Introduction

As noted in Chapter 1, orphanage tourism is a growing niche in the wider volunteer tourism trend in the Global South, where orphanages can provide a last resort for struggling families. Nepali families living at, or below, official poverty lines often require their children to work, and crises such as conflict, drought, flood and other natural disasters can push families into deeper poverty and towards evermore desperate measures. Orphanage tourism is one of many markets to emerge around the needs of poor families and the supply of child labour this supports. Commercial orphanages that offer volunteering placements to tourists rely on a steady stream of visitors from affluent countries who are prepared to pay significant sums of money for the opportunity to undertake charitable work with children.

As with many other tourism markets in low-income countries, such as ‘tribal’ tourism to indigenous communities in Vietnam or paying to fire rocket launchers at live cows in Cambodia, tourists behave in ways that would be unthinkable and impossible in their home countries. In poorer, post- or mid-crisis contexts, norms, codes and laws are often (or often assumed to be) more relaxed, meaning that tourists can use their position of relative power in the consumer markets of tourism to explore and indulge their whims and fantasies with impunity. Indeed, partaking in such markets can be valorizing and status-enhancing when tourism experiences and landscapes are aestheticized by ‘cultural intermediaries’ for the reproduction of distinction (Bourdieu 1984). The global supply and demand chains in various niche tourism markets function because of multiple social, economic and political factors that make these activities possible. Widespread marginalization and disenfranchisement of minority indigenous groups in Vietnam, for example, allows for their objectification, which is taken up by foreign tourists seeking out unusual and Orientalist experiences of the ‘primitive’ (Bott 2018). Similarly, relaxed and poorly enforced gun and animal welfare laws in Cambodia make the outer extremes of ‘dark tourism’ possible for those who can afford to explore the ‘edges’ of mainstream tourism (Robinson 2005) by obliterating cattle. Even when tourism practices are illegal and/or morally and socially unacceptable, as is the case with child sex tourism, a blind eye is often turned by communities and authorities of states that rely on tourism revenue for survival.

The previous chapters have established and explored the socioeconomic, historical, geopolitical and symbolic landscapes of Nepal, especially the ways in which they have contributed to Nepal becoming an orphanage tourism destination that has the necessary conditions for such a market to exist. Discussions have considered Nepal's relationships with global systems of aid and humanitarian intervention, and with international tourism development and markets, arguing that acknowledging the peculiarities of such relationships is key to understanding orphanage tourism and other emergent tourism and labour niches. The availability of children and child labour is of course central to the orphanage tourism industry, and children's broader position in the context outlined above is also crucial.

This chapter deepens the emphasis on context by interrogating the realities of childhood in Nepal, and the unavoidable necessity for many children to work in order for them and/or their families to survive. It outlines critical debates in childhood, child labour and children's rights, locating ‘orphans’ working in orphanage tourism therein. Discussions will question Western frameworks of childhood, which largely fail to meaningfully acknowledge the contextual conditions of childhood, instead framing it as a discrete, homogenous life stage that requires universal measures of protection. This abstract understanding of childhood has received critical interrogation because of the vastly differential conditions in which children grow up, and this chapter will show that through the contextualization of childhood in Nepal in relation to the conditions of poverty and dependency outlined in Chapter 3, childhood emerges as a more f lexible and heterogeneous life-stage, which is negotiated as needs and limits dictate and possibilities permit.

Constructed Childhood

In most parts of the world, childhood is legally defined as the period between birth and 18 years, or the equivalent ‘age of majority’ in respective countries. The age of majority is the threshold of adulthood as declared in law, usually 16 or 18 years. It signals the acquisition of control of one's own person, actions and decisions, and marks the termination of legal guardianship by parents or guardians.

As a critical tourism scholar with particular concern with how destinations are imagined and altered for tourist consumption and local people's responses to such, I have a longstanding interest in tourism in Nepal. Like many popular destinations in poorer parts of the world, Nepal is constructed and commoditized as an opportunity for immersion in rich cultural heritage and spectacular scenery. It is home to eight of the world's tallest mountains and is famous for world-class mountaineering, trekking, rafting and other adventure activities. Its strong Hindu and Buddhist heritage means that Nepal is famous for its many temples, monasteries and stupas, and in combination with the spiritual allure of the Himalayas and the often-cited warmth and hospitability of Nepali people, Nepal is perhaps uniquely imbued with mythical appeal to tourists seeking an ‘authentic’ travel experience.

