From the 1950s, development volunteering programs including the United States Peace Corps and Britain’s Voluntary Service Overseas fielded hundreds of thousands of volunteers across scores of nations. Many volunteers set off with good intentions, but their actions were invariably intertwined with national and racial power in the overlapping contexts of decolonization, globalization and the Cold War. This panel will consider volunteering as an avenue for non-elite participation in international and global affairs, and critically examine its impacts within national, regional and global contexts as well as on the interconnected fields of humanitarianism and international development.

Panelists will consider development volunteering through several lenses. Dr. Beatrice Wayne will present her research on the Peace Corps program in the Horn of Africa during the 1960s to explore why it is productive to differentiate between U.S. volunteers and development workers during the global Cold War. A close examination of the daily work of Peace Corps volunteers reveals the unique way the labor of Peace Corps volunteers worked to extend United States influence in the Horn of Africa, shore up the power of the Imperial Ethiopian government, but also facilitate resistance to both states by radical student groups and Eritrean separatist fighters.

Associate Professor Jasamin Rostam-Kolayi will discuss how US Peace Corps volunteers in Iran in the 1960s and 1970s became entangled in the monarch Muhammad Reza Shah’s development program known as the White Revolution. Though some volunteers became unwitting participants in state-sponsored repression, others used their contacts and relations with non-elite Iranians to circumvent the power of the state. And, surprisingly, in the present day, many of these same American volunteers continue their political and social engagement with Iran and Iranians, working to shape the US popular image of and policy on Iran.

Dr. Agnieszka Sobocinska will situate British, American and Australian volunteers at the center of a ‘humanitarian-development complex’: a nexus of governments, NGOs, private corporations and public opinion that encouraged continuous and accelerating intervention in the Global South from the 1950s. Her research argues that volunteering organizations played a key role in the rise of the humanitarian-development complex by bringing together coalitions of governments, community groups and private sector corporations, as well as galvanizing popular support for Western development intervention.

Following a short overview of their research, panelists will join the discussant to consider a number of key questions. To what extent did development volunteering facilitate non-elite or ‘ordinary’ citizens’ engagement with international relations and global issues? What sort of political mentalities and global imaginaries were encouraged by development volunteering? How did tensions between East and West, and North and South, affect the motivations and actions of volunteers and programs in the context of the Cold War and decolonization? How were political tensions and global economic inequality mirrored or resisted by volunteers and host communities? And what are the continuing legacies of early development volunteering, at a time when volunteering abroad has become a rite of passage for many Western youth, and for-profit ‘voluntourism’ is a multi-billion dollar business?