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Paper short abstract

This paper analyses local volunteering in protracted crises, revealing how volunteers transcend humanitarian-development frameworks. Based on Burundi data, it calls for recognising volunteering's social, cultural & geographic contexts, challenging established practices through grassroots solidarity.

Paper long abstract

This paper analyses local volunteering during protracted crises and explores the implications for humanitarianism and development practices, particularly in the global South. Most of the existing scholarship on volunteering has been framed by siloed humanitarian or development accounts, often privileging perspectives from global North settings. Despite their critical roles, the presence of local volunteers in protracted crises is often assumed in practice and obscured in the literature. Based on qualitative data collected through an ethnographic and participatory approach foregrounding local agency and knowledge in Burundi, the paper develops a critical conceptualisation of volunteering during a protracted crisis. It reveals how local volunteering does not fit established humanitarian or development languages and frameworks but rather transcends and destabilises them as volunteers enact forms of solidarity across and between such spaces at community level. This paper calls for relocating volunteering in its particular social, cultural and geographical spaces, and recognising how these spaces are shaped by but also challenge established humanitarian and development discourses through grassroots alternatives and solidarity practices.