My earlier work on adventure tourism in Nepal and my wider research on the idealization and romanticization of places and their people under the influence of the ‘tourist gaze’ (Urry 2002) led me to explore the power of globalized tourism markets to construct and control geographical locations, often in ways that Orientalize, Other and sometimes endanger their inhabitants (Bott 2009, 2012, 2018). Tourists are sold holidays through photoshopped, sanitized and highly selective depictions, which mostly airbrush over the realities of daily life in popular destinations, many of which are found in the world's least economically developed countries (LEDCs) in the Global South.

Paradoxically, even when poverty and ‘underdevelopment’ are themselves commoditized, as is the case in niche areas such as slum tourism and ‘tribal’ tourism, the political economies of countries are largely hidden from formations and mediations of ‘dream’ holidays. There is a deliberate segregation of the problems faced by people living in difficult circumstances and the gratifying elements of holidays, which are designed to represent an embodied departure from the realities of everyday life. During my earlier ethnographic fieldwork in the Himalayan foothills and at Everest basecamp, I had observed the extraordinary measures provided to buffer tourists from cold temperatures and provide them with Western luxuries. I watched helicopter loads of Coca-Cola, chocolate bars, firewood and battery-farmed eggs being unloaded and carried uphill by porters in basket loads weighing more than they did.

This book draws on several periods of research, including two periods of qualitative research carried out in Nepal in 2018 and 2020, whose primary aims were to explore the complexities of the industry, foregrounding the experiences and voices of young adults who have spent time in orphanages in Nepal. These concerns stemmed from my witnessing the emergence of Western discourses surrounding orphanage tourism and the omission of the voices of the residents themselves in recent theoretical and policy advancements. Modern slavery and child-trafficking frameworks have the potential to dominate orphanage tourism discourse, and the book has critiqued understandings that do not meaningfully engage with the group in question but are becoming paradigmatically entrenched.

Research on orphanage tourism in the Global South that fails to engage with local voices and context constitutes a manifestation of the ‘coloniality of power’ (Quijano 2000; Mignolo 2007) characteristic of much Western intervention as discussed throughout this book. Western research in non-Western contexts has a problematic history of applying predatory, oppressive and pathologizing methods and analytical lenses (Sinclair 2003; Thambinathan and Kinsella 2021) and is inextricably bound up with legacies of colonial exploitation (Smith 2021). Postcolonial and decolonial epistemologies are needed to inform better empirical understandings and open what Couze Venn calls ‘critical spaces for new narratives of becoming and emancipation’ (Venn 2006, 1), which are critical to undoing Western material and discursive domination.

The research, therefore, adopted a decolonial epistemological approach, which centres on the experiences and worldviews of non-Western actors, in this instance, young Nepalis, and respects the cultural context of their lives (Thambinathan and Kinsella 2021). To those ends, I have illustrated the relevance of the social, cultural and economic context of orphanage tourism in Nepal and have tried to locate the narratives of former residents therein.

I adopted a critically reflexive approach to developing the research design based on a pilot study I undertook in Kathmandu in 2018, which led me to re-evaluate the methodological and ethical implications it raised alongside the empirical avenues it opened. Lessons learned from the pilot study included moving beyond simply recognizing my privileged position as a white Western researcher working in a southern tourism setting, and towards decentring myself from the research process as far as possible.

The central argument of this book is that orphanage tourism is adopted and co-opted into numerous campaigns and discourses in ways that partly, if not predominantly, serve the interests of intervenors by generating certain rewards: gaining power, status, repute, funding, identity and so on. Meanwhile, the subjectivities of youth involved are sidelined and overlooked. Chapters have presented a range of paradigms and contexts through which this argument is made. In that regard, the book contributes to a growing body of work that critiques interventions performed by the ‘rescue industry’ and international/ multinational interventions that can do more harm than good on account of poor understanding, little or no local consultation, dubious metrics and questionable goals and frameworks. As I have argued throughout, the urge to rescue ‘paper orphans’ by volunteers, INGOs or abolitionists chiefly rests on the blunt assumption that the Global South is needy of a saviour, and the Global North is well equipped to perform the task.

