Practising Citizenship: Rights, Power, and Marginalised Communities in Southern Africa.

While advances towards political democracy have been made in a number of Southern African states, large numbers of their citizens are marginalised and excluded from a range of resources and the power that these confer. Such marginalised communities include the poor, particularly poor women, the homeless, and those with HIV/AIDS. Against the background of an account of social citizenship as a practice rather than merely a legal status, the paper considers the role rights-based strategies can play in the pursuit of social citizenship for members of such marginalised communities, by investigating the ways in which these communities engage with the notion of human rights, ranging from largely rhetorical use of rights language at the one end of the spectrum, to rights-based litigation on the other. The paper focuses on the link between rights and power, and considers the extent to which rights-based strategies can challenge prevailing power relations and the contribution this may make to transformative politics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]