Politics of hope

Amid the clouds of unpredictable change, there always seems to be a sliver of light – of hope – on the horizon. In promising something new, something better and potential change, hope encourages and engenders faith in the future. The utility of hope has not gone unnoticed in politics. Even though, or perhaps precisely because, the environmental, social and economic insecurity we see in the world today could be better described in terms of hopelessness, politics has intensified its quest for hope. In the process, it has redefined ‘hope’ as a strength to draw on, a counterforce and a means to achieve empowerment. This special section reflects on the contemporary politics of, in and through hope. It presents some of the discussions on the politics of hope that took place in a seminar at the University of Copenhagen and Copenhagen Business School in November 2017. The politics of hope deals in potential, in anticipated opportunities that give rise to hope, in political and legal visions as well as material and lived realities. Despite the salience of the topic, the interlinkage between politics and the heightened expectations it invests in hope has remained underresearched. The articles in this section provide multidisciplinary insights on politics that appears and functions through hope. They demonstrate how the dynamics of hope pervade a broad range of phenomena. The contributions by Eva Ottendörfer, Claes Tängh Wrangel, Valeria Guerrieri and David Chandler illustrate, respectively, that processes as diverse as transitional justice, counterterrorism measures, efforts to map energy resources and coming to terms with the Anthropocene all reflect manifestations of a (seemingly) ubiquitous hope. Through analyses of societal reparation, security rhetoric, cartography and the debate on the meaning of the Anthropocene, the authors illuminate how politics figures in discussions of hope.