Celebrity Humanitarianism: Using Tropes of Engagement to Understand North/South Relations

Abstract

Celebrity humanitarianism has been transformed in its scope, scale, and organization in the last thirty years. Its flourishing has generated considerable academic interest from a wide variety of disciplines that share two characteristics. First, these studies are—unusually—well connected, which means that different disciplines have not tended to develop their own separate literatures, but learn from each other’s approaches. This makes it useful and important to identify ways different disciplinary approaches can complement each other. Second, most of this attention has focused on politics of celebrity humanitarianism in the global North. Yet focusing also on the South and on North/South relations will move the field forward. We argue that celebrity humanitarianism must be interpreted through the broader systems of which it is a part. We offer a heuristic typology of celebrity humanitarianism that continues to bridge between different disciplines and which identifies ways in which political science can complement existing studies. We also use this typology to refocus work on the politics of celebrity humanitarian relations away from merely Northern politics. This approach allows us to identify what sorts of politics and political solutions are being advocated by current forms of celebrity humanitarianism.

Full text

Celebrity Humanitarianism: Using Tropes
of Engagement to Understand North/
South Relations
Lisa Ann Richey and Dan Brockington
Celebrity humanitarianism has been transformed in its scope, scale, and organization in the last thirty years. Its flourishing has
generated considerable academic interest from a wide variety of disciplines that share two characteristics. First, these studies are—
unusually—well connected, which means that different disciplines have not tended to develop their own separate literatures, but
learn from each other’s approaches. This makes it useful and important to identify ways different disciplinary approaches can
complement each other. Second, most of this attention has focused on politics of celebrity humanitarianism in the global North. Yet
focusing also on the South and on North/South relations will move the field forward. We argue that celebrity humanitarianism must
be interpreted through the broader systems of which it is a part. We offer a heuristic typology of celebrity humanitarianism that
continues to bridge between different disciplines and which identifies ways in which political science can complement existing
studies. We also use this typology to refocus work on the politics of celebrity humanitarian relations away from merely Northern
politics. This approach allows us to identify what sorts of politics and political solutions are being advocated by current forms of
celebrity humanitarianism.
What is your favourite anecdote of celebrity
humanitarianism—Angelina Jolie’s work with
the UNHCR, Bono’s lobbying in Washington
to fight HIV/AIDS, or Jude Law’s peace promotion in
Afghanistan?
1
Or perhaps you recall Princess Diana’s work
to ban landmines, the concerts for Kampuchea and
Bangladesh (that preceded Live Aid), or Danny Kaye’s
work for UNICEF (Brockington 2014a)? Or, even further
back would you include Stanley’s famous greeting to
Livingstone as both, ostensibly, sought to liberate the
African continent from slavery.
2
Perhaps you have no
favourite but see celebrity as a sort of pathology, a problem
to be minimised (cf. Ferris 2007). But whether you
welcome, detest, or tolerate celebrities, their work at the
intersection between culture and formal politics for
humanitarian causes as proxy philanthropists, statesmen,
executives, and healers requires the attention of political
science (Street 2004).
Emerging alongside the post-Cold War expansion of
humanitarianism, celebrities perform on both sides of
what Michael Barnett terms the “politics of solidarity”
and the “politics of governance”(Barnett 2005). Matthew
Benwell and colleagues argue that “the diverse interven-
tions of celebrities in global issues can be usefully
examined precisely because they complicate some of the
core categories inherent to contemporary geopolitical
research”(Benwell, Dodds, and Pinkerton 2012, 407).
Some authors welcome the affordances that “celebrity
diplomacy”brings (Cooper 2008). Others deplore its
perpetuation of privilege, inequality, and exploitation
(Kapoor 2012). Some discern new, more narcissistic forms
of humanitarianism that celebrity support is associated
with (Chouliaraki 2013), or note that it represents a form
Lisa Ann Richey is Professor of Globalization at the
Copenhagen Business School and was Visiting Professor at the
Kenan Institute for Ethics at Duke University at the time of
writing (lri.msc@cbs.dk). She was the founding vice-president
of the Global South Caucus of the International Studies
Association (ISA). She has authored and edited books on the
aid business and humanitarian politics including Celebrity
Humanitarianism and North-South Relations: Politics,
Place and Power (Routledge, 2016); Brand Aid: Shopping
Well to Save the World with Stefano Ponte (University of
Minnesota Press, 2011) and Population Politics and De-
velopment: From the Policies to the Clinics (Palgrave
Macmillan, 2008).
Dan Brockington is the Director of the Sheffield Institute
for International Development at the University of Sheffield
(d.brockington@sheffield.ac.uk). He has conducted research
on conservation and development in East Africa as well as on
NGO networks in the UK and Sub-Saharan Africa. He has
authored and edited several books on conservation issues as
well as Celebrity and the Environment and Celebrity
Advocacy and International Development.
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of governmentality that brings Northern audiences into
alignment with international programs (Wilson 2011;
Goodman 2010, 2011). Others find that celebrity hu-
manitarianism perpetrates stereotypes, particularly about
the Northern Self and the humanitarian Other (Repo and
Yrjölä 2011).
Unfortunately, the attention so far has focussed most
on the politics in the global North. This, we argue, is
misplaced. Rather, it is more important to understand the
politics of celebrity humanitarianism as a form of North/
South relations and that doing so involves scholarly focus
on both North and South (Repo and Yrjölä 2011). That
requires more attention to the Southern celebrities,
Southern politics, and the consequences of humanitarian-
ism in the South and the North/South relations that
produce them. It requires understanding how celebrity
humanitarianism reproduces the hierarchies and inequal-
ities that constitute North/South relations.
We suggest that, following Brockington (2016), these
North/South relations and their politics can be broken
down into two different domains:
1. What contests, and what types of contest, over
financial, symbolic and discursive resources, and
representational space arise from celebrity humani-
tarianism? Which disputes are silenced or dimin-
ished?
2. What happens in these disputes? What changes as
a result of them? How do they distribute fortune and
misfortune? How shallow or profound are these
consequences? And what is left out, what does not
happen, as a result of these interventions? (Brock-
ington 2016)
To answer these questions we present a series of tropes
through which celebrity humanitarianism is frequently
conducted. Tropes are used in literature studies to refer to
the limited ways that a particular story, or group of people,
are represented (Wexler 2000, Spurr 1993). Tropes pro-
vide a lexicon, a way of talking and thinking about issues.
They denote particular sorts of performance, which share
certain characteristics, of both the celebrity humanitarian
and the audiences of their performances. In literary
analysis, tropes are often used in a negative context, in
that tropes perpetuate stereotypes and are the vehicles (and
substance) of discrimination and domination (for example
see Wexler 2000; Sahlins 1993; Stoler 1992). Identifying
tropes highlights the common themes upon which celeb-
rity humanitarianism tends to focus. It reveals the aspects
of humanitarianism which are silenced or diminished.
They also help us to see how celebrity humanitarianism fits
with other aspects of the politics of North/South relations,
and so to understand what changes, and what injustices do
not change, as a result of these interventions.
We hold that celebrity humanitarianism, and by
extension celebrity politics, cannot be understood by
focusing on the individuals themselves. Rather, the
political performances of celebrity humanitarianism must
be interpreted through the institutions that produce
them, the interpretive resources of their audiences, and
their utility to broader political and corporate agendas.
This framework is important for political scientists as it
will help to situate the contributions of this discipline in
relation to others. Furthermore, our case material and
literature review will introduce existing work to new
audiences and suggest research questions that political
scientists are well-placed to examine.