In this relationship, the saviour – whether voluntourist, humanitarian, academic, governmental or state – assumes the role of hero, or protagonist, in the story they narrate about themself and their own goals and achievements. The narrative relies on an object to pity, rescue and redeem, and the orphan child fulfils this role well because of historical and contemporary constructions of orphanhood, childhood vulnerability and the assumed sanctity of family life. The racialized dynamic of the orphan/rescuer relationship further enhances the imagined potential of the West to reform, rescue and restore the ‘Other’. This reproduction of victimhood connects to Teju Cole's notion of a ‘white saviour industrial complex’, which compels Westerners to have ‘a big emotional experience that validates privilege’ (Cole 2012, 1). According to Cole, ‘the white saviour supports brutal policies in the morning, founds charities in the afternoon and receives awards in the evening’ (Ibid.). Cole's thesis was originally made in response to White hegemony in Western humanitarian aid, but the concept is applicable in other ways. Anderson, Knee and Mowatt argue that the idea of White hegemonic groups seeking ‘to do good while also satisfying their own emotional needs can also apply to leisure research and practice’ (2021, 531). They employ Cole's framework to identify the enactment of White saviourism in international volunteer tourism.

Resilience is a word and an attribute that is increasingly becoming more and more familiar in the world of leadership. After all, one cannot be expected to always win in every situation. There are plenty of times when one ends up snatching a loss from the jaws of victory—I know the expression probably seems a little lopsided to most readers, but I’ve always found it deliciously ironic. In a situation of failure, most people would be reasonably expected to be rather devastated. The ability to bounce back from failure is what resilience is all about. If one has to define resilience, then usually the definition involves the ability to face or respond to a failure or a drawback of some kind. Resilience could be on a continuum of course—for instance, a person may be resilient in one area, but less so in another area. However, from a leadership perspective, resilience is often thought to be one of the components of psychological capital or PsyCap as it is popularly acronymized as.

PsyCap basically refers to the internal resources a person has in order to be able to manage difficult or turbulent situations. It consists of four components, namely hope, efficacy, resilience, and optimism. As you can see, each component of it helps people tackle tough times. For instance, a person definitely needs a healthy dose of optimism and hope when facing tough times, and similarly needs to be confident in one's own ability to eventually be successful. The resilience piece specifically deals with how a person can deal with and overcome challenging or stressful circumstances, and still be able to forge forward.

Dogs are among nature's most resilient animals, and many-a-dog has displayed amazing tenacity and the ability to bounce back from really awful and harrowing situations. That ability to bounce back from emotionally or physically draining activities and incidents is what resilience is all about. Although, one could make the case, that possessing high levels of overall psychological capital is an essential recipe for being able to bounce back from failure and go on to a successful outcome.

Just as history by and large is the history of wars, so in political philosophy more is written on war than on peace. In political philosophy, peace is most often a negative concept, being the absence of something else—the absence of war. More fruitful for political philosophy has been the analysis of conditions for, conduct of and the justice of war, with an assumption that war, if not a necessary aspect of social life, is more common than not. Yet, peace is the backdrop to the commonly discussed areas within political philosophy—human and civil rights, contracts, justice, property rights and law. Without peace, these aspects of common human life make little sense.

Nonetheless, despite the predominance of war in political affairs, peace and nonviolence were central ideas behind much political activism in the twentieth century. M. K. Gandhi was the first to use techniques of nonviolent resistance, first in South Africa (1893–1914) and then in India (1915–1947). For Gandhi, nonviolent protest required as much courage as warfare. The satyagrahis—those who practice satyagraha, “truth force” or “love-force”—were to resist oppressive sanctions by absorbing the violence of their oppressors in their own persons (2001 , 3ff). In time, the oppressor would cease violence, having had a fill of it. He called this the “law of self-sacrifice,” the “law of nonviolence” and the “law of suffering.” Just as the requirement of the military is training in how to use violence effectively, satyagrahis needed to be trained in how not to be violent (Ibid., 92ff). Gandhi even called for an official “non-violent army” of trained volunteers numbering the thousands who could put themselves in harms way to end violence (Ibid., 86).

