"Ett vitt och fritt tillträde att rädda världen?" : En studie av tidigare svenska volontärturisters resonemang kring maktstrukturer och koloniala spår i afrikanska utvecklingsländer

The following study investigates volunteerism as a possible form of reproduction of postcolonial structures. The purpose of this study is to investigate earlier Swedish volunteers’ argument about social effects generated by commercial volunteerism and possible macrostructures that can be distinguished as an effect of colonial history, in order to see if volunteer travel influenced their way of resonating around dichotomic relationships and colonial stereotypes in volunteerism. The study has been conducted from a qualitative research using loosely structured interviews and analyzes of two Swedish volunteer agencies 'web materials. The result shows that there is superiority in view of the fact that the Western volunteers ‘must’ help while Africa is in need of Western help. Furthermore, the study shows that volunteers believe that media play a vital role in the exotification of Africa where volunteers can reproduce a narrative of the vulnerable Africans, which could lead to neocolonialism. All volunteers agree that the volunteer rather than the host society profit from volunteer tourism and that it provides a volunteer empowerment. Conclusions that can be deduced from the result are that the resonance of power structures and social effects differs from the previous volunteers compared to the latter volunteers, but that all volunteers believe that volunteer travel is an egoistic act that primarily favors the Western volunteer. Arguments also shows that with time to few years of reflection, the former volunteers resonate differently around the power structures that exist compared to the latter volunteer who traveled less than a year ago