We first define the key concepts and debates from
literatures studying celebrities in advocacy, develop-
ment, and humanitarian endeavors. Then, we examine
the central approaches to the study of celebrity human-
itarianism, to situate political scientists’work within in
them. Next, we develop a heuristic typology of celebrity
humanitarianism to explain celebrity interventions span-
ning North and South. Finally, we use the typology to
highlight some challenges for political scientists and
international relations scholars who seek to understand
the politics of celebrity humanitarianism and North/
South relations.
Defining and Situating Celebrity
Humanitarianism
Some definitions of celebrity focus on the amount of
public interest in them. From politics, Lena Partzsch
suggests that a celebrity is a person with an “above-
average public profile,”which is too inclusive for an
analytical category (Partzsch 2018, 231). For most ana-
lysts, celebrity is not simply about the amount of attention,
but its nature,organization, and consequences. There are
tens of thousands of celebrities on the professional contact
databases. The vast majority are unknown to the vast
majority of people. Audiences for celebrity are often niche
and small. Audience size does not help us understand what
makes celebrity work.
Graeme Turner’sdefinition (from cultural studies)
hinges on the nature of interest from the public: when
a person’s private life attracts more attention than their
professional life, then they are a celebrity (Turner 2004,
3). This assumes a distinction between the personal and
professional which is hard to maintain, for example, with
musicians, politicians, royalty, and reality TV stars.
Another approach holds that the nature of celebrity is
to commercialise both professional and personal aspects,
in order to build a brand. Celebrities are created through
a process of “celebrification”linking privatization, per-
sonalization, and commodification (Couldry and Mark-
ham 2007; Driessens 2013b; Gamson 1994). Brockington
defines celebrity as “sustained public appearances which
are materially beneficial, and where the benefits are at least
partially enjoyed by people other than the celebrity
themselves, by stakeholders whose job it is to manage
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the appearance of that celebrity”(Brockington 2014a, xxi).
This definition recognizes that celebrity is a product of
a variety of social and economic forces and a particular
configuration of institutions, companies, and commercial
interests. Celebrity, as the histories make clear, is an
industry (Gamson 1994; Schickel 2000; Braudy 1997).
Celebrities are the employees of an industry that manages
and produces fame. Part of the push towards celebrity
humanitarianism is that it provides more opportunities to
be seen and build brand.
3
However, an industrial approach to celebrity does not
help us to understand how it works symbolically, semi-
otically, hermeneutically or, crucially, politically, in the
sense of providing power, authority, and legitimacy to
bring—or prevent—change. Olivier Driessens’contribu-
tion here is useful (Driessens 2013b). Drawing on
Bourdieu’sfield theory, he argues that celebrity constitutes
a distinct form of capital that he calls “recognisability”that
is based on “recurrent media representations or accumu-
lated media visibility”(Driessens 2013b, 550-1). Dries-
sens argues that celebrity capital works like other fungible
capitals and can move across different fields such as
economic capital (money), social capital (networks),
symbolic capital (recognition), or political capital (political
power). This characterizes a long-term process of “societal
and cultural changes”termed “celebritization”that should
be analyzed on par with globalization, individualization or
mediatization (Driessens 2013a).
Celebrity humanitarianism is part of an evolving
history of humanitarianism. International relations schol-
ars use “humanitarianism”with a specific reference to the
1864 Geneva Convention’s recognition in international
law of humanitarian principles to govern the moral
practice of war (Barnett 2005). But the nature of
humanitarian space has fluctuated over time and in
different ways expanding notably after the Cold War
(Barnett 2005; Barnett and Weiss 2008; Fassin 2012;
Boltanski 1999; De Waal 1997). The remit of humani-
tarian activities has changed to include political and
military interventions and not mere relief. And as the
remit has changed, so have its partnerships, including the
military and the private sector (including celebrity in-
dustries). As Brockington has shown, the organization of
celebrity humanitarianism has entailed a radical reorienta-
tion of the sector towards working with celebrity (as we
will describe, following Brockington 2014a, 2014b). It has
also been accompanied by a new zeitgeist of humanitarian
action, that Chouliaraki calls “post-humanitarianism”that
focuses less attention on needy others, and more on the
humanitarians’fulfillment of their own life goals (Chou-
liaraki 2010, 2012, 2013; see also Walton 2018, 652).
Celebrity humanitarians have moved beyond acting as
“accessories”in what has been termed the “humanitarian-
industrial complex,”and as we will demonstrate, their
performances of humanitarianism reproduce fundamental
inequalities that undergird North/South relations (Hoff-
man and Weiss 2018).
Debates over the character of humanitarianism center
on its politics (Barnett and Weiss 2008; Richey 2018).
Roberto Belloni argues that humanitarianism serves to
support the interests of powerful elites in ways that
reproduce inequalities between North and South. In doing
so, it undermines the moral basis of human rights that
justify humanitarian intervention in the first place (Belloni
2007). Studying celebrity humanitarianism can add to this
with insights into several debates about humanitarian
performance and politics (Weiss 2016). One could explore
it from the perspective of the debate about humanitarian-
ism and neutrality. To what extent does celebrity human-
itarianism resonate with performances meant to engage
particular audiences—and therefore sides—in disputes or
alter the nature of humanitarianism’s (performed) neu-
trality? Second, is celebrity humanitarianism a means of
governing the management of conflict and crisis? Does it
inhibit structural change? As Brockington has argued, both
tame and unruly, unmanaged interventions are possible.
The structures that produce celebrity humanitarianism
can be seen as attempts to control and marshal the
unruliness of celebrity intervention (Brockington 2016).
Third, what is the broader political economy of celebrity
humanitarianism; how is its authenticity cultivated?
Celebrity humanitarianism is different from celebrity
advocacy. Celebrity humanitarianism requires a needy
“Other”— it is something that one actor does for another
person. Advocacy is taking up a cause and amplifying it in
the public discourse, which could be about issues across
the political spectrum that engage the celebrity’s own
communities or those of Others (cf. Brockington 2014a,
xxi). This distinction has important consequences for the
study of celebrity politics in the context of North/South
relations. Celebrity humanitarianism becomes one of the
means by which North/South relations are maintained and
renewed. North/South, as Richey has argued, is less of
a geographic description than a reference to inequalities
and perceived hierarchies (Richey 2016). Accordingly, the
performance of celebrity humanitarianism on the differ-
ential stages that North/South relations afford helps to
construct and maintain these inimical differences.
The history of the two forms, celebrity advocacy and
celebrity humanitarianism, are, however, intertwined.
Brockington argues that the Victorian era was a moment
when humanitarian causes lead the production of fame,
in that many of the greatest figures celebrated in the late
nineteenth century were celebrated for their contribution
to good causes overseas (ending slavery in Africa,
spreading Christianity, serving wounded soldiers).
4
Con-
versely after World War II, when the humanitarian
apparatus expanded, celebrity engagement dwindled, with
celebrity diplomat Danny Kaye’s work for UNICEF and
the 1954 initiation of the Goodwill Ambassadors program
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being the exception, not the rule. Engagements expanded
in the 1970s (UNICEF expanded celebrity operations
then) and multiplied in the 1980s with UNHCR joining
in and a number of high-profile events (Nelson Mandela’s
birthday concerts, the Band Aid moment). By the early
Noughties, UN organizations had sixteen official celebrity
ambassadors and documented fifteen different UN titles
bestowed onto celebrity humanitarians (Fall and Tang
2006). Today, the most comprehensive (but still incom-
plete) database records 1,240 celebrities working on
disaster relief, 1,684 on poverty, and 1,414 on human
rights.
5
Situating Political Science Approaches in the Study of
Celebrity Humanitarianism
Political scientists have contributed three kinds of inquiry
around celebrity humanitarianism—descriptive over-
views, qualitative case studies, and quantitative analyses.
Examples of the former include the work of Daryl West
and Andrew Cooper (West 2008; West and Orman 2003;
Cooper 2008). Detailed case studies examine the limits,
consequences, or legitimacy of particular interventions
(e.g., Partzsch 2018; Majic 2017; Meyer and Gamson
1995; Tsaliki, Frangonikolopoulos, and Huliaras 2011).
