Among the many outrageous utterances of the Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro is one from a speech in the 2018 campaign, where he said that he would ‘put an end to all forms of activism’ in the country. At the time – and just like their counterparts in the United States and the United Kingdom did with Trump and Brexit – many in Brazil sought to downplay the significance of Bolsonaro's words. Three years on, Brazil finds itself in a policy chaos laid bare by the Covid-19 pandemic and over 600,000 dead.

Jessica Rich's book on the making of Brazil's AIDS policy since the 1980s offers insights into the links between current problems and Bolsonaro's promise to ‘put an end to activism’. The book addresses the question ‘why was the Brazilian anti-AIDS movement able to endure and expand over time?’, which happened in the absence of conditions deemed necessary in social movements literature (i.e. grievances, resources/funds and political opportunities/alliances) and in spite of Brazil's tortuous development path, where democratisation and the adoption of a progressive Constitution was followed by a neoliberal decade (see the introduction and Chapters 1 and 2).

Rich argues that the success of AIDS activists was due to a unique nexus between the movement and the state or, to be more precise, bureaucrats. Bureaucrats provided the social movement with resources and opportunities to access the state apparatus and contribute to shaping Brazil's AIDS policy, which the movement, in turn, used to build strength and continue to demand further policy changes (pp. 152–3). Sponsorship of the social movement was strategic to bureaucrats too: they had to navigate a fragmented state, where opposition could come from the legislature, other agencies and other levels of government (pp. 154–6). One source of opposition, for example, was religious groups, which were averse to public-health-based solutions involving campaigns to promote safer sex or attempts to make disposable needles available to drug users (p. 106). In this context, building ties with social movements could help bureaucrats gain leverage and prevail in their own ‘palace wars’.

Rich's core finding is encapsulated in the concept of ‘civic corporatism’, which she argues also offers a contribution to studies of state–society relations and studies of social policy change/continuity. An example given is the Brazilian government breaking patents to enable access to anti-retroviral medications (AVRs). Companies producing these AVRs were based in the United States, which has considerable economic and political power over Brazil. One way for the Brazilian government to gain leverage was to bring non-governmental organisations (NGOs) and international non-governmental organisations (INGOs) on board, even paying for travel expenses to intergovernmental negotiation meetings. The work of these activists gave a societal face to the issue, drew attention from the press and was considered ‘key’ to the success of Brazil's programme (p. 108).

Rich's work also deserves praise for her methodology which, unfortunately, only had a couple of pages dedicated to it (pp. 17–20). But these are enough to show the reader that she truly engaged with ‘the field’, navigating the complexities of Brazil's public and civil society sectors. While much area studies work is done with a handful of elite informants, Rich's research entailed geographic and organisational diversity, leading to an output that is both intellectually solid and politically responsible.

All in all, Rich's account adds to a growing line of studies that highlight the points of contact between the state and society, which are often assumed to be separate spheres. In the literature on law and social change, for example, recent research also points to ties between bureaucrats and activists as a key explainer of how rights become real (Charles R. Epp, Making Rights Real: Activists, Bureaucrats, and the Creation of the Legalistic State, University of Chicago Press, 2010). But the roots of this thinking can be found in older social theory. Marx, for example, warned that ‘the state’ was but a vehicle for societal interests (of the bourgeoisie). Our tendency to reify the state and to think of it as separate from society or the economy only makes these connections less visible and, accordingly, more difficult to transform. Rich's book comes as a timely reminder of the true nature of the state–society nexus.

This is where Bolsonaro's promise to ‘put an end to activism’ raises important questions for Rich and others to respond to. The Bolsonaro programme has meant a twofold attack on the kind of state–society relationships unveiled by Rich. For one, Bolsonaro has cut the ties between bureaucrats and social movements which were growing in other areas beyond AIDS – although not always with the same success (see, for example, Leonardo Avritzer, The Two Faces of Institutional Innovation: Promises and Limits of Democratic Participation in Latin America, Edward Elgar, 2017). This is happening, for instance, where Bolsonaro dismantled the structure of public policy councils and other participatory institutions, which gave social movements the space that, in Rich's account, was so central for the AIDS movement to prosper. It is also happening when Bolsonaro creates an atmosphere of fear, which cows bureaucrats out of human-rights work, as evidenced in a recent study (Michelle Morais de Sa e Silva, ‘Beyond Ordinary Policy Change: Authoritarian Policy Dismantling in Brazil’, SciELO Preprints, 2021). Bolsonaro has also fostered ties between the state and other civil society forces – big landowners, religious organisations, and supporters of military power and police violence. Their agenda is the dismantling of the transformative promises of the 1988 Constitution upon which Brazil's new republic rests. To make things worse, the kind of institutional space that bureaucrats once gave to AIDS activists may be no longer needed when the mood in politics and policy can be shifted after a Twitter storm and when coalitions and identities can be forged in the darkness of WhatsApp groups and fake news.

Will Bolsonaro and his radical bases build sustainable policies and movements like their predecessors in the fight against AIDS did? Or will others in the state and civil society be able to resist these potential changes and protect the Constitution? Rich's book, by its very design – which neither focused on, nor anticipated Brazil's far-right turn – enables us to raise questions of the contingencies in the state–society nexus more consciously and, for this very reason, is a source we should all make time to consult in these exhausting times of viruses and parasites.