Better Must Come they are guaranteed by virtue of their citizenship organise and mobilise to demand the rights they are entitled to. 17 Of course, in no struggle is victory assured, and each struggle will be shaped by its respective cultural, political and historical context, 18 but conceiving of citizenship as struggle completes this gap in liberal theory and does so without displacing the purchase of individual rights. To better establish theorising citizenship as struggle, and thus restore agency to previously stateless persons who struggle to not only gain new rights, but give substance to those rights that have already been secured, the concept of dissensus as developed by French philosopher Jacques Rancière is adopted to buttress the theory of citizenship used in this study. By dissensus, Rancière means ‘a division put in the “common sense”: a dispute about what is given, about the frame within which we see something as given’. 19 As Rancière argues, rights can be said to belong to individuals ‘when they can do something with them to construct a dissensus against the denial of rights they suffer’, that is, to dispute the social consensus that sees one’s rights denied. 20 This means that there is no binary of having rights and not having rights whereby individuals passively accept whether their rights are observed or not, but that individuals secure the rights that are theirs through their struggle to first show that they have been denied the very rights they are owed, whereupon those same rights that have been denied are then enacted once secured. However, this is only possible if, as Rancière suggests, we move beyond viewing rights as being possessed by a definite subject. 21 According to Rancière, 22 ‘the subject of rights is the… process of subjectivisation, that bridges the interval between two forms of the existence of those rights’. The first form is written rights; the ‘inscriptions of the community as free and equal’. 23 The second form are ‘the rights of those who make something of that inscription, who decide not only to “use” their rights but also to build such and such a case for the verification of the power of the inscription’. 24 However, it must be noted that the inscription affords moral justification for the subject to seek verification, for the mere existence of the inscription allows the subject to assume equality as she proceeds. Though the construction of a dissensus against the denial of rights may be met with charges of recalcitrance, the subject is in fact proceeding ‘from the point of view of equality, asserting equality, assuming equality as a given, working out from equality, trying to see how productive it can be and thus maximizing all possible liberty and equality’ 25 when disputing the given so as to verify the power of the inscription. In this way, the subject of rights is not a definite 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 Marshall (n 12); Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (Harcourt Brace & Company 1973); Walzer (n 11); Naila Kabeer, Inclusive Citizenship: Meanings & Expressions (Zed Books 2004); Celestine Nyamu-Musembi, ‘Towards an Actor-Oriented Perspective on Human Rights’ in Naila Kabeer (ed), Inclusive Citizenship: Meanings & Expressions (Zed Books 2004); Margaret Walton-Roberts, ‘Conclusion: Slipper Citizenship and Retrenching Rights’ in Rhoda E Howard-Hassman and Margaret Walton-Roberts (eds), The Human Right to Citizenship: A Slippery Concept (University of Pennsylvania Press 2015). Jack M Barbalet, Citizenship: Rights, Struggle, and Class Inequality (University of Minnesota Press 1988); Lister (n 15). Jacques Rancière, ‘Who is the Subject of the Rights of Man?’ (2004) 103(1–2) The South Atlantic Quarterly 297. ibid 305–6. ibid. ibid 302. ibid 302. ibid 303. Jacques Rancière, On the Shores of Politics (Verso 1995) 51–52. 9