Abstract EN:

At the beginning of the years 2000, the United States of America launch a séries of negotiation for bilatéral trade agreements. The issue of intellectual property and of its impact on access to medicines, raised during previous multilatéral negotiations at the WTO, corne to the surface again, under the pressure of an AIDS épidémie still expending. Based on field work conducted in three countries, the United States of America, Morocco and Thailand, I propose a sociological analysis of the way health and access to medicines are taken into account in the context of the negotiations of Free Trade Agreements. Thèse negotiations, taken here as a stratégie site to study processes of the current globalization, are the scène of the expression of a conflict between defenders of access to medicines and promoters of intellectual property. The démonstration of the complexity of the interactions between social actors shows that the issue can not be reduced to the unequivocal imposition of norms and rules by the United States of America : it is on the contrary the result of power relations and influences, always embedded into spécifie contexts. The historicisation of the conflict and its analysis through the use of the tools provided by the sociology of social movements demonstrate that it reflects the deployment of two mirror non governmental collective actions aiming at opposite goals and looking at influencing the production of State's positions and politics. Beyond the purely materialistic dimension of the impossibility of populations in poor countries to access the medicines that they need, collective actions resort on moral motives to articulate politically their demands. A compétition between moral économies develops locally as well as globally ; it characterizes a contemporary way to do politics.