Martin Luther King Jr. relied extensively on Gandhi's developed nonviolent techniques (see his “Pilgrimage to Nonviolence” in 1986, 54–62). In his “My Trip to the land of Gandhi” King says,

Introduction

This chapter arises out of a larger project in moral philosophy with a working title, Love as a Guide to Morals. My task is to examine love as a sufficient basis for moral life. In this chapter, I address one facet of the larger moral picture: the important critical framework of intersectionality as a means of understanding layers of domination and oppression that contribute to human suffering. My suggestion is that intersectionality, as theoretically descriptive, alone does not provide a normative approach to human relationships. It needs a way of thinking about how normative moral commitments are shaped. My assertion is that love provides a useful compass to steer through the complexities of this particular moral maze.

Moral philosophers since David Hume have grappled with the difficult relationship between the empirically descriptive and the morally prescriptive. Hume's analysis has become known as “Hume's Law,” “Hume's Guillotine” (Black 1969, 100), or the is/ought question (1969, 421). His assertion was that it is impossible to derive “ought statements” from “is statements.” What is the case will never tell us what ought to be the case. Theoretical, sociological, political and critical analyses, though so important in helping us understand what is actually true rather than what merely seems true, are indispensable. However, alone it cannot move us to moral commitments without some way of forming value judgments.

Hume thought that values derive from the innate human sympathy people have for others and from common sense benevolence. In contradistinction to Immanuel Kant, he argued that moral commitments couldn't be rationally justified. Hume established a trajectory in moral philosophy that would have profound influence in the twentieth century. George Edward Moore, building on Hume, likewise rejected any rational defense of morality and preferred an intuitive basis (1905).

In the early to mid-twentieth century, the trend continued. Many agreed with Hume and Moore—that morality had no rational basis—yet rejected both intuitionism and innate sympathy. All that was left of the moral project was emotivism: moral statements are merely expressions of emotion and have no truth value.

This book began life as a talk at Nottingham Trent University in February 2023. The audience was appreciative and the discussion lively and engaged. However, I discovered later that complaints were raised about the event. The content of the talk was criticised, even though it was presented more in the form of an open-ended enquiry into the causes, course and consequences of the Russo-Ukrainian war than an ex-cathedra statement of dogma. The complaint carried threatening implications, not least for Dr Antonio Cerella, who had invited me. Fortunately, the audience feedback on the session was very favourable, and the matter was laid to rest without any serious consequences. The more positive outcome was that Antonio suggested that I write up the lecture to become the inaugural publication in his series on International Security and Sustainability for Anthem, which I was honoured and delighted to do, and the outcome is this book.

Unfortunately, the incident at Nottingham is far from the only instance in which the ‘cancel culture’ which accompanies and aggravates Cold War II has affected me. In 2016, I was invited to teach a course on European international relations at the College of Europe in Natolin, on the outskirts of Warsaw. Over the years I had taught the subject many times, accompanied always by lively and healthy debate. This time, from the outset I noticed something different, with a solid phalanx of Polish and Ukrainian students staring aggressively and refusing to participate in discussions. In the end, I asked one of the brightest students, from Germany, what was going on. She told me, glancing around to check that we were not being overheard, that ‘we have been thoroughly brain-washed’. There could be no questioning of the righteousness of Western actions, the expansion of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) was an unmitigated good, and the European Union (EU) was the repository of all the virtues. By contrast, Russia was the fount of all evil, and any questioning of these postulates was not only illegitimate but effectively prohibited. This does not make for a healthy scholarly environment. The line between education and indoctrination, analysis and advocacy, is dangerously blurred.

