Celebrity humanitarianism and the popular geopolitics of hope along the Thai-Burma border

In June of 2014 Angelina Jolie, actress and United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) Goodwill Ambassador, visited camps—home to 130,000 Burmese exiles—along the Thai-Burma border to draw international attention to one of the most protracted displacement situations in the world. Her fourth trip to the border since 2002, Jolie's day-long visit was widely commended in popular media. I draw on ethnographic research among Burmese exiles in northern Thailand to argue that the popular geopolitics of hope she engendered is constituted through contradictory impulses of, on one hand, her signification of global capital and the concurrent widespread geoeconomic hope around Burma's deepening integration into global capitalism, and on the other, the far-reaching geopolitics of fear that has materialized around the threat of repatriation resulting from rapid political-economic change in Burma. Thus, this paper builds on recent work in popular geopolitics and geographies of emotion and affect to offer a grounded illustration of the micro-macro linkages between popular culture and everyday geopolitical experience, as well as the often politically nuanced role of celebrities in humanitarian interventions. This paper contributes to ongoing conversations around the relationship between celebrity humanitarians from the global North and the political-economic implications of the affective enrollment of their intended benefactors from the global South.