AN EXERCISE IN WORLDMAKING 2009 - ISS

6 The Utility of the Citizen: Relating Citizenship in Social Movement Activity 67
point, offering an examination of what it means to be included or excluded
from the political sphere or society. Speaking to social constructs
of gender or discrimination are a few of the ways citizens are socially and
systematically excluded. This very dilemma is of concern to Naila Kabeer
(2005), who suggests that there are values which people associate with
the idea of citizenship. This commonality exists through a fundamental
connection of experienced exclusion, which provides a basis for the imagination
of a more inclusive structure (3). While inclusive citizenship is
but on example of an emerging concept applied to citizenship, it represents
a move towards understanding citizenship as something that is not
simply given due to territoriality. It is a process of struggle for consideration,
inclusion and rights. This particular understanding of citizenship
closely resides with individuals and communities such as migrants, who
are often denied the rights associated with citizenship on the basis that
they are not a national of their country of residence.
To provide an example, resistance movements have often been noted
for their ability to expand the state-given framework of inclusion, replacing
it with a radicalized version that defines inclusion from the perspectives
of those who are excluded (Mohanty 2006: 82). Under the neoliberal
institutional model adopted in South Africa, the APF is one of many
movements seeking to crumble state and its partner’s perceptions of social
progress and inclusion for marginalized communities. Following the
break from apartheid in 1994, the African National Congress (ANC) began
to form a state under an assumed “trickle down effect” from neoliberal
institutional arrangements such as the Reconstruction and Development
Programme (RDP) and its subsequent replacement by the Growth,
Employment and Redistribution Strategy (GEAR). Strongly situating
itself within socialist tradition, the APF was created in order to provide a
platform for solidarity and information-sharing for communities and
groups of the left that had broken from alliances with the ANC, and
who were seeking a space to express their concerns. In turn, the APF became
a movement for organizations, individuals and associations alike in
order to challenge governmental and private companies’ systematic exclusion,
which denied citizens access to basic goods and services (Buhlungu
2004: 4). Therefore, as social movements are involved in an active
process of imagining new mechanisms or opportunities for inclusion, citizenship
becomes a crucial reference point upon which they contest this
exclusion. The movements themselves can become a space to counter