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  • Introduction:Volunteer Labor—Pasts and Futures of Work, Development, and Citizenship in East Africa
  • Hannah Brown (bio) and Ruth J. Prince (bio), Guest Editors

Across the globe, voluntary labor is a prominent mode of engagement within development, humanitarian, and philanthropic activities, political activism, social justice movements, and religious organizations, and it is increasingly being used in welfare and health care provision (Milligan & Conradson 2006). Defined as the free giving of an individual’s labor, time, and energy to a larger cause, collective goal, or public good, volunteerism is imbued with moral and political meaning. It implies the creation or enactment of attachment between the individual and a collective and carries assumptions about altruism, freedom, and a “politics of virtue” [End Page 29] (Mindry 2001).1 These definitions underscore the political and social purchase of volunteering. It is a powerful concept, capable of mobilizing individuals and groups to act for a common good. As such volunteering has been tied to political and social projects, and promoted by state and nonstate institutions for various ends.2 The power of volunteerism is particularly apparent in East Africa—the subject of this ASR Focus—where volunteering has a long and rich history and voluntary labor has been reinterpreted through various citizenship and political projects since the colonial period.

While volunteering is a global phenomenon, it is also situated within historically specific political and economic contexts. Assumptions about altruistic action, freedom, and virtue that surround the concept do not therefore necessarily hold. Despite such ideals, the actual practice of volunteering is often riddled with tension. Volunteering may benefit the giver as much as the receiver. The lines between altruism and material reward, and between labor that is given freely and labor that is demanded by those in political authority, are often blurred. The relation between voluntary labor and paid work may be ambiguous, and the utility of volunteering within the labor market may be significant. Although imagined as progressive social action, voluntary labor as charitable, humanitarian, or development practice may reinforce inequalities between giver and recipient (Mittermaier 2014).

The importance of volunteering to social and political transformation, together with the ambiguity and the tensions in practices surrounding volunteering, makes it an important subject to study. Voluntary labor and volunteerism are emerging as a focus of scholarly attention (e.g., Allahyari 2000; Eliasoph 2011; Hilton & McKay 2011). In part this is because the political value of volunteer labor is being repositioned within neoliberal governance as states seek to shift responsibility for social welfare onto citizens. A growing literature on volunteerism in the global North situates the practice of volunteering within the rise of an “affective economy” that celebrates the harnessing of people’s compassion for others as a form of public utility and caring citizenship (Adams 2012; Hardt 1999; Muehlebach 2012). This scholarship argues that the relation between volunteers and the state has undergone a reversal. Whereas during much of the twentieth century voluntary labor was intimately associated with the harnessing of a national spirit to produce a fairer society (e.g., Titmus 1997), now volunteers “are tasked with taking the common good into their own hands” (Muehlebach 2012:38) as voluntary labor is used to provide solutions to social and economic problems that are considered to lie outside the formal reach of the state (Lacey & Ilcan 2006). The scope and meanings of global voluntarism within development, humanitarian, and environmental projects, and its relations to identity formation, work, careers, and global citizenship for youth from the global North, have gained some attention (e.g., Jones 2008; Lacey & Ilcan 2006; Lorimer 2010; McWha 2011; Parreñas 2012; Simpson 2004, 2005; Smith & Laurie 2011), while recent work explores volunteer [End Page 30] participation as religious and ethical practice within charitable work shaped by a “global moral economy of compassion” (Mittermaier 2014:518) and “encounters between privilege and poverty” (Muehlebach 2013:300; see also Mindry 2001; Redfield & Bornstein 2010).

In contrast to the growing literature on voluntarism in the global North, we know much less about voluntary labor and volunteerism as a mode of political and social action in African countries, even though African governments promote voluntarism among their nationals and volunteerism has an extensive colonial and postcolonial history...

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