What does it take for a person to be considered one of those who are “full members of a community” (Marshall 1950, p. 28)? What does it take to be considered fully human? Questions such as these have been cause for contemplation in many fields of humanities for some time. Throughout history, full citizenship rights and recognition have been denied to people in various contexts on the basis of race, gender, and religion, to name only three identity markers amongst a host of others. Indigenous and colonised people have been denied citizenship rights, and it is on the basis of ideas of citizenship that innumerable political struggles have been waged. At the current time, during which migration and the status of refugees is a key global concern, many scholars are thinking and writing about what migration means for citizenship (Bloemraad and Sheares 2017; Ní Mhurchú 2014).

The question of who may and may not be considered a full member of a community is a pivotal one to disability scholars and activists. Historically, and to the present day in many parts of the world, disabled people are not only denied full membership of their communities, but their very humanness is called into question (Kittay et al. 2005). Disability struggles are not just about belonging, they are about personhood itself (McBryde Johnson 2005). Added to that, disability scholarship goes even further—with the turn to what has been termed “posthumanism” in social sciences (Braidotti 2013), some disability studies scholars are making the important point that the very categories of “person” or “human” are problematic in their exclusion of some disabled people. In this view, to aspire to personhood—to being considered a “fully qualifying” human—is to strive for inclusion in a typology which is set up to exclude disabled people and, indeed, has been used in systematic efforts to eliminate disabled people altogether (Goodley et al. 2017). There is clearly a lot at stake as we approach disability and citizenship.

Given the centrality of questions of citizenship for disability studies, it is not surprising that over the past 20 years, there has been a dramatic upward trend in writing about disability and citizenship (Sépulchre 2017). A recent review of work in the area showed clearly that the vast majority of scholarship dealt with disability and citizenship issues from the Global North and that even in cases of work concerned with the Global South, authorship was still heavily biased towards the North (Sépulchre 2017). Now, there can be little argument that at the very foundations of disability studies is the politics of voice. The question of who speaks for whom is the heart of struggles for self-representation and, indeed, for citizenship. A few years ago, one of the editors of this volume (Swartz) was fortunate to attend an excellent disability studies meeting in a wealthy country in Europe. One of the keynote speakers argued forcefully and cogently that if disability studies is to have any meaning for the vast majority of disabled people¹ in the world, far greater inclusion of scholarship from the Global South is simply essential. Though fully in support of the speaker’s position, Swartz pointed out that what was being enacted at the meeting was exactly the problem the speaker wanted to address. Here was an expert from the Global North telling other people, overwhelmingly from the Global North, that they should be talking with people from the Global South. Once again, people from the Global South (and disabled people at that) were being spoken for and about—rather than speaking for themselves and being spoken with. They were not part of the conversation. With this issue in mind, this book makes an attempt to begin to bridge the immense gap bequeathed to us by both our colonial history and the global structural inequalities surrounding participation in scholarship.

But the book concerns itself not just with disability studies’ knowledge lacuna regarding disability and citizenship in the Global South. As editors, we are also centrally concerned with the effacement of disability issues from citizenship debates in the broadest context. Just as it is no longer possible to discuss any aspect of citizenship without considering gender inequality as part of the equation, it should not be possible to address citizenship without thinking about disability. Scholars and activists should not have to demonstrate that certain forms of oppression or exclusion are widespread in order to justify these being attended to. In the case of disability, however, we often encounter surprise, including in progressive circles, at the fact that disabled people may well constitute the single largest minority on earth after women² (WHO and World Bank 2010). This occurs notwithstanding the fact that, when asked, most people “discover” that they have an experience of disability in their families or close networks. Surprise at how prevalent disability is, is not a chance thing. On the contrary, part of the work of disablism and exclusion globally is to make disability invisible (Swartz and Bantjes 2016; Watermeyer 2013). As just one example of the pervasive drive to conceal, consider the fact that, until as late as the 1970s, parts of the US maintained “ugly laws” designed to keep disabled people, and other “unsightly” individuals, off the streets (Schweik 2009).