Notably, contributions to Cooper, Dobson, and Wheel-
er’s collection address celebrity diplomacy in non-Western
contexts (East Asia, Russia, and the Arab world; Cooper,
Dobson, and Wheeler 2017, 316). Majic’s interpretation
of an initiative against human trafficking demonstrates
that celebrities are limited through a framing of cause and
effect that leaves out Southern actors and global structures
(Majic 2017). Quantitative studies measure the impacts of
specific interventions. These have been particularly in-
sightful with respect to domestic political behavior or
health outcomes. But measurable consequences of celeb-
rity interventions on measurable behaviors and political
outcomes on far flung causes are noticeable in their
absence.
6
These different contributions also vary according to
the emphasis given to individuals and to the mechanisms
through which celebrity is created, produced, managed,
and sold. Richey and Budabin are able to explain the
emergence of actor Ben Affleck’s humanitarian work, and
interpret its consequences and contradictions, by explor-
ing how it has been fostered by different organizations in
both the United States and the Democratic Republic of
Congo (Budabin and Richey forthcoming). Dan Brock-
ington’s study of celebrity advocacy hinges on the remark-
able re-structuring of the humanitarian and development
sector in the UK in the last eighteen years, leading to its
radical re-orientation to work with celebrities (Brocking-
ton 2014a, 2014b). The management of celebrity human-
itarianism has become a niche sector in the celebrity
industries and a specific funded aspect of humanitarian
organizations. The history and growth of celebrity hu-
manitarianism (and the broader celebrity industries them-
selves) become much more intelligible through this
structural approach.
7
Approaching the mechanisms of celebrity humanitar-
ianism runs against the grain of typical interpretations in
which the celebrity plays the role of hero. Looking to the
system, rather than the individual, helps us to discern the
driving forces that produce celebrity humanitarianism,
how it is performed, and how authenticity is constructed.
Authenticity is not some sort of inherent characteristic
that precedes public engagement. It is produced in the
public domain and performed for public consumption.
Brockington’s work shows that celebrities perform au-
thenticity through expert or experiential authority (knowl-
edge and experience); affinity (similarity with others);
empathy (shared emotion with others as a result of similar
experiences; and sympathy (emotions provoked by the
Other’s fate; Brockington 2014a, 106). Celebrity authen-
ticity can then be adjudicated according to their perform-
ances (Jerslev 2014; Budabin, Mubanda Rasmussen, and
Richey 2017). In this respect, the carefully constructed
authenticity of celebrity humanitarians precisely follows
Rai’s account of the authenticity of “felicitous”political
performances in the public sphere (Rai 2015).
A second approach to celebrity humanitarianism
focuses on its politics. Many contributions build on John
Street’s foundational contribution to understanding ce-
lebrity politics as performance, distinguishing between
politicians who instrumentalize aspects of celebrity (CP1)
and celebrities who enter into the field of politics and
international diplomacy (CP2) (Street 2012, 2004, 2003,
2002; Street, Hague, and Savigny 2008). Building on
Street, Mark Wheeler calls for a better understanding of
how “a celebritization of politics has brought about
alternative forms of political engagement”(Wheeler
2013, 170). This requires attention to the informal, and
performative, aspects of power, recognizing that celebrity
politics does not stand outside of the “normal”or “non-
celebrated”politics but are entering into, constructing,
and affecting pre-existing politics (James Brassett, cited in
Richey and Christiansen 2018).
Brockington argues that celebrity interventions signal
a new aspect of elite rule in post-democratic contexts
(Brockington 2014a). Elitist celebrity humanitarianism is
cheaper and easier than mass populist interventions, as it
involves only a few selected players at higher levels of
policy making and a rarefied realm of informed, educated
policy-makers and lobbyists uncluttered by widespread
participation that makes elite decision making easier. For
some, this way of doing politics is just too repugnant.
8
Ilan
Kapoor (2012) draws heavily on
ˇ
Ziˇzek’s psychoanalytical
approach to argue that celebrity humanitarianism should
be understood as a spectacular celebration of corporate
power, apparently urgent charity, and the seductions of
celebrity. This approach limits the politics of celebrity
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humanitarianism to existing only as effects created by the
unjust exploitative capitalist relations that underpin celeb-
rity (Kapoor 2012).
A third, hermeneutic approach examines transformative
possibilities as read from key humanitarian texts. Chou-
liaraki shows celebrity humanitarian performances have
shifted from support for grand narratives of solidarity to
more individualist projects of self-fulfillment (Chouliaraki
2010, 2012, 2006). Her analysis is concerned with seeking
a politics of justice but is limited by the fundamental
narcissism that makes humanitarianism possible only when
it is linked to self-fulfillment or lifestyle choices.
These different approaches are useful for the framings
that they offer to political science studies of celebrity
humanitarianism. For example, the quantitative
approaches of Atkinson and DeWitt or of Thrall and
colleagues can be read as illustrations of the idea that
celebrity activism’s elite politics reproduces disconnection
with the public (Thrall et al. 2008; Atkinson and DeWitt
2018). Chouliaraki’s work suggests ways of approaching
legitimacy, authority and authenticity other than in terms
of the international apparatus governing humanitarianism.
The typology we offer next has a similar goal. We want to
provide a useful framing against which diverse case studies
of celebrity humanitarianism can be read in order to help
understand their political consequences and implications.
It will suggest, as we show in the conclusion, a number of
conceptual and methodological challenges for political
scientists to take on.
Tropes of Celebrity Humanitarianism
It should be clear from our analysis that for celebrity
humanitarianism to work, humanitarian values and prac-
tical support to particular places and people must be
performed (Hoffman and Weiss 2008, 281; Thompson
2014, 106; Street 2004). As Rai has argued, performance
determines “how . . . representative claims are made and
what makes them legitimate”(Rai 2015, 1180). Unlike
factual claims, it is the “mode of performance in which
individuals and institutions (actors) make claims to represent
and affect their audience (the represented)”that constitute
the acceptability of claims to representativeness (Rai 2015,
1180). Thus, to understand its politics, we must study its
performance. The visual turn in international relations is
helpful here, as the images of celebrity humanitarianism can
hold more power and speak more about their politics than
the texts (Hansen 2014; Kearns 2017; Bleiker 2001). We
have used performance as the basis for our tropes.
Methodologically, our tropes are an inductively drawn
template of ideal types from published research. We are
engaging in what Alexander Wendt terms “constitutive
analysis”in that our work “seeks to establish conditions of
possibility for objects or events by showing what they are
made of and how they are organized”(Wendt 1999).
Constitutive analysis allows us to capture the key ways in
which celebrity is performed, and these tropes then
capture the avenues for action and humanitarian solutions,
which then become possible. Substantively, our tropes
demonstrate the interactive effects between individual
actors, their inferred audience responses, and their consti-
tutive apparatus.
9
In the following discussion, we will
describe six tropes of celebrity humanitarianism based on
the performance of their solution to humanitarian prob-
lems. These are summarized in table 1.
Aid Celebrities
When aid celebrities enter the realm of international
development and humanitarianism, they bring the mo-
dalities of celebrity with them. They “embody a manufac-
tured consensus, let simple moral truths substitute for
rational debate, and thus manage the affective needs of
those who would solve the world’s problems”(Richey and
Ponte 2011, 11). Aid celebrities become advisors who are
trusted to speak on issues that extend beyond the actual
scope of their expertise, and their presence is invoked to
stand in for important beliefs and social values about
North/South relations. They embody classical develop-
mentalist perspectives that deem parts of the world to need
a“big push”to fulfill teleological notions of progress, and,
as such, they tackle technical problems better than political
ones. Being an aid celebrity does not imply any lack of
expertise. In fact, it is on the basis of the high profile of
their work as experts that aid celebrities came to be
celebrated in the first place. The high level of achievement
of their expert profile provides the justification for the
public interest in their personae. They merge achieved and
ascribed status distinguishing them from other stars who
simply engage in do-gooding (Cooper 2008; Rojek 2001).
