The perpetual promise of volunteering in crises: changing relationships between citizens and civil society

• In Event: Voluntary Action in a Crisis

Abstract

This paper develops a new conceptual understanding of the engagement of volunteers in the context of crises and inequalities that highlights a growing fragility in the relationships between citizens and civil society.

Volunteering has been increasingly mainstreamed in civil society and state strategies for responding to crises and conflicts (Bazan et al., 2021; Nissen et al., 2021). But despite popular celebrations of volunteers as heroes, particularly in times of crises (UNRIC, 2020; World Economic Forum, 2020), data and evidence on the political economies of volunteering in global South contexts characterised by significant inequalities as well as crises and conflicts remains weak and fragmented (for some exceptions, see Baillie Smith et al., 2022; Prince & Brown, 2016). In this paper, we explore the ways in which volunteering is promoted and organised by civil society actors working with young refugees in Uganda, how those young refugees make sense of and respond to these volunteer opportunities, and what this means for their relationships to civil society organisations.

The paper draws on data from a large scale multi-method and multi-institution research project, “Refugee Youth Volunteering Uganda” (www.ryvu.org), which explored the roles of volunteering in the lives and livelihoods of young refugees in Uganda. It uses data from both a large survey of the scales, forms and distribution of volunteering amongst refugees in urban and rural contexts, as well as qualitative data on young refugees’ motivations to volunteer and their experiences of volunteering.

Analysing this data, we develop two new conceptual lenses on volunteering, civil society and citizenship which reveal and explain the emergence of increasingly fragile and contested relationships between young refugee volunteers and the organisations that engage them. Firstly, we develop the idea of the ‘perpetual promise’ to reveal how and why the benefits and outcomes of volunteering are continuously deferred. We explore how the promises made by organisations about volunteer participation articulate with the fragilities and inequalities of humanitarian spaces in refugee settings (Pascucci, 2019), the ‘hustle’ of building lives and livelihoods in a context of limited work opportunities (Shand et al., 2021) and young people’s hopes for changed futures (Allan, 2019). We suggest that, while civil society organisations and young people attach significant ‘promise’ to volunteer participation, including in relation to employment, skills development and income, these promises are perpetually deferred. As a result, the relationship between young refugees and civil society organisations reflects a Faustian pact, in which young people are aware of the ‘perpetual promises’ being made, and the risks of exploitation associated with such promises, but are faced with limited other options.

Through the development of these conceptual lenses, we develop new understandings of the civil society and citizen relationships that produce volunteering in crises. By developing an account that links the agency of young refugees, the engagement strategies of organisations, and the inequalities that characterise displacement in Uganda, we are better able to understand the risks to citizen and civil society relationships that emerge from and through crises.

References

Allan, K. (2019). Volunteering as hope labour: the potential value of unpaid work experience for the un- and under-employed. Culture, Theory and Critique, 60(1), 66–83. https://doi.org/10.1080/14735784.2018.1548300

Baillie Smith, M., Mills, S., Okech, M., & Fadel, B. (2022). Uneven geographies of youth volunteering in Uganda: multi-scalar discourses and practices. Geoforum, 134, 30–39. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.geoforum.2022.05.006

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Shand, W., van Blerk, L., Prazeres, L., Bukenya, B., Ibrahim, R., Hunter, J., Essaid, A. A., & Kasirye, R. (2021). The Effects of Limited Work Opportunities on Transitions to Adulthood among Young Refugees in Uganda and Jordan. Journal of Refugee Studies, 34(2), 1999–2017. https://doi.org/10.1093/jrs/feaa042

UNRIC - United Nations Regional Information Centre for Western Europe. (2020, December 4). Volunteers: real-life heroes in the time of COVID-19. https://unric.org/en/volunteers-real-life-heroes-in-the-time-of-covid-19/

World Economic Forum. (2020, March 25). Meet the everyday heroes of the pandemic. https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2020/03/meet-the-everyday-heroes-of-the-covid-19-crisis/

Authors

• Bianca Fadel, Northumbria University

• Matt Baillie Smith, Centre for Global Development, Northumbria University

• Sarah Mills, Loughborough University

• Moses Okech, Makerere University