This book grew out of a programme of public engagement run by ourselves and some colleagues, with the generous funding support of the National Research Foundation, South Africa. As South Africans who have lived through the apartheid era and the transition to democracy, we were (and are) committed to contributing to the formation and maintenance of a more open and fair society. In 2006, ten years after the adoption of South Africa’s Constitution—a Constitution which explicitly mentions disability rights³—the three of us contributed to a book which located disability inclusion in our country within broader struggles for securing citizenship rights (Watermeyer et al. 2006). Despite publicity around the book, including a launch event at South Africa’s Constitutional Court, we were concerned that public events surrounding disability tended to attract the same audience—people already mobilised regarding disability issues, including disability activists. If the project of realising the citizenship rights of disabled people was to gain traction, we believed, it was important for us to get out of what amounted to an echo chamber of like-minded people. We had to begin engaging earnestly with civil society organisations in the broad sense, as well as with government directly. With this in mind, we arranged a series of public debates, each focussing on key issues of concern to all living in our young democracy. Representatives were invited from civil society organisations which were, and were not, explicitly concerned with disability, as well as delegates from local and national government and interested members of the community. Topic areas included transport, education, media access, sport and physical activity, health, and the legal system, along with many others. The twist to these engagements was that we asked speakers and participants to think through what these issues meant in the lives of disabled people and what disability could teach regarding these development challenges broadly. In keeping with MacLachlan, Mannan and McAuliffe (2011) in their work on disability as an indicator of equity in health systems, we believed that putting disability at the centre of discussions concerning equity in the lives of everyone would help people think not only about disability but about questions of inclusion in all areas of community and civic life. In a sense, we were taking a universal design (Hamraie 2017) approach in order to strategically infuse disability concerns into debates and activism regarding citizenship.

We received positive responses to the series of public meetings. In particular, we noted participants who commented that they had hardly thought about disability before but now saw its central relevance to broad democratic concerns and vice versa. Putting together a book based on the public engagement process was the logical next step, and some of the chapters in this volume began as talks in the initial series. As we developed the book, though, it morphed and expanded into a work some way beyond where we started. Although many of our authors are South African, and many of the examples are from our own country, our concern became much broader. We have enlarged the scope of the book to the broader Global South, and these pages include contributions from many parts of the world.

Part I of this book engages with key cross-cutting concerns regarding disability and citizenship in the Global South. To begin, Soldatic introduces the notion of “surplusisity”, thereby locating the discussion of citizenship within the global economy and the politics of labour and exploitation. She highlights the nebulous, if not precarious, position of disabled people within neoliberal discourses of economic participation, where the promise of inclusion brings with it interpellation. Next, through her discussion of Kazuo Ishiguro’s novel Never Let Me Go, Garland-Thomson raises important questions about what it takes to create a world in which there is a place for all to live, a place where physical and social environments act as drivers of flourishing rather than as barriers. The novel’s inversions of normate and disabled status bring into stark relief the contradictions inherent in normative ideas about citizenship, such as the “good life” being defined by health, vigour, and attractiveness. Picking up on this issue, Friedman locates disability struggles within broader concerns about how society and the economy is organised. As a political scientist who is new to the field of disability, Friedman provides a clear-eyed analysis of the obstacles to full citizenship faced by disabled people and ways in which these are held in common with other groups such as slum dwellers in India or shack dwellers in South Africa. Subsequent to this, Swartz places the concerns of the book within the context of a contemporary global challenge—the question of how to claim citizenship rights and entitlements in the “post-truth” era of Donald Trump. Developments in the most powerful country on Earth have profound ramifications for those living far away from it, in circumstances probably unimaginable to Trump and his allies. By contrast, Watermeyer uses his own local experience as a white disabled person in a highly racialised country, South Africa, to ask much broader questions about identity politics, paradoxical aspects of intersectionality, and claims to citizenship rights. At issue is the question of how to figure disability disadvantage in a society where colonial and post-colonial racial capitalism continues to structure the very foundations of exchange. Görgens and Ziervogel add to the changing perspectives by examining the use of resilience thinking in addressing complex development challenges emanating from urbanisation, displacement, and climate change, with special emphasis on vulnerable groups, and the idea of “no one left behind”. Their analysis demonstrates both the potentials and weaknesses of global development discourses in attending to diverse local problems.

Part II is composed of contributions dealing with networks and contexts of disability in the Global South. First, Kahonde and McKenzie discuss the crucial, yet poorly understood, role of families in supporting people with intellectual disabilities. Their focus is on how family caregivers respond to the sexuality of their intellectually disabled relative, in ways which may promote or limit flourishing. Then, Horton and Shakespeare invert the common stereotype of disability as abjection by exploring how disabled people in a number of very challenging African contexts find ways to access education and livelihoods. Their innovative study suggests questions regarding psychological aspects of resilience, as success occurs in very divergent ways in different contexts—what may be an overwhelming obstacle in one circumstance may appear as a spur to action in another. Wood, Essop, Watermeyer, and McKenzie provide a case study of how it is possible under very trying circumstances to make progress in realising the citizenship rights of vulnerable people in a young democracy. This narrative underlines how obtaining a judicial directive for service provision by the state can function as the beginning point of collaboration between government and civil society in building inclusive structures. Finally for this section, Claassens, Shaikh, and Swartz address an issue which is elemental to the experiences of millions of disabled people in the Global South but one which is commonly overlooked in policy documents and processes—the issue of faith and religion.

Part III imagines what an inclusive society should look like and explores potentials for change. Watermeyer and Goggin sug...