Do we live in hopeful and uncertain times?

Since the turn of the Millennium, there has been a veritable explosion of academic writings on hope. While some studies focus on theoretical questions of time and anticipation, other provide empirical explorations of hope in situations of uncertainty.

A new special issue of the journal History and Anthropology, guest-edited by senior researcher at DIIS, Nauja Kleist, and senior lecturer in social anthropology, University of Manchester, Stef Jansen, brings these two perspectives together. Consisting of an introduction, four case studies, and an afterword, the special issue aims at critical exploration of hope as engagement with the future in contexts characterized by crisis, conflict and its effects, uncertainty and immobility.

Kleist and Jansen start the introduction by asking why there is so much emphasis on hope in anthropological writings and why this is happening now. They suggest that this reflects two converging developments: a sense of increasing unpredictability and crisis, and a sense of lack of political and ideological direction in this situation. Taking departure in a review of anthropological writings on hope, they further discuss how hope and uncertainty is produced, distributed and perceived in situations of (im)mobility, protracted crisis, and the future. Four articles follow the introduction, all based on long-term ethnographic fieldwork. Cathrine Brun examines the (lack of) future in humanitarianism in Jordan; Ilana Feldman analyzes how Palestinians refugees in Lebanon and the West Bank confront the future; Alicia Sliwinski explores everyday utopias in a post-disaster reconstruction site in El Salvador; and Stef Jansen discusses how to study hope in ethnographic studies in the context of Bosnia and Herzegovina. Finally Ghassan Hage provides a short afterword where he reflects on a future-politics and his own contributions to the study of hope.

The special issue is published as part of the research programme ‘New Geographies of Hope and Despair: the social effects of migration management for West African migrants’, anchored at DIIS and coordinated by Nauja Kleist.