Our exemplar case, Jeffrey Sachs, is the economist
renowned for his initiatives to eradicate poverty (Richey
and Ponte 2008). His academic credentials are superlative.
Trained at Harvard, he became full professor of economics
there in 1983 when he as just 29 years old. But his fame
reaches far beyond the academy. As Richey and Ponte
summarized, “He was deemed ‘most important economist
in the world”by The New York Times Magazine and “the
world’s best-known economist”’ by Time magazine’
(Richey and Ponte 2008, 717). As he became more well
known for his interventions in African poverty, Time also
listed him as one of the most influential people in the
world in 2004 and 2005. Bono has characterized Sachs as
the “Jimi Hendrix”of the “Woodstock of Global Health,”
and Angelina Jolie described him as “the world’s leading
expert on extreme poverty”in the MTV production of
their joint visit to a Millennium Village in Kenya. Yet, as
Wilson has observed, Sachs’contributions to minimizing
the harm caused by poor economic policies and interna-
tional interventions are somewhat schizoid (Wilson 2014).
As an advocate of “shock therapy”in the 1990s in the
former USSR, he facilitated the enforcement of policies
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which caused misery, illness, and death for tens of millions
of people (Wilson 2014). He has since reinvented himself
as an advocate for international aid.
In the aid celebrity performances, the problems of
humanitarianism can be solved by simply adding more
humanitarian technologies. Sachs’demonstration project
that ending poverty is possible provides a quintessential
example of this view. The Millennium Villages Project was
a multi-sector rural development project that operated in
ten African countries between 2005–2015 to achieve the
Millennium Development Goals. The project’sfinal
evaluation has recently found that in spite of its consider-
able investment of funds from public and private donors,
the project met only one-third of its goals (Mitchell et al.
2018). Together with the final project evaluation, The
Lancet published a response piece entitled, ‘Lessons from
the Millennium Villages Project: A Personal Perspective’
written by Jeffrey Sachs. Through the reflections of an
expert economist reviewing a large-scale development
failure, Sachs concludes:
(1) Set clear targets to 2030. (2) Identify key interventions and
budgetary needs. (3) Form teams from national to local level
prepared to work in an integrated manner. (4) Establish real-
time information systems. And (5) don’t expect a quiet life!
Rapid changes in technology, and even in geopolitics, will force
considerable innovations, systems changes, and improvisation,
between now and 2030. (Sachs 2018, 474)
Sachs’faith in targets, planned interventions, managed
budgets, integrated teams, and systems to harness tech-
nology in the service of good politics is consistent with his
aid celebrity modality. Humanitarian crises and protracted
developmental inequalities are solvable. According to
Sachs, “Africa’s problems are tougher, but solvable”and
“Africa is a great puzzle for a development economist and
a great challenge for all of us involved in policy to try to do
something about it.”
10
For the aid celebrity, the problems of humanitarianism
come from a lack of resources, expertise, and technology.
Sachs, for example, was quick to blame the failures of the
Millennium Villages Project on inadequate aid flows,
even though aid accounts for relatively little of the money
flowing into poor countries (Sachs 2018). Aid celebrities’
ideal type of technical solution rests in doing development
as it has traditionally been done, but doing more of it. This
emphasis means that development becomes a series of
technical, not political problems, and not something that
might reflect, for example, unequal power structures
underlying North/South relations.
Table 1
A typology of celebrity humanitarianism
Ideal Type Humanitarian Solution Examples
Aid Celebrities
Technology
Jeffrey Sachs, Paul Farmer, Muhammad
Yunus, Malala Yousafzai
The problems of humanitarianism come from
a lack of resources, expertise and technology,
not political problems.
Global Mothers
Love
Angelina Jolie, Madonna, Princess Diana,
Audrey Hepburn
Global mothers demonstrate good intentions,
compassionate actions and love. They embody
hope through a mixture of feelings, beauty, and
support for families and children.
Strong Men Doing
Good
Power
Sean Penn, Brad Pitt, Ben Affleck, Danny
Glover
This trope rehabilitates celebrities’
hypermasculinity through the performance of
care for suffering strangers. It situates
humanitarian politics as an extension of
masculine identities.
Diplomats
Institutions
Pu Cuxin, Danny Kaye, Luciano Pavarotti,
Yao Ming, Bono
The diplomats perform within the boundaries of
formal politics, as representatives for
institutions at all levels.
Entrepreneurs
Money
Sophie Ndaba, Richard Branson, Elon
Musk, Ted Turner
Promote their business successes as the
grounds for justifying their “giving back” as
celebrity humanitarians.
Afropolitans
Awareness
Hella Joof, Teju Cole, Taiye Selasi
Raising global awareness of racially-based
injustices, without relying on identities as
“raced.”
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Global Mothers
Global mothers perform the politics of affection for
children around the globe, both actual children and the
childlike desires of adults as well. Global motherhood is
the most explicitly gendered category of celebrity hu-
manitarian, as it involves a performance of motherly love
as the archetype for solving humanitarian problems. The
North/South positioning of the enslaved and colonized as
children who need “care”in the cloak of domination
lingers behind an entrancing feminized beauty. In contrast
to the aid celebrity’s reliance on impact, expertise, or
technology, the global mother is all about demonstrations
of good intentions, compassionate actions, and love. Jo
Littler describes how the celebrity humanitarianism of
Angelina Jolie, Mother Theresa, and Princess Diana are
performances of the celebrity “soul”in which “the
confession of truly caring”presents itself as “plugging the
gap”of structural inequalities in global social systems
(Littler 2008, 247-8; see also Repo and Yrjölä 2011).
According to the official hagiographical accounts,
Angelina developed her interest in humanitarian work
in 2001 when she was working in Cambodia on her
Hollywood blockbuster film Lara Croft: Tomb Raider.
11
Since then, she has met with refugees and internally
displaced people in more than twenty countries. In their
study of gender politics in celebrity humanitarianism,
Repo and Yrjölä document that:
Jolie’s primary humanitarian credentials were in the discourses of
motherhood which intertwined with her humanitarian work . . .
She was a humanitarian because she was a mother, and vice versa,
producing humanitarianism as a fulfilment of a White feminine
destiny. As a sort of “mother-without-borders,”Jolie constructed
a model of what became referred to as the “rainbow family’’
(Repo and Yrjölä 2011, 50).
At times her maternity bordered on holiness, as she
“wears a scarf and kneels among the needy like Mother
Teresa”(Repo and Yrjölä 2011, 50).
In person, and in media representations, she draws
attention because of her performance of care. While on
the ground she impresses with her ultimate humanity, it
is the good mother that is praised in her professional work
as a celebrity humanitarian. In the Democratic Republic
of Congo in 2003, her host, a long-experienced human-
itarian worker, explained how impressed they were with
Angelina: “They came to see a movie star but left with
a sense that she was very serious about her job and was
more on the human side of things.”
12
Mary Mostafanezhad’s ethnography among three
NGOs in Northern Thailand documents how Angelina’s
global-mother humanitarianism is translated into the
practices and representations in photographs on social
media by volunteer tourists (Mostafanezhad 2013). The
images of “often Anglo-European, young, and vigorous
volunteers are depicted in protective poses with children”
in ways that create “an illusion of reciprocity which is
highlighted by their innocuous poses of motherhood.”
Interestingly, this global motherhood resonates with the
Burmese refugees themselves who are reported to state that
“I’ve heard that [Jolie] adopted two kids. It means she
saved their lives. People like her must have a soul filled
with compassion to save all refugees”(Mostafanezhad
2016, 28).
