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Paper short abstract

This paper explores vulnerability as apartheid-rooted dominance and strategic resource. Through public employment, grants (e.g., Child Support, SRD) aiding 30% of population, it explores how communities mobilize it for agency, urging solidarity and participatory governance for justice.

Paper long abstract

This paper examines vulnerability in South Africa as a dual phenomenon: a structure of dominancy rooted in apartheid legacies and a strategic resource mobilized by communities for survival and agency. Drawing on social grants, aid regimes, and public works programs like the Expanded Public Works Programme (EPWP), it analyzes how vulnerability is designated and rendered visible through selective eligibility criteria and donor priorities, which privilege "deserving" groups (e.g., HIV/AIDS-affected households, youth, and women) while marginalizing informal workers and the chronically unemployed. State social protection systems, supporting nearly 30% of the population through the grant system like the Child Support Grant and Social Relief of Distress (SRD), stabilize precarious livelihoods but reinforce hierarchies of suffering aligned with global humanitarian narratives. The analysis highlights state and community mobilization of vulnerability: governments expand grants to manage unemployment and inequality, while recipients actively leverage them for grassroots organizing, negotiation, and advocacy, transforming dependency into "strategic vulnerability." In rethinking vulnerability beyond victimhood, the paper advocates for a relational paradigm emphasizing solidarity, participatory governance, and active citizenship. Aid and grants should evolve from mere survival mechanisms into catalysts for justice, inclusion, and sustainable livelihoods, challenging exclusionary moral economies and fostering pluralistic responses to structural precarity.