Short Abstract

This roundtable examines how voluntarism powers state-making processes across Africa. Attending to ideals of the common good, the authority and duty to enact it, and the integration of un(der)paid labour into public services over time, its debates resonate across the continent and beyond.

Long Abstract

As the 2026 UN’s International Year of Volunteers for Sustainable Development shows, governments North and South promote voluntarism and its deeper integration into national development planning. However, the recursive rediscovery of volunteerism in international policy circles and its celebration as virtuous civic action neglects the long and complex histories of how voluntary labour has been elicited, stewarded and sanctioned within state projects, especially across Africa.

This roundtable explores voluntarism as a dual prism: first, refracting multiple ideas, intents and indeed actors over time, and second, as illuminating contemporary and historical processes of state-making across Africa. Understood as the ethic of giving time and effort to a perceived or claimed collective good, the roundtable asks how this ideal has been articulated across colonial and independence periods, often blending developmental, market-liberal, and post-liberal discourses with specific cultural repertoires and tropes. Bringing together panellists across regional and disciplinary specialisations, we also explore the wide range of actors that operationalize voluntarism, and attend to their perspectives and struggles for recognition and resources. Locating voluntarism both at the core and the margins of the state, this roundtable discusses how unpaid or part-paid labour stretches, supplements or substitutes public action across sectors as diverse as health, water and sanitation, legal care, and local government. Such labour, often supplied or exacted on a semi-permanent basis, remains central to contemporary state-making. This roundtable thus frames a nuanced conversation about the potentials and pitfalls of embedding voluntary and unpaid work into state practices globally.