The fight against the HIV/AIDS epidemic between global health and national specificities: Poster campaigns in Vietnam

Since the mid-1980s, policies to fight the HIV/AIDS epidemic have been marked by increasing internationalization. In Vietnam, they were linked to the policy of “social evils” (tệ nạn xã hội) until a radical change occurred in the early 2000s. This period was marked by a rapid increase in HIV prevalence, and the Communist Party in power and the state intensified the fight against the epidemic. In accordance with international standards, a greater social participation of people living with HIV and their families has been encouraged. These successive policy approaches are visible in poster campaigns in public spaces. Our semiological analysis of forty-three of these posters shows that the two orientations, the repressive approach followed by the more participatory one, are associated with different visual languages. Posters use international codes but also make reference to the specific local culture. Messages from different periods of the fight against the epidemic coexist in the public space, making visible the radical change in the successive public policies but maintaining a coherence in the visual field. The contradictions and divergences resulting from this visual polyphony are symptomatic of a tension between two trends characteristic of policy transfers in Vietnam: on the one hand, they witness a concern for economic and political integration in a constrained international context, on the other hand they express a desire to assert national sovereignty. These contrasting messages correspond to a general policy orientation that conditions the support provided by multilateral and bilateral agencies while maintaining idiosyncrasies.