Journal of Human Rights 119 It is notable that UNHCR presently views statelessness as qualitatively different from refugee situations in the sense that a campaign by the agency to eradicate refugeedom is inconceivable. Perhaps this is testimony to the fact that statelessness is still viewed as a largely legal issue, whereas refugee situations are understood to be inevitable due to political disputes—or, rather, that the UNHCR would not want to render itself obsolete by eradicating its primary mandate responsibility. There are further considerations relating to the fact that the eradication target for statelessness is arguably ambitious to the point of being unrealistic and unachievable. We must ask ourselves whether it undermines the message if a time-bound campaign fails to reach its goal, or to even come anywhere close to it. Indeed, in his critique of charitable sector actors, Martin Kirk (2012) stated: There is a vast gulf between what NGOs say they are about, how they sell that mission to the public, and what their strategies and capabilities can actually achieve. In other words, they routinely pin their ambitions far higher than they can reach, yet never acknowledge this either to the public or even to themselves. In fact, they use the scale of their ambition to attract public support, while actively maintaining a blindness to their inability to deliver their stated goals. This tendency is at best misguided and counterproductive, at worst cynical and dishonest. (p. 246) In the case of MPH, months of unprecedented attention to the issue of world poverty, accompanied by massive media hype and innovative use of promotional white campaign wristbands (Ward, 2005), proved anticlimactic, with the ultimate failure to positively alter the global economic landscape. The ambition of MPH to “end poverty” by raising public awareness alone has been critiqued for naïvely ignoring the structural political inequalities driving, and sustaining, wealth inequality (Kettle, 2005). Meanwhile, the Ending AIDS initiative arguably had more cause to be ambitious, given that the international community had already met the MDG targets for HIV/AIDS. Indeed, UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon stated, “This milestone [of attaining the MDG targets related to AIDS] shows that, together, we can set ambitious, even aspirational, goals, achieve them and then reach for more. Indeed, a new objective is now before us: ending the AIDS epidemic by 2030” (UNAIDS, 2015, p. 13). The initiative was then structured around submilestones based on scientific modeling in which ultimate AIDS eradication (by 2030) was premised on the 90-90-90 plan adopted in 2014: This projected a scale-up of treatment whereby, by 2020, 90% of those living with HIV should be diagnosed (and know their status); of those diagnosed, 90% should be on antiretroviral therapy (ART); and of those on ART, 90% should have viral suppression (undetectable status; see UNAIDS, 2014). Despite the arguably more evidence-based design and more attainable goals of this campaign, commentators have questioned the benefit or necessity to set an end date for eradication at all: There is no reason to doubt that reinstituting a UNAIDS program with the goal of increasing ART distribution to a new numerical goal by a particular date (e.g., the “25 by 25”) would offer benefits to patients and the population that would be identical to those of an eradication campaign. Moreover, reinstituting a numerical goal for the next UNAIDS campaign would avoid the risk of misleading workers and donor agencies—the potential downside of a failed campaign to end AIDS. (Kazanjian, 2017, p. 429) Likewise, questions of whether eradication framing is the best approach came up in the context of the MPH campaign. Even during the early phase of activities there were divergent views within the inner circle of organizers and supporters about the bold aspirational (and, arguably, utopian) framing of the campaign. Sireau (2009), who has studied MPH from a social movement perspective, noted: Some of those with a more marketing emphasis tended to see the name as a particularly effective way of capturing people’s imagination and enthusiasm and popularizing the message. They believed that its strength came from its idealistic and utopian vision. They refuted those who said that it will never be possible to make poverty history and that the campaign was therefore setting itself up to fail. (p. 50)