Politics & Power Quote by Paul Farmer

“Last great hopes” lands like both a rallying cry and an indictment. Paul Farmer isn’t just praising cross-border HIV partnerships; he’s quietly naming the disaster that makes them necessary: a world where the gap between who gets to live and who is allowed to die is no longer an accident, but an operating system.

The phrase “strategic alliances” is doing double duty. It borrows the language of geopolitics and business - arenas that usually protect national interest and capital - and flips it toward care. Farmer understood that charity language can be sentimental and politically harmless; strategy implies power, leverage, logistics, and durability. Treating HIV among “the world’s poor” isn’t framed as a niche humanitarian project but as a stress test for whether global institutions can still coordinate around human need rather than border control.

The subtext is that solidarity has become scarce. He situates the work “across a widening divide,” a line that compresses decades of structural adjustment, patent regimes, and unequal health systems into one image: distance expanding between rich and poor, North and South, insured and disposable. HIV, historically stigmatized and politicized, becomes the moral and practical battlefield where this divide is most visible.

Context matters: Farmer’s career with Partners In Health grew out of the AIDS crisis and the fight to prove that “impossible” treatments could be delivered in places like rural Haiti. The quote reads as hard-won optimism - but not naive. It suggests that global health is one of the few remaining arenas where people still try, concretely, to build a politics of mutual obligation in a time increasingly organized around retreat.