Volunteering in Conflicts and Emergencies Theme Paper 4: More than a snapshot in time

This paper, the fourth of six preliminary working papers of Volunteering in Conflict and Emergencies (ViCE) initiative, reflects on the importance of time and temporalities when analysing volunteers’ roles in humanitarian emergencies. The paper argues that volunteering in conflicts or emergencies is part of longer histories of volunteering, built on longstanding relationships built between volunteers and communities over time; the rush to use local volunteers for a particular humanitarian response means these relationships and histories can be neglected and undermined; volunteering is a diverse mix of ways of coping with and responding to everyday and emergency challenges, whose richness and complexity should not be forgotten in a moment of crisis.