In her excellent Saving the World? Western Volunteers and the Rise of the Humanitarian-Development Complex, Agnieszka Sobocinska tells a story of a meeting between the Global North and the Global South after the Second World War in the nexus of volunteer aid. The key site of connection is a series of volunteer development agencies who, armed with good intentions, went to the developing nations of Asia, Africa, and Latin America to contribute to their economic and social modernization. As she points out this was, in fact, a global project, involving governments, nongovernmental organizations, private corporations, public opinion, and the volunteers themselves who were at the heart of what she calls the “humanitarian-development complex” (2) that blurred the boundaries between state and non-state action in international relations. Sobocinska focuses on three of the earliest and most influential development volunteering programs, from their origins in the 1950s to the 1970s: Australia's Volunteer Graduate Scheme (1950), Britain's Volunteer Service Overseas (1958), and the United States Peace Corps, launched by President Kennedy in 1961.

Under their banner hundreds of thousands of young enthusiastic Western volunteers were sent to work in what were considered underdeveloped nations such as Nigeria, Indonesia, and Chile to theoretically live like the locals and provide aid: as teachers, doctors, technicians, and experts. The locals were not asked what they wanted or needed but were expected to accept the projected benefits, including increased human capital and expertise, a greater level of interracial friendship, and recognition of the good global citizenship of the Global North. The volunteers came with a variety of motivations, from genuine conviction and high ideals and empathy and “sentimental radicalism” (101) to adventure. The three organizations were financially supported by their respective governments, undergirded by Christianity, and lionized and sponsored by numerous private corporations and civic organizations. Everyone wanted in on volunteer aid. It was big business.

Of course, the humanitarian-development complex was wrapped up in overlapping contexts of decolonization, globalization, and the Cold War, nowhere more so than in the Peace Corps, which was consciously pitted as the antidote of Soviet aid. It was unbelievable to learn of the commodification and almost fetishization of aid work: being young, good looking, and white (like the woman depicted on the front cover of the book), was virtually the only prerequisite one needed. American beauty was the public face of the Peace Corps, but a healthy detachment to avoid “going native” (201) was expected of all aid workers, particularly women. In the chapter “The Intimacy of the Humanitarian Development Complex,” Sobocinska notes instances where aid workers crossed the line to varying degrees of connection, from love and romance to marriage. Such relationships were accompanied by degrees of angst and policing that demonstrated the racialized, classed, and gendered dynamics of cross-cultural intimacies and the fact that some volunteers transcended such boundaries, even though it must not have been easy.

Sobocinska is not interested in reconstructing the work of these organizations at a particular historical juncture alone. Indeed, two sections out of the three in the book—“Images” and “Experiences”—explicitly focus on the propaganda and image of Western aid and the lived experiences of both the aid workers and the population they were supposed to aid. The latter was, for me, the most interesting part of the book, and I appreciated the way Sobocinska weaves individual volunteers’ experiences through the story, such as that of Herb Feith, the first development volunteer from Australia. She shows how the image of serving in this way rarely matched the reality. Rather than blending in, volunteers were often conspicuous in their exclusivist social and domestic enclaves, some showing their obvious displeasure and unease in foreign settings. Others, like Feith, seemed to thrive.

Such is the picture of well-intentioned, neocolonialist do-goodism Sobocinska emphasizes that it was quite a relief to learn of a response from recipients that moved across a spectrum from acceptance and cooperation to suspicion, dislike, distrust, and political enmity that could and did lead to violence and expulsion. Sobocinska also addresses the internal critique that had emerged among disillusioned volunteers themselves by the 1970s, a sentiment that escalated across the Global South and spread back to the metropoles. On occasion, as in Indonesia, an initial optimistic accommodation soured largely as a result of changing internal political dynamics and a suspicion that Western intervention would see colonialism replaced by neocolonialism.

With great assuredness, Sobocinska presents her argument very clearly at the beginning and weaves it throughout. The reader is left with no doubt as to her sense of the highly ambiguous and problematic project that was the postwar humanitarian-development complex—and left feeling rather uneasy after having absorbed this detailed and deeply engaged account. As Sobocinska notes, its phoenix-like resurrection in more contemporary times— despite an identity crisis in the 1970s brought about by critique from within and without, including organized resistance movements in the Global South, that led to reassessment—seems to indicate the established attraction, durability, and cultural logic of the model. While the tensions at the heart of volunteering—between altruism and neocolonialism, image and reality, foreign volunteers and in-country populations—clearly led to some soul searching, they were ultimately never resolved. Saving the World reminds us of the long reach and tenacity of the Euro-American civilizing mission and its racialized and developmental hierarchies that work to depoliticize global inequality.

If Sobocinska is right, then this book is an invaluable and timely resource. Governments of all persuasion, nongovernmental organizations, corporations, and aid workers would do well to read this history and heed its lessons. Perhaps one of the most valuable long-term contributions of Sobocinska's book will be in educating a new generation of students to the pitfalls of Western altruism and intervention dressed up as voluntary aid. At the very least, it will enable some critical thinking about motivation and possible reception at the individual, state, and international levels. An urgent and important history, Saving the World will be a great teaching resource.