 7 ready to participate. Cases of DDR appropriate for investigation include Burundi and DRC.
• The police are much-neglected in research on HIV/AIDS. The police, along with other uniformed services such as paramilitary forces, customs and immigration, coastguard and prison warders, should not be treated simply as poor relations of the military. While some of their internal institutional issues to do with how to manage HIV/AIDS are similar to those of the military (and indeed other institutions), other issues are peculiar to the police and law-enforcement agencies. The police are in the front line of dealing with key groups that are vulnerable to high levels of HIV, including commercial sex workers, trafficked women and children, children living and working on the streets, detainees, injecting drug users, illegal immigrants, and stigmatized groups such as gay men. These issues arise both for national police forces and for civilian police contingents within peacekeeping forces. How the police respond to these groups is a critical determinant of whether or not it is possible to mount effective HIV/AIDS programmes among these difficult-to-reach groups that are often on the margins of society or are stigmatized and criminalized.
• The proposed research includes both a survey of the formal policies and programmes of various police forces with respect to criminal and civil laws relevant to these groups and their activities (e.g., whether prostitution is legal, whether harm reduction schemes are in place) and also in-depth case studies of how particular police forces implement policy.

Research Projects

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