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Paper short abstract

This study examines South Korea’s state-led overseas volunteerism (1971–2024) as a nexus of national strategy and youth labour, tracing its shift from Cold War politics to a market-oriented tool for managing youth unemployment and national branding within changing global aid regimes.

Paper long abstract

This article examines the formation and evolution of South Korea’s government-sponsored overseas volunteer programme between 1971 and 2024, situating it within broader debates on volunteerism, labour, citizenship, and development in and from the Global South. While overseas volunteering is often framed as an altruistic or solidaristic practice, this study argues that it has been actively shaped by state agency in response to shifting development discourses, domestic labour conditions, and transformations in the global aid regime, thereby moving beyond a conventional North–South aid framework.

The analysis traces how the programme has been instrumentalised to serve changing national imaginaries and policy objectives: initially as a tool of anti-communist diplomacy and domestic social governance during the Cold War period (1971–1993), and later as a strategic response to youth unemployment, labour precarity, and global competitiveness from the early 2000s onwards. Drawing on archival materials and 29 in-depth interviews with policymakers, administrators, and former volunteers, the study demonstrates how overseas volunteerism has been simultaneously reframed as a diplomatic resource, a market-oriented labour management mechanism, and a means of cultivating globally oriented citizenship aligned with state-led development goals.

The article ultimately argues that South Korea, as a former Global South country, mobilises overseas volunteerism to negotiate its position within the contemporary global aid architecture. In this process, volunteerism functions not merely as an expression of solidarity, but as a flexible governance tool through which development practices, citizenship norms, and labour relations are reproduced and reconfigured in a post-aid context.