Paper details

Paper authors	Bianca Fadel
In panel on	Humanitarianism from below: analysing the views, values and practices of local and national aid actors
Paper presenter(s) will be presenting	In-Person / Online

Abstract

Volunteers are increasingly celebrated as global development and humanitarian actors. Whilst most research has focused on international volunteers, ‘local’ volunteers are far more numerous, playing increasingly important roles in the rhetoric around the ‘Agenda 2030’ and the ‘Agenda for Humanity’. In this paper, we critically explore the notion of the ‘local’ in framing forms of volunteer activity in humanitarian contexts. We explore how these framings suggest particular and distinctive knowledge, increased capacity, enhanced legitimacy and accountability, and distinguish ‘local’ volunteers from international ones. We argue that the celebration of ‘local’ volunteers can appear as a panacea for diverse humanitarian and development challenges, obscuring problems with the term and the challenges volunteers can face working within their own and geographically proximate communities. To do this, we analyse qualitative data from experiences of volunteers in conflicts and humanitarian crises, collected as part of the Swedish Red Cross/Northumbria University Volunteers in Conflicts and Emergencies Initiative. We explore how claims for the benefits of ‘locality’ in terms of social identity, shared experience and spatial proximity are contested in humanitarian contexts and how equalising ‘local’ to ‘acceptable’ might be a risky simplification. We show how being ‘local’ can create particular challenges for volunteers, focusing particularly on the implications of being volunteers from the affected communities, on how the scale of the local can shift, and on how social identities shape volunteer capacities and exposure to risk. These findings challenge dominant conceptualisations of volunteering, and established framings of ‘local’ volunteering in humanitarian contexts, highlighting aspects that need addressing through programming and volunteer support.

*This paper is co-authored by Professor Matt Baillie Smith, Nisha Thomas and Bianca Fadel from Northumbria University, UK; and Jessica Cadesky, from the University of Ottawa, Canada.

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