How successfully can we name and define a work of art? Doesn't an art experience “prick” us? We name, but the naming is just not enough to express it. The art moments betray an incapacity to name, which, then, as Roland Barthes points out, becomes “a good symptom of dis-turbance.” Putting their work in context, artists Judith Selby Lang and Richard Lang write:

There is an art-making to the moment. One can identify a focused curation in the way the installation got arranged, something that spells of a permanent “diagram” and design. But art's afterlife is in constructing “asignification,” which means how curation or attention to artistic details cannot oversight the inexplicable sites of appreciation and reception. The Plastic Food Art installation inculcates imagination, a wide panorama of emotions, and aesthetic bafflement. Art exists; it entices.

The ethics of care are one of the most creative and hopeful developments in ethics in contemporary thinking. The subject is just 25 years old, having its birth in Carol Gilligan's In A Different Voice. Gilligan suggested that most ethics, most of the time, has been done by men and have demonstrated those aspects of ethical thinking that have been in the province of men: justice, contract, rationality and principle at the expense of relationships with those closest to us. Women have traditionally thought and practiced in different ways: relationally, with responsibility for others and rooted in care. Others picked up Gilligan's challenge including Noddings, Ruddick and Manning. More recently, Virginia Held has presented an overview and critique of the ethics of care after a quarter century of development and discussion. In this chapter I will demonstrate that the ethics of care (as addressed in the literature) are helpful in explicating a nonviolent critical theory if modified in certain ways.

The Elements of an Ethics of Care

The ethics of care begins with the assertion that ethics is rooted in human affective response—that is, in the emotional response to people, other sentient beings and situations.

Though a new and needed emphasis, this perspective is not unique to feminist ethics. In the ancient traditions, both the Buddha and Jesus present an ethics of compassion or loving kindness. It favors relationships between people over abstract principles. It is an ethics of the heart, rather than the mind. Enlightenment philosophers David Hume and Adam Smith argued that ethics are a function of sentiment. For Smith, it was “fellow-feeling.” We are hardwired with sentiment, compassion for others. It is part of the human condition. This is the opening of Smith's work on moral sentiments:

In 1989, an inner city Virgil guided film audiences through the inferno of race relations in America. Most left theaters shocked and surprised after viewing the film—and few were without a strong opinion about it.

In this regard, my first experience viewing Spike Lee's Do the Right Thing was no different than most. The moment of first viewing this masterpiece of American cinema has remained vivid with me for now over 40 years. The shock of the film has never left me. It was like a lightening bolt to the tree of my being. Nevertheless, many of the surprises of the film (e.g., the murder of Radio Raheem and Mookie throwing the trash can through the window) have long since faded over a lifetime of repeated viewing.

A good description of the first experience of viewing this film was given by Barry Michael Cooper, who says that it left him completely disoriented:

Released in the United States on June 30 of 1989, the film had this effect on many people. It depicted a single day in Brooklyn where racial tensions between its African American residents and the Italian American owner of a neighborhood pizzeria culminated in violence so shocking that for many it forever changed their view of the world.

Unfortunately, the responses to Cooper's questions are both affirmative. The world is as mean and mixed-up as director Lee depicts it, and the recent unchallenged rise of the alt-right has shown how we have let it go from bad to worse. It seems as though every week another person-of-color is being murdered through a hate crime in America.

Over the last century or so, nonviolence as a concept and a practice has become more popular than at any other time in human history. This is due in no small part to the example set by Mahatma Gandhi, the “great soul,” as the Indian poet Tagore called him. From the mid-twentieth century to present, that popularity has only grown, due to many circumstances: the example of Martin Luther King Jr., the publication of Gene Sharp's 1973 work The Politics of Nonviolent Action, the release of Richard Attenborough's 1982 film Gandhi, and a series of video productions commissioned by the International Center for Nonviolent Conflict, most notably the one-hour film “Bringing Down a Dictator.” These people and events have inspired many people to adopt nonviolence either as a tactic for doing battle or as a way of life, or as some course of action or conduct in between.

