ABSTRACT
Volunteer tourism is a twenty-first century materialization of popular humanitarianism where the geopolitics of hope are remapped in a commodity oriented fashion. The cultivation of hope through consumerism requires both a de-historicization as well as an apolitical structuring of uneven development economic inequality. The geopolitics of hope in volunteer tourism is mediated by imaginative geographies of possibility as it articulates with the geoeconomics of probability. Highlighting the geopolitics of hope in volunteer tourism experience can contribute to a more theoretically engaged tourism scholarship which goes beyond questions of impacts and motivations. If volunteer tourism is to achieve its broader goals of contributing to a more equal and just global civil society, its current focus on the individual and the sentimental must be broadened. This focus must also address the current policies and practices that ultimately sustain the political, economic and social inequalities on which volunteer tourism is based.