The refugees’interpretations of Jolie’s role with the
UNHCR were mediated by their own local gender regimes
of power in which women who fulfill their traditional role
in managing the household are idealized (Mostafanezhad
2016, 32). Thus, Jolie’s performance as the global mother
was able to mobilize what Mostafanezhad terms a “geo-
politics of hope”that shifts attention both locally and
globally away from the ongoing political disputes over the
UN’s insufficient curbing of human rights atrocities in the
global South, to Jolie’s sentimental encounters with in-
dividual refugees and the nature of her caring soul.
Jolie’s work as the global mother also characterizes her
non-humanitarian work as an actress and film director.
Jolie described her recent critically-acclaimed war film,
13
‘First they Killed My Father’(2017) about the rule of the
Khmer Rouge in Cambodia from 1975–1979:
The film is about family. It’s what would your family would go
through? What would you do for your family to get through this?
We have to show the horrors but it’s not about the horrors. This
was supposed to be a beautiful film that was appealing to people.
We wanted to show the beauty of the children and the country
through the war.
14
The global mother trope serves to reinforce the
affective turn in international relations where feelings,
beauty, family and children are featured as the “hope”in
geopolitics. Their ideal type of “caring”solution to
humanitarianism is love. However, it comes with a warn-
ing. In North/South relations, actors in the global South
have been historically read as “children”who need
education through the institutions of governance and
democracy. In this context the global mother works
effectively because of its resonance with an infantilizing
history. Global mothers are not as global as they would like
to be. They are white women from the North performing
roles demanded of them by northern audiences.
Strong Men Doing Good
The humanitarian trope of strong men doing good
successfully rehabilitates celebrities’hypermasculinity
through the performance of care for suffering strangers
(Chouliaraki 2006). Strong men doing good focuses
celebrity humanitarianism on “the man question”in
North/South relations, what Zalewski and Parpart identify
as power “with a ‘masculinized face’—that recirculates and
makes invisible the constitutive evidence of violence in the
everyday and in the international”(Zalewski and Parpart
2008). These caring actions move beyond celebrity
advocacy and engage in hands-on interventions.
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Annika Bergmann-Rosamond documents the case of
Sean Penn, the “bad boy of the U.S. entertainment
industry with a reputation for disregarding authority”
(Bergman-Rosamond 2016, 154).
15
She notes that “Penn
does not limit himself to speaking out on behalf of distant
others, but participates in heavy-duty rescue and recon-
struction work, which adds authenticity, masculinity and
radicalism to his story”(Bergman-Rosamond 2016, 154).
Penn’s work as a celebrity humanitarian has been most
notable in New Orleans after hurricane Katrina and in
Haiti after the 2010 earthquake. While some might argue
that only Haiti represents humanitarianism in the global
South, we would dispute this perspective. Both places are
linked by “historical experiences, cultural heritage and
embedded practices of racism”and become spaces where
North/South relations play out. In these crises, Penn
brought a masculine rescue story of self-effacing celebrity
humanitarianism of just “lending a hand”(Bergman-
Rosamond 2016, 150-157). All the while, social media
documented Penn motoring around the bayou of New
Orleans looking for people to rescue, in his words, “on
a personal crusade to save victims.”
16
Sean Penn’s hands-on celebrity humanitarianism is
a critical component of the strong men-doing-good trope.
While the global mothers feel, suffer and hope with their
humanitarianism, men must be acting, literally, with their
own hands. After the Haiti earthquake, a photograph of
Penn, strain in his face and biceps bulging under the
weight of a gunny sack over his shoulders, circulated across
media forms as evidence of his “actually solving”human-
itarian problems with his own hands. Yet as Bergman-
Rosamond concludes, “media images of him employing
his physical, masculine strength when carrying food to the
needy are not innocent, but contribute to the gendering of
his celebrity activism”(Bergman-Rosamond 2016, 164).
A popular newspaper’s introduction exemplifies this
power: “Sean Penn no longer lives in a tent, surrounded by
some 40,000 desperate people camped on a muddy golf
course. And he no longer rushes about the capital with
a Glock pistol tucked in his waistband, hefting bags of
donated rice and warning darkly of a worsening human-
itarian crisis.”.
17
The pistol, the hefting, and the dark
warnings of humanitarian crisis are all justification for
interventions by strong men, arriving from afar, to do
good.
The trope of strong men doing good situates human-
itarian politics as an extension of masculinist domesticity:
acting, doing, making, and moving as the remedies for
humanitarian need. Their ideal type of interventionist
solution for humanitarian crises lies in the power to act.
This leaves little room for waiting, listening, stock-taking,
collaboration, and coordination of efforts—all of which
take time. Hence, the humanitarian imperative that “lives
are at stake”calls forth a quick draw response from the
strong men doing good. This form of celebrity humani-
tarianism is most effective in situations in which the cause
can be justified as “natural”and when the input needed is
short term. However, the politics of the strong men are
more difficult to institutionalize, whether that is toward
multinational actions like the UN or longer-term de-
velopment work done in collaborations between public
and private sectors.
Diplomats
Celebrity humanitarians performing North/South rela-
tions with “glamourous conformity”embody the trope of
diplomats (Cooper 2008, 18, cited in Wheeler 2013,
147; see also Wheeler’s 2011 account). This archetype is
the oldest in the celebrity humanitarian typology and was
the first to be noticed and studied as part of the informal
realm of diplomacy (Cooper 2008). Most celebrity
diplomats trace the archetype to the work of Danny
Kaye, the first UN Goodwill Ambassador. Kaye’spart-
nerships with UNICEF helped to construct a new
humanitarian image of the UN and links the diplomat
simultaneously with national politics at home and with
global politics (Wheeler 2011). As celebrity human-
itarians, the diplomats are those who perform within
the boundaries of formal politics, as representatives for
institutions at all levels and as informal brokers between
formal political actors from public and private sectors.
The diplomats are most effective when the context or
institution is already politicized, and they are able
charismatically to link opposing sides in a political debate
to unite under a humanitarian mission.
In China, HIV/AIDS was one of the first causes that
celebrities were allowed to endorse, and they found
themselves working alongside global and local organiza-
tions ranging from UNAIDS, IFRC, and the China Red
Cross to the Gates Foundation (Hood 2016, 107). Our
exemplar here is actor Pu Cunxin, who comes from
a family of actors in Beijing and sings, acts, and recites
poetry in Chinese television series, dramas, and popular
films. He has become the most publicized “AIDS hero”in
China for his dedication and work promoting HIV
education and greater social acceptance for people living
with AIDS. In spite of holding no formal educational
credentials in health, Cunxin is assigned a more author-
itative voice than comparable Western celebrity health
advocates: he educates state leaders about HIV/AIDS,
endorses official campaigns, and serves as an advisor on
HIV publications. Hood argues that “Pu Cunxin’s
uniqueness derives from his conformity with state visions
of celebrity involvement in the promotion of public
health, while simultaneously raising tacit social criticism
of state inadequacy in the same arena”(Hood 2016, 108).
His handsome public persona is charismatic, soft
spoken, aware, and always impeccably dressed, and is
“imbued with qualities that exceed the expected norms of
human behavior”(Huang 2003, 72, cited in Hood 2016,
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119). Cunxin perfectly embodies the diplomat trope of
celebrity humanitarianism through his consistent, loyal
dedication to working to solve humanitarian problems
within the existing system. Also, Cunxin is known for
bringing other actors into the humanitarian space, partic-
ularly big businesses and wealthy philanthropists.
