Inclusion through Organization - Social Movements in the Global South As an Exercise of Self-Inclusion of the Excluded

The major part of the population of the Global South has been excluded from participation in important spheres of society. They cannot communicate following the logics of modern society. Marginalized by politics, law, economy, and other functional systems, these people were and are considered as permanent threat and thus turned into objects of repression or paternalistic social policy – or simply invisibilized. However, exclusion can lead to major integration and by this, to a self-organization of the excluded. This text argues that self-organization of the excluded can be a way to self-inclusion. As organizations, such as community schools, sport clubs, cooperatives, are able to access, albeit in a marginal way, functional systems such as politics, education, and economics, the excluded can, through their organizations, communicate in the systems. Organization becomes therefore a way to participate in society.

This could be a way to understand social movements in the Global South. These movements often differ from the framework of social movement theory. Their organizations are based not only on protest or political engagement, but on the provision of services in their community. At the same time, they are the main pillars of some of the most influential social movements worldwide. This text will discuss how social movements in the Global South can be understood without the need to reduce their complexity to a degree where their everyday activity is invisibilized. Also, effects of the inclusion into society will be pointed out.