In recent years the concept of ‘volunteering’ and the figure of the volunteer have become increasingly prominent in political ideologies, social movements and individual experience across the globe (Allahyari 2000; Eliasoph 2011; Hilton & McKay 2011; Milligan & Conradson 2006). The ethic of volunteering drives the work of charities, philanthropic groups, religious organizations and non-government organizations (NGOs) concerned with global inequalities, poverty alleviation, development, disaster response and emergency relief. Not only does volunteerism underpin an organizational ethic, heard for example in the term ‘voluntary sector’, but many of these organizations themselves also rely upon voluntary labour. Volunteer medical professionals are central to the work of humanitarian organizations such as Médicins Sans Frontières (MSF), the Red Cross and the Red Crescent, while NGOs such as the UK-based Oxfam or the North American World Vision grew out of the work of volunteers. Meanwhile ‘gap-year’ volunteering among Western youth has become popular alongside other kinds of volunteer tourism within ecological or development projects (e.g. Mostafanezhad 2013b; Parreñas 2012; Simpson 2004; 2005; Smith & Laurie 2011). While the direction of volunteer action within international development and humanitarian projects is predominantly from global North to global South (McWha 2011), there are South–South volunteering programmes organized by the United Nations (UN) and other international, including religious, organizations. International volunteers work in Israeli kibbutzim, or join Palestinians in occupied territories as a display of solidarity. From South Africa to Egypt, Germany to India, Indonesia to Nicaragua, volunteers are involved in civic action, political activism, poverty alleviation, humanitarian aid and disaster relief within as well as beyond their own societies (see e.g. Watts 2002; Nading 2012, 2013; Mittermaier 2014).

Voluntary labour and volunteerism is not only a prominent mode of engagement within global humanitarianism, development and philanthropy, political activism and social justice. As states withdraw from twentieth-century promises of work, care and social redistribution (Eliasoph 2011) ‘voluntary organizations become key to the shifting social architecture in post-welfare societies and the new forms of citizenship that accompany it’ (Muehlebach 2012:10). Voluntary labour is being positioned within an ‘economy of affect’ (Hardt 1999), which relies on unpaid labour and non-profit infrastructure to do the work of the state (Archambault & Boumendil 2002; Adams 2012).