Volunteer Tourism: Popular Humanitarianism in Neoliberal Times, by Mary Mostafanezhad Farnham, Ashgate, 176 pp., EUR 74,00 ISBN: 978-1-4094-6953-7

Book review: Popular discourse surrounding the booming industry of Volunteer tourism (‘voluntourism’) locates the activity at the nexus of tourism and development. This has created polarised positions among both academics and development practitioners as to whether the activity contributes to the development of host communities or destructively perpetuates stereotypes of the ‘Other’, thus rendering invisible the structures of inequality. In this work, Mary Mostafanezhad attempts to locate voluntourism within broader geographical, political and economic processes, theorizing the activity as an articulation of globalization and neoliberal capitalism. As the author herself notes, the book goes beyond narrow debates as to whether voluntourism is ‘good’ or ‘bad’; rather it follows Vrasti’s (2012) suggestion that we disregard the development impact of voluntourism, and instead to focus on the central question of what the growth of the volunteer tourism industry says about broader cultural trends in contemporary western societies.