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Hope in a time of catastrophe? Resilience and the future in bare life
School of Global Studies, University of Gothenburg, Gothenburg, Sweden, (SWE). (Critical War Studies)ORCID iD: 0000-0003-1806-4347
2014 (English)In: Resilience: International Policies, Practices and Discourses, ISSN 2169-3293, E-ISSN 2169-3307, Vol. 2, no 3, p. 183-194Article in journal (Refereed) Published
Abstract [en]

The framework of resilience has been claimed to strip bodies of both hope and the promise of the future, reducing life to mere biology, concerned only with its survivability. This article interrogates such claims by critical theory, analysing the definitions of life and time embedded in them. Reading the figure of human nature as it appears in US President Obama's call for a common humanity – united by hope in a world of insurmountable insecurity – this article asks what promises structure liberal subjectivity when security and universalism are seemingly abandoned. Through the lens of Agambian biopolitics, I argue that resilient life is produced not in opposition to hope, but as its embodiment, turning indefinite insecurity into a continuous experience of hope, and hence into a structure of promise. As such, I submit that the hopeful life today has become the barest of all, engendered by the production of a paradoxical temporal indistinction between an open future and the inevitability of catastrophe.

Place, publisher, year, edition, pages
2014. Vol. 2, no 3, p. 183-194
National Category
Other Social Sciences not elsewhere specified
Identifiers
URN: urn:nbn:se:fhs:diva-13380DOI: 10.1080/21693293.2014.948326OAI: oai:DiVA.org:fhs-13380DiVA, id: diva2:1925159
Available from: 2025-01-08 Created: 2025-01-08 Last updated: 2025-09-29Bibliographically approved
In thesis
1. The Use of Hope: Biopolitics of Security During the Obama Presidency
Open this publication in new window or tab >>The Use of Hope: Biopolitics of Security During the Obama Presidency
2018 (English)Doctoral thesis, comprehensive summary (Other academic)
Abstract [en]

 Through a compilation of four research articles, this PhD thesis investigates ‘hope’ as a biopolitical technology. It interrogates the use of hope by the United States security apparatus, on the one hand, to pre-empt processes of radicalisation and, on the other hand, to prepare the subject of security to cope with permanent insecurity. The dissertation analyses the security discourse of the Obama Administrations 2009 – 2016, paying particular attention to strategic narratives of hope across three principal domains of US security: diplomacy, development and military. The thesis thereby renders visible the ambiguous relations between hope and insecurity in US foreign policy during the Obama period: between hate and hope in the domain of (public) diplomacy; between despair and hope in the domain of development; and between fear and hope in the military domain. To analyse the respective strategic narratives, the thesis employs a theoretical framework drawn from Giorgio Agamben’s theory of biopolitics. Through Agamben’s theoretical perspective, hope appears as a means of governing the future, a technology employed to regulate processes of subjectification. The dissertation’s theoretical ambition is to question a central assumption undergirding important critique of the post-9/11 biopolitical condition: namely that practices of security are inherently at odds with hope, operating through discourses and practices of fear and suffering to reduce the capacity to hope within the global populace. By analysing the appropriation of hope by US security discourse, the thesis explores how practices of security works through hope to achieve security. US security discourse achieves this by means of constituting a particular form of hopeful life: an individualised and resilient form of neoliberal life who is called to embody an indistinction between fear, despair, hate and hope.

Place, publisher, year, edition, pages
Gothenburg: University of Gothenburg, 2018. p. 119
National Category
Other Social Sciences not elsewhere specified
Identifiers
urn:nbn:se:fhs:diva-13383 (URN)978-91-629-0412-8 (ISBN)
Public defence
2018-02-16, 10:34 (English)
Opponent
Supervisors
Available from: 2025-04-25 Created: 2025-01-08 Last updated: 2025-09-29Bibliographically approved

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Tängh Wrangel, Claes

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