The celebrity diplomat, like Pu Cunxin, highlights the
vacuity of theorizations of celebrity as an amoral category
that provides a blank repository for reflecting audience
desires—being merely known for their “well-knownness”
as Boorstin’s seminal work suggested (Boorstin 1992). The
trope of the celebrity humanitarian diplomat points us to
a more contextualized, materially, and morally grounded
theorization of celebrity.
The ideal type solution of diplomats to humanitarian
dilemmas is through negotiation within institutions. The
celebrity humanitarian diplomat must perform within the
larger realm of humanitarian diplomacy. While definitions
of humanitarian diplomacy vary, Egeland writes that
“humanitarian diplomacy is to a large extent, the art of
facilitating the optimal relief, reaching through the best
channels and actors, without delay and waste, to those in
greatest need”(Egeland 2013, 4). Determining “optimal,”
“best,”and “greatest need”is always already laden in
politics, regardless of the supposed cause of the humanitar-
ian crisis. Thus, celebrity humanitarians in the diplomatic
trope are also defining the politics of North/South in-
tervention and justification, and they are doing this in terms
of pre-existing political structures, both local and global.
Indeed, as Brockington has shown, the reorganization of
celebrity humanitarianism, and the niche economy it has
adopted within the celebrity industries, exists partly to
manage the potential unruliness of celebrity interventions
and to ensure that they serve pre-existing structures
(Brockington 2014a, 2016; Richey and Ponte 2011).
Entrepreneurs
The close links between celebrity humanitarians and
business are well known, including the interlocking
structures of commodification and marketing that pro-
mote celebrity, business, and development NGO brands
(Brockington 2014a, 2014b). Also, many celebrities
donate money to charities, both their own and those of
others, and publicize this generosity. However, the entre-
preneurs are most public in their promotion of their
business successes as the grounds for justifying their
“giving back”as celebrity humanitarians.
Danai Mupotsa’s research on one of South Africa’s most
popular contemporary soap opera stars, Sophie Ndaba,
illustrates the celebrity humanitarian entrepreneur per-
fectly.
Sophie Ndaba, tagged “socialite,”celebrity actress, soap opera
star and entrepreneur comes on screen wearing an elaborate red
gown to welcome us to her special “thanksgiving”celebration
which will support her charity work with orphans in South
Africa.
18
. . . She grew up in the foster care and orphanage system
and aspired to one day be a social worker or a nurse and help
others like herself. . . . Three hundred and fifty of South Africa’s
celebrity elite are sitting patiently in neat rows separated by an
aisle, to receive the “sudden surprise”that on this very special
occasion Sophie will marry her beau, Reverend Keith Harring-
ton. . . . Sophie later explains to the crew from Top Billing
19
that
this was an important way for her to marry, she grew up poor and
she wanted to share her wealth with others. (Mupotsa 2016, 88)
South Africa provides an exemplary case for thinking
about the opportunities and exploitation inherent in
North/South relations. Throughout the historical periods
of apartheid and post-apartheid, “‘black women’s’activ-
ism also included the production of images tied to
consumption, beauty and fashion, as well as charity, social
uplift and entrepreneurship”(Mupotsa 2016, 89). Ndaba
starred as “Queen Moroka”on the soap opera Generations.
The life of the celebrity and that of her character were
intertwined in the performances of individual self-making,
success, and giving back. Ndaba’s personal story was one of
“overcoming”through successful consumption, and her
achieved status as a full “citizen”was signaled through the
culturally-appropriate gesture of holding a big wedding
that was also a charity event (Mupotsa 2016, 91).
Ndaba’s entrepreneurial celebrity humanitarianism
involves a public performance of “fixing”of the self
through charity for others, and the “self-styling”that is
on display is not simply over-consumption by a famous
star, but must be read in the context of black South African
women’s appropriation of signs and symbols of freedom
(see Magubane 2004, cited in Mupotsa 2016, 99). The
entrepreneur is about providing business solutions to
humanitarian problems, but more than that, it is the
performance of “by-the-bootstraps self-creation”(Peck
2012). The entrepreneur in humanitarian crises is
expected to work effectively within market relations to
maximize profit and then “give back”to help those in
need. Thus, the ideal type business solution rests in money
as humanitarianism becomes a philanthropic cause. The
individualization of responsibility, the focus on practices
not on intentions, and the importance of performing
a humanitarian “style”are characteristics of this trope.
Afropolitans
Because of their exceptionalism, celebrities are considered
able to represent world citizens, or embody cosmopolitan
ideals (Partzsch 2018; Richey and Christiansen 2018). In
North/South relations, performing embodied cosmopoli-
tanism provides a particular challenge. One intriguingly
disputed incidence of this is “Afropolitanism”(Richey and
Christiansen 2018). This term refers to the work of
cultural elites, either African or of African origin, in
diaspora politics, online activism, fashion, and future
debates. Richey and Christiansen observe that these
engagements provide an interesting type of celebrity
humanitarianism because
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Afropolitanism can be usefully considered as an Africa-specific,
post-colonial form of cosmopolitanism that spans discourses of
elite pan-African culture to theories of elite global aid culture . . .
Afropolitanism is an idea combining cosmopolitanism’s
notionsofkindnesstostrangersinaworldwherethe“kindness”
is aid and the “strangers”’ are Africans. (Richey and Christiansen
2018, 238)
While Afropolitanism may be an increasingly popular
concept, critics point out that it is constituted from the
leftovers of political struggle, rather than a new, self-
sustaining politics.
20
Our exemplary case involves a Danish
celebrity humanitarian, Hella Joof, about whom we have
written elsewhere, and her role as a host of a major media
fundraising event in Denmark in 2010, which was themed
“Africa’s Women,”where she played the dual roles of
a leading cultural figure and at the same time an African-
Danish celebrity.
As Richey and Christiansen have explained,
Since the mid-1990s, Joof has been an “A-list celebrity”in
Denmark, working as a television host, comedian, singer,
actress, director and public intellectual. Joof had her acting
debut in 1985 playing Josephine Baker in a “variety show”,
21
and she revisits this role, playing with racial stereotypes, in
a promotion campaign for the Danish branch of Fair Trade,
where she has been an “ambassador”since 2011 and her image
is adorned with a large banana headdress. (Richey and Chris-
tiansen 2018, 255)
22
But Joof is not just an entertainer who earns her place
in the public eye for her ability to perform, act, and make
people laugh. Racial identity, commentary, and politics
are part of her public persona. She has used her self-
identification as African and Danish to build her career as
a comedian.
23
And she is recognised, in Denmark, as
a public intellectual because she challenges racism in
diverse forms as they appear in Danish public life and
society. She is quite open about how her racial identity has
affected her life, and what it is like to grow up black in
Denmark’s“white culture.”
24
Joof’s assimilation of her different identities has not been
easy. As Richey and Christiansen observed, Joof derives her
identity as an African woman from her genes more than her
upbringing. She met her father (from the Gambia) and his
family only once, when she was fourteen. She had to learn to
“behave much more black”when she “met real black people
as an adult.”
25
This combination of a thoroughly Danish
upbringing and her deliberate and vigorous adoption of an
African identity explains part of her appeal. As Richey and
Christiansen argue in their analysis:
Joof embraces the role of celebrity humanitarian. She uses it to
perform, visualize and realize a cosmopolitan possibility of
Afropolitanism in Denmark that allows a Danish public to
“feel”African in Joof’s black skin, without engaging in the
conflictual realm of aid politics, inequality debates, or race as
a contentious issue. (Richey and Christiansen 2018, 256)
Afropolitan celebrity humanitarians are given the re-
sponsibility for raising global awareness of racially-based
injustices, without relying on identities as “raced.”In
some ways, these humanitarians are simply reproducing
tropes occupied by the majority of humanitarians who are
white, but in other ways they are allocated a dispropor-
tionate share of representativeness, and their roles in the
global cadre of celebrity humanitarianism are to solve
problems that they are not allowed to acknowledge exist.
