The Power of Voluntary Activity: Global Perspectives

This special issue explores voluntary activities from a global perspective. Questioning their
assumed universality and Western-centric foundations, the contributions examine voluntary
activity as a historically contingent social practice that carries different meanings and conse-
quences across time and space. Case studies from England, Lebanon, India, Slovenia, and Swit-
zerland demonstrate how voluntary activities can both challenge and reinforce existing struc-
tures. By tracing their diverse historical trajectories, the issue highlights the ambivalent power
of voluntary activity as a site of empowerment, obligation, and social transformation.

This article explores a phenomenon of local, voluntary security actors in Lebanon: the Qabaḍāyāt.
These strongmen were power brokers and agents of political mobilization within Lebanon’s sys-
tem of patronage and clientelism, connecting local populations with political elites and state
representatives. They constituted an important informal institution at the neighborhood level,
protecting the neighborhood against external threats, policing crime, settling disputes, and
preserving social order, traditions and morality. However, their local authority was based on
the use or threat of violence. The article positions the Qabaḍāyāt within the broader field of
research on voluntariness and voluntary engagement, focusing on their voluntary nature and
their ambivalent role as both protectors of the neighborhood and as violent actors who often
bypassed the rule of law. It traces their evolving role within Lebanon’s political system from its
independence in 1943 until their gradual disappearance during the civil war.

This article examines the voluntary work of Indian women in the Saroj Nalini Dutt Memorial As-
sociation (SNDMA), who organised and implemented rural development programmes for their
subaltern female contemporaries. It focuses on the underlying motivations and the social and
political circumstances that informed the work of the Bengal-based SNDMA from the 1920s to
the 1970s. The article discusses the importance of voluntary work in developing expertise and
establishing sustained careers in social work. It also examines the extent to which the volun-
teer organisation’s work led to paid employment for women. The article demonstrates how the
SNDMA’s work transformed rural areas into vital sites for gender-specific development, and how
Indian women established social services that had not previously existed, bridging the period
before and after 1947.

his article uses a longue-durée approach to discuss volunteering as a practice in Slovenia since
the mid-nineteenth century. It uses an example of volunteer fire departments, one of the old-
est voluntary organizations in the country and asks what firefighters in Slovenia recognized as
voluntary work during the imperial, interwar, and socialist periods? The article looks at wom-
en’s participation in fire departments to investigate whether the gradual inclusion of women
changed perception regarding volunteer work? In particular, the article focuses on the period
of socialist self-management, during which the idea of volunteering was based on the partici-
pation of people in voluntary actions to improve community life with a loose understanding of
individual gains. The chapter argues that while volunteer fire departments notably diversified
their membership, the meaning of volunteering remained linked to a national tradition rooted
in an earlier era when departments consisted exclusively of men who viewed their participation
as unpaid and honorable work.

This article argues that the availability of statistical information on volunteering resulted from
a variety of efforts to make previously obscured contributions to countries’ wealth and well-
being visible as productive activities. Since the late 1960s, economists from the Global South
and feminists criticized international economic standards for their Western and male bias. These
discontents led to the introduction of unpaid work as a new category of international labor
statistics and umbrella term for very diverse activities, such as subsistence farming, housework,
caring, and volunteering. This was the beginning of an epistemic revolution in data collection
with far-reaching consequences. It changed the semantics of the concept of labor and en-
hanced the visibility of women’s and volunteers’ contributions to societies’ well-being. But data
collection also made volunteering more susceptible to political management and economic
exploitation, and its classification under the general category unpaid work tended to blur the
distinction between voluntary and involuntary activities.

This article critically revisits John Locke’s concept of the liberal subject by examining its en-
tanglement with voluntary action, property, and colonial domination. Situating Locke’s political
thought within the dual context of 17th-century resistance to absolutist authority and colonial
expansion, Jürgen Martschukat argues that the Lockean subject was shaped through and le-
gitimized by systems of unfree labor, land appropriation, and racialized hierarchies. Drawing on
Locke’s theoretical writings and his active role in the colonization of Carolina, he shows how
voluntariness was both a principle of freedom and a mechanism of domination. Rather than
viewing exclusion and exploitation as contradictions of liberalism, Martschukat reveals their
structural integration into its formation. He calls for a historicized understanding of voluntari-
ness that recognizes its dual potential as a tool of subjugation and a resource for critique and
resistance.

Transimperial history is a vibrant emerging field that is rapidly maturing. However, for it to be-
come a distinct approach, it requires more than just momentum; it needs its own method-
ology—something transimperial history is still lacking. This article proposes the transimperial
prism as an analytic tool to address this gap. A prism refracts the seemingly uniform narratives
of single empires into a spectrum of shared practices, revealing how empires were inextricably
linked through connectivity, cooperation, and competition. It centers mechanisms of power
over “flows” and rethinks historical directionality, rejecting teleological narratives of globaliza-
tion. Addressing the question of whether transimperial history is “the new global,” we argue
that it is not a replacement but a necessary complement responding to the current “crisis of the
global” and the resurgence of imperial thinking.