The recent upsurge in the popularity of nonviolence has coincided with the life of Andrew L. Fitz-Gibbon, and in this collection of essays and chapters written over the course of his philosophic career, Fitz-Gibbon reveals his own developing understanding and practice of nonviolence. His path toward nonviolence began, interestingly enough, with an early idealism about nations and the glory of war. But that idealism was tempered by a sense that all is not right with the mass killings that are a part of war. Coupled with his Christian beliefs, this sense led him to pacifism, a rejection of the violence that is war. The various paths that the world has taken toward nonviolence over the last one hundred years or so have provided rich soil from which Fitz-Gibbon has woven his own approach to nonviolence, and as a result Fitz-Gibbon's work provides a mature and insightful approach to nonviolence that remains, remarkably, idealistic and pragmatic at the same time.

Principled nonviolence has always been subject to charges of idealism, of a lack of realistic approaches to problem-solving and justice. How can one always stand on a principle of nonviolence when one sees another person unjustly set upon? Does nonviolence require that one refrain from intervening, allowing the injustice to continue? And if one does intervene, what if the nonviolent intervention fails to stop the attack?

Directing has always been

There is little point and not much joy in directing if you are not prepared to dig deep into the text in order to meet at least a part of yourself in it. The more you invest in this exploration, the more you feel that you have only begun to scratch the surface. Staging Anton Chekhov's Uncle Vanya has been one such visionary moment of artistic exploration for me, a journey of mental and psychological discoveries, where subliminal moments of creativity alter-nated with profound personal reflection.

I started working on the play in class, exploring its themes with MA direct-ing students at the Open University of Cyprus. In February 2023, I also conducted a practical workshop with theatre students at the University of Birmingham in the UK. Though originally skeptical about “doing Chekhov in the 21st century,” most students gradually became drawn to the play, responding warmly to its existential themes. Whether the play documents Vanya's process of disillusionment or is a tale of acceptance of human frailty for all characters is a matter of interpretation. My understanding of the text, which became the conceptual basis of the production I directed in Nicosia, Cyprus, in 2023, is that nothing much has changed between Vanya's time and ours. In this respect, there is no hope to share. Through Vanya, the spec-tators are bound to experience the failure of letting life simply pass them by, together with a sense of urgency, a “now or never” chance to free oneself from one's imprisoned self.

There is a list of plays in every director's mind—gifts for artists and for audiences alike. Uncle Vanya is certainly one of them. That said, I’ve always been both attracted to and estranged from Chekhov's infamous atmosphere, the notorious “heaviness” of mood, the intensity but—also—opacity of emo-tions. Most directors are aware that the play's reputation is its main enemy.

In the very beginning, when I first envisaged this book, I hadn't initially thought about having a separate chapter on intelligence. But as time went ticking along and the book started to come together, I figured it would be clinically insane not to have a chapter on intelligence. So, here we are—a chapter on intelligence, and this of course is another quality that is vital for successful leadership. Sometimes you can have intelligent leaders do something unintelligent, but the simple fact remains that it is far unlikelier for an unintelligent leader to do something intelligent. Just by dint of pure luck, an unintelligent leader may do something intelligent, but it is rather unlikely in most situations. However, by the same yardstick, intelligence isn't always universal—there are times when one form of intelligence works better than another form of intelligence, and leaders often have to choose which kind of intelligence they need to rely on given a situation.

There is a plethora of types of intelligence, and a majority of them can be categorized into either cognitive intelligence or emotional intelligence types.

I will be focusing the discussion and explanation in this chapter around these two main categories of intelligence. In some ways, the conversation around intelligence parallels the conversation around the nature versus nurture element of leadership. There are some who believe that intelligence is something people are born with, while others believe that intelligence is something people can and do learn. I will argue that the truth (like most things in life) is somewhere in the middle. There are elements of intelligence that we are naturally gifted at, and there are elements of intelligence that we have to work at in order to improve. This chapter posed a wee bit of a struggle for me to be able to decide which dogs to write about here, as there are far too many breeds which I could talk about. Some of the intelligent breeds have already been discussed in preceding chapters (e.g., German Shepherds, Poodles, etc.), and it is my aim to discuss wholly unique breeds in every chapter. Else, we’d be running the risk of having the entire book focus on Otterhounds and Dachshunds, which would be jolly for those breed lovers, but not so jolly for other breed fanciers.