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With an increasing number of tourists ‘vacationing like Brangelina’ (Fitzpatrick, 2007), volunteer tourism has become one of the fastest growing niche tourism markets in the world. In this article I develop the popular humanitarian gaze as an analytic to describe the geopolitical assemblage of institutions, cultural practices and actors (e.g. celebrity humanitarians, alternative consumers and volunteer tourists) that play a critical role in the privatization and depoliticization of popular humanitarian interventions. Based on ethnographic fieldwork among three non-governmental organizations that use volunteer tourism as a social and economic development strategy as well as popular media texts, I argue that the popular humanitarian gaze co-produces and extends geopolitical discourses of North-South relations that naturalize political, economic and social inequality. Volunteer tourism in particular, I argue, perpetuates a …