How Celebrities Shape North-South Relations

Development aid has become increasingly bureaucratized, with check-lists, manuals and log-frames moving money into large-scale programs instead of small, visible, bounded projects. At the same time, powerful images of turbulence and suffering in the South come into people’s living rooms and the recipients of these messages are moved to act, but how? Trusted celebrities with simple but powerful ideas are changing the relations of expertise between North and South. Understanding how celebrity involvement is shaping North-South relations has important implications for what we give in aid, how we shop and who we are willing to let in our borders.