The educational solution to humanitarianism promoted
by Afropolitans relies on awareness.
Discussion
The six tropes of celebrity humanitarianism demon-
strate the premise of constructivist understandings of
politics: social conduct is shaped by the ways that
actors determine meaning and respond to it within
specific contexts (Dessler and Owen 2005). Thus,
understanding celebrity humanitarianism requires
a multi-sited contextualization of the meanings audien-
ces vest in this activity. Taking context more seriously
requires, we argue, more attention to the Southern
contexts in which much celebrity humanitarianism
unfolds. Our conceptual framework based on our in-
ductive typology provides a way of bringing together the
generalizable elements from this multi-sited diversity
into distinctive tropes. The tropes are not defined by
their exclusiveness through the boundaries that separate
them from other tropes, but by their core and key
features that we have outlined.
In all the six tropes, celebrity humanitarianism offers
a politics that is based on authenticity not account-
ability. This is common in humanitarianism, which is
rarely downwardly accountable to the people receiving
support, and more normally upwardly accountable to
funders, governments, and multilaterals (Stein 2008,
124). Our point here is not that celebrity humanitari-
anism is somehow inauthentic, or that more authentic
celebrity humanitarianism should be more powerful
than less authentic tropes. Rather, problems arise from
the lack of accountability, or the mechanisms by which
accountability is diverted and distorted. Even if some
forms of celebrity humanitarian performances can be
considered “legitimate”(by particular audiences), ce-
lebrities themselves are not formally accountable to
anyone (Partzsch 2018). Celebrity humanitarianism
exemplifies an underlying tension as it relies on the
popularization of a crisis to enlist more “caring,”yet
more caring may not result in better practical care. This
has important implications for understanding the con-
sequences of celebrity humanitarianism (our second
question). Understanding the consequences can hinge
on understanding where, and with whom, legitimacy is
sought.
The marginal role played by crisis victims or “benefi-
ciaries”in performances of legitimacy is important. Each
of the six tropes in our typology constitutes a familiar script
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in the storytelling of North/South relations, and their
power comes from the wedding of a distinct affective
performance of ideal values with an overall synergy into
a single story in which the silences of these marginalized
Others are not called into question.
26
Celebrity human-
itarians are oligarchs in the attention economy, and in the
case of humanitarianism, this usurping of the power of
voice, whether by Northern or Southern celebrities,
propagates the inequalities inherent in North/South
relations.
27
All our tropes are drawn from the mainstream. The
apparatus of celebrity engagement exists to reinforce this
mainstream control and co-opt interventions that might
challenge it. It is difficult to think of contemporary
celebrity interventions that lie outside these formal
frameworks.
28
The service to the mainstream and status
quo of humanitarianism is most clearly visible in celebrity
diplomats, but it is also apparent in other tropes—global
mothers infantilize, Afropolitans diminish contentious
racial politics, and entrepreneurs equate more profit with
better outcomes. All draw attention away from structural
causes of unequal power structures and the outrage and
obscenity of crises. These structural causes are most
notable in their absence.
29
All of the tropes in our typology of celebrity human-
itarianism perform the affective desires of diverse human-
itarian publics for demonstrations of care. Audiences buy
in, or appear to buy in, because celebrity humanitarians
are affective.
30
In a humanitarian context dominated by
technicians who stop suffering in the most efficient way
possible, celebrity humanitarians manifest the affective
desire for humanitarianism to work. Celebrity human-
itarians act as emotional sovereigns by performing
solutions—technology, love, power, institutions, money,
and awareness—for solving what might otherwise be
considered (and may in fact remain) intractable global
political problems.
Conclusions
Returning to the questions with which we began
suggests a number of challenges for political scientists
seeking to explore celebrity humanitarianism. The first
is that, in order to answer the questions we posed, they
will have to pay more attention to the South. As elite
politics of humanitarianism become increasingly global-
ized and the business of humanitarianism expands into
the global South, we need to pay more attention to
North/South relations. This is both in terms of the
celebrities from the South and in recognition of the
historical precedents linking North and South in pur-
suits of development, slavery, empire, and unequal
terms of trade.
The South matters because its politics, and celebrities,
have been relatively neglected in the literature. But this
also requires different ways of thinking about the South,
not just as a separate realm of activity, but as a place
where elitist politics of the North are extended, perpet-
uated, and reproduced by Northern and Southern actors.
We need a North/South approach because the unequal
hierarchies that the term describes are co-produced in
different sites across the globe.
The imperative for this call is quickly visible if we
consider what happens when we leave out the South.
Can global mothers like Mother Theresa, for example,
be properly understood without considering criticisms
like Hitchens who examined the actual quality of the
care they provided (Hitchens 1995)? Likewise Jolie’s
work with refugees is better understood with those
refugees’own perspectives on her interventions, as
Mostafanezhad has shown (Mostafanezhad 2013, 2017,
2016). Work on Yunus cannot omit the questionable
impacts that the proliferation of microfinance has
brought (for example, see Maitrot 2014). Viewing
celebrity humanitarianism from the North alone is un-
satisfactory.
Yet the suggested focus on performance and southern
contexts also poses a challenge to mainstream political
science. It excels in quantitative analysis and proxies to
measure celebrity influence (media mentions, circulation
of celebrity magazines, Wikipedia views).
31
However, as
audiences fragment, or move overseas, and responses
become increasingly diffuse, spotting the signal of celebrity
influence becomes harder. Harder still is the fact that
responses may not be about rational information seeking.
Where they occur, they are about identity, affect, and
emotive connection. They trigger and signify forms of
behavior whose politics is more difficult to count and
measure.
For example, as our typology has demonstrated,
celebrities do engage with various publics and publics
engage with celebrity humanitarians, often in informal
and unpredictable ways. The Danish celebrity Hella
Joof could talk about race and inequality while raising
money for a humanitarian NGO because she was
entertaining, not political. Sean Penn’simageas
a gun-toting, wife-beating patriot served an authentic
persona of getting things done in humanitarian emer-
gencies both at home and abroad. Angelina Jolie is able
to introduce a caring persona into institutions like the
UNHCR, which might otherwise be known only for
bureaucratic and rational evidence-based interventions.
Further research is needed for a systematic assessment
of how the affective politics of celebrity humanitarian-
ism affects political engagement, even if it does so
indirectly.
Yet for all the methodological challenges, approaching
the performative work of celebrity humanitarians in
a North/South perspective is productive. As Richey and
Budabin show with the case of Ben Affleck, his
interventions in the North reinforce elitist lobby
11
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politics, at the same time as his rhetoric in the South
opposes such politics (Budabin and Richey 2018; Richey
and Budabin 2018). Jim Igoe explored the production of
Northern celebrity spectacle for conservation and its
political consequences in East Africa (Igoe 2010, 2017).
Similarly George Holmes’work on the international
conservationist class demonstrates how these methods
might be used in a North/South perspective, and shows
how the South both constructs and challenges Northern
elitist politics (Holmes 2010). Only by examining both
ends of the intervention, the nature of the contests, and
their consequences can celebrity humanitarianism be
understood.
Answering the questions we posed at the start of this
paper poses important challenges that political science
and international relations are well placed to address.
With respect to the first question we posed on the type
of contests celebrity humanitarianism promotes, and
the results of these contests, it is perhaps easiest to
answer these by examining the contests that are
allowed, and the winners of them. Celebrity humani-
tarianism is a way of doing humanitarian politics as
usual (Cox 2011). Celebrity humanitarianism privileges
special interests and corporate lobbyists in ways that
characterize Colin Crouch’s description of post-
democracy (Crouch 2004). To understand how this
works, and to answer the second question we posed,
requires “studying up”and undertaking the ethnogra-
phies of high-level power relations, bargaining, and
murky processes that celebrity humanitarians are en-
couraged to facilitate. This requires techniques more
commonly used in anthropology, rather than main-
stream political science, but, when applied, can yield
remarkable insights.
32
Finally, just as the increase of celebrity power is
embedded in new forms of governance and the in-
creasing relevance of private authority in global politics,
so the celebritization of humanitarianism must be un-
derstood within the context of the changes that have
been taking place to our understandings of what
constitutes humanitarianism, who has a right or an
obligation to engage it, and on what terms. The setting
for the celebrity humanitarian to join the staging of
global politics comes from the history of an ever-
expanding humanitarian space that includes more actors
and more types of actors from public and private
spheres. At the same time, humanitarianism is an
increasingly professionalized field of technicians who
have replaced caring volunteers. As Stephen Hopgood
illustrates, “the professionalism of technicians is all about
not getting involved; they have generic and transferable
skills—Weber’s‘specialists without spirit, sensualists
without heart.”
33
In contrast, celebrities are extraordi-
nary, not generic, and their skills are to perform caring
involvement. Our analysis of the tropes of celebrity
humanitarianism has demonstrated the limited range of
these performances.
Notes
1 For Jolie’s work see Chouliaraki 2013; Bono see
Jackson 2008; Law see Brockington 2014a, 94.
2 Stanley’s greeting was “Dr. Livingstone, I presume.”
3 For accounts of the process of acculturation by
which celebrities acquire authenticity see Brock-
ington’s work 2014a and 2014b from the perspec-
tive of the humanitarian industries and Driessens
2013a and 2013b from the perspective of the
celebrity.
4 This history is drawn from Brockington 2014a.
5 From the searchable “Look to the Stars”database
containing 4,299 celebrities searchable by fifty-six
different categories (entries may overlap), www.look-
tothestars.org, retrieved November 10, 2018.
6 For measurements of effective celebrity advocacy see
Cram et al. 2003; Chapman and Leask 2001; Bou-
dioni et al. 1998; Garthwaite and Moore 2008. For
studies showing the limits of celebrity humanitarian-
ism see Thrall et al. 2008 and Atkinson and DeWitt
2018.
7 Gamson 1994, 2001; Schickel 2000. Similar insights
into how structural pressures can shape the perfor-
mance and politics of the civil society sector can be
found in Cooley and Ron 2002.
8 See for example John Hilary in https://
www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2010/apr/05/
geldof-arrogance-poverty-agenda-starsuckers, re-
trieved May 10, 2018.
9“Inferred”because there is little research on audience
responses (for exceptions see Mostafanezhad 2016,
Brockington 2014a and Brockington and Henson
2015). Brockington 2015 provides an overview of this
literature. We therefore use Chouliaraki’s 2013
method that reads intended audience responses from
discourse and textual analysis.
10 Jeffrey Sachs, speech to the University of Copenhagen,
September 11, 2007, cited in Richey and Ponte 2011,
40.
11 https://www.looktothestars.org/celebrity/angelina-
jolie, retrieved May 15, 2018.
12 Quotation with permission from a personal interview
conducted by Lisa Ann Richey, June 10, 2016 in
Kinshasa, Democratic Republic of the Congo.
13 See for example, reviews from The New York Times
and The Atlantic. https://www.nytimes.com/2017/
09/13/movies/first-they-killed-my-father-review-
angelina-jolie.html?referrer5google_kp and
https://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/
archive/2017/09/first-they-killed-my-father-is-a-
surprising-devastating-triumph/540018/, retrieved
May 15, 2018.
12 Perspectives on Politics
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14 https://www.marketwatch.com/story/how-tomb-
raider-inspired-angelina-jolies-unflinching-new-
cambodian-film-2017-09-12, retrieved May 15,
2018.
15 Notably Penn served prison time in 1987 for assault-
ing a photographer and was arrested and charged with
domestic assault against his then wife the pop star and
celebrity humanitarian Madonna in 1988. Interest-
ingly, when Madonna declared in a formal affidavit to
the Supreme Court of the state of New York, that
Penn had actually not “struck [her] with a baseball
bat,”she bases her claim that Penn is a “caring and
compassionate individual”on the merits of his work as
CEO of the J/P Haitian Relief Organization. See
https://jezebel.com/after-years-of-silence-madonna-
denies-allegations-that-1748593381, retrieved May
15, 2018.
16 The Sydney Morning Herald, September 5, 2005,
“Penn’s Rescue Attempt Springs a Leak”https://
www.smh.com.au/world/penns-rescue-attempt-
springs-a-leak-20050905-gdm0bm.html, cited in
Bergmann-Rosamond 2016, 166).
17 https://www.csmonitor.com/World/Making-a-
difference/Change-Agent/2012/0423/Actor-activist-
Sean-Penn-says-he-s-in-Haiti-for-the-long-haul,
retrieved May 16, 2018.
18 See http://www.sophiendaba.co.za/, retrieved March
1, 2019.
19 Top Billing is a popular lifestyle magazine television
show aired on the public broadcaster, SABC 3. The
show features the lives of the rich and famous and
Ndaba frequently appears as a guest celebrity wedding
planner.
20 Aaron Bady, ‘‘Afropolitan’’,State of the Discipline
Report, April 2014, http://stateofthediscipline.acla.org/
entry/afropolitan, retrieved February 1, 2016, cited in
Richey and Christiansen 2018, 238.
21 Katja Maria Salomonsen and Jeppe Michael Jensen,
“Ærlig klovn,”Copenhagen, BT Søndag, June 2009,
6–9, 8; cited in Richey and Christiansen 2018, 255.
22 Fairtrade Denmark, “Mød holdet, ambassadører,
Hella Joof,”Fairtrade Denmark, October 2012; cited
in Richey and Christiansen 2018, 255.
23 Tonie Yde Mørch, “Så snakker vi ikke neger om det!”,
Berlinske Tidende, October 2004. http://www.b.dk/
kultur/saa-snakker-vi-ikke-neger-om-det, retrieved
January 20, 2009, cited in Richey and Christiansen
2018, 256.
24 Ibid.
25 Ibid.
26 https://www.ted.com/talks/chimamanda_adichie_
the_danger_of_a_single_story, retrieved November
15, 2018.
27 This not unique to celebrity interventions, as dem-
onstrated by Krause’s documentation of how benefi-
ciaries are sold to donors across the marketplace of
humanitarian projects; Krause 2014.
28 The “Yes”men might just qualify. Other interven-
tions are clearly unschooled, such as rapper 50 Cent’s
claim that he would feed 1 billion Africans on
a continent with less than 900 million people; Daley
2013, 381.
29 Katharyne Mitchell’s work on Bono’s advocacy of
“factivism”makes an interesting parallel. She argues
that the solutions advocated, which champion markets
and neoliberal rationalities, fail to see poverty and
inequality as produced by laissez-faire capitalism;
Mitchell 2017, 124.
30 We say “appear”to buy in because the nature of
audience responses to celebrity humanitarianism is far
from clear as Brockington’s 2015 review makes clear.
In other work Brockington (2014a; also Cox 2011)
argues that public responses to celebrity humanitari-
anism in the UK are surprisingly muted. Most people
there believe that it “works”but they do not un-
derstand how, and nor do they themselves follow it.
Which means that it works because people believe it
works, and not because most people are actually
listening. As Brendon Cox put it, “Celebrity is a proxy
for public engagement, even though in pretty much all
cases, they, the public, were not engaged initially”;
Brockington 2014a, 125.
31 These were the methods used in Thrall et al. 2008,
Atkinson and DeWitt 2018, and Garthwaite and
Moore 2008.
32 As one example we would recommend Brendon Cox’s
work on humanitarian campaigning which was based
on a large number of high-level interviews; Cox 2011.
33 Hopgood 2008, 114, cites Weber 2003, 182.
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