Biopolitics of hope and security: governing the future through US counterterrorism communications

ABSTRACT

This article probes the relationship between hope and security, looking at how hope is appropriated and used by the US security apparatus under President Obama to pre-empt radicalisation. It looks specifically at strategic narratives designed to infuse hope within the global Muslim population – identified in US security discourse as being particularly vulnerable to terrorist recruitment. While critical studies of security often articulate hope and security to be diametrically opposed concepts, this article shows that hope not only is an active and important part of contemporary technologies and logics of security, but also that hope can be productive of the insecurities, fear and exclusions that such politics often is assumed to entail. The use of hope within US counterterrorism communications further indicates that, rather than a subversive force, hope has come to legitimise some of the key facets of post 9/11 politics of security, namely the identification of human nature as a site of potential danger, the invocation of permanent intervention, the radical exclusion of the global Muslim population from political rights, and, not the least, the effective denial of our capacity to imagine another world, free from the insecurities of our political present.

KEYWORDS:

• Hope
• security
• Obama
• biopolitics
• Agamben
• counterterrorism communications

Introduction

In literature critical of the contemporary biopolitical condition there is a tendency to position hope as an antidote to the ‘atmosfear’ (Aly & Balnaves, 2005) of all-pervasive insecurity that so many has observed across the global North post 9/11 (e.g. Evans & Reid, 2014; Massumi, 2005; Robin, 2016). While politics of fear, according to Sara Ahmed, attempts to ‘secure the relationships between […] bodies’, (2004, p. 63), to ‘shrink’ and ‘prepare the body for fight’ (2004, p. 69), hope is often described as being open both to the future and to social difference. Quoting Ernst Bloch, Ahmed defines hope as a practice that ‘open[s] up the world’, one that makes ‘people broad instead of confining them’ (2004, p. 69). Brian Massumi has equally described the practice of hope as a form of ‘global becoming’, rooted in the desire not for a ‘particular content or end-point’ but in the ‘desire for more life, or for more of life’ (2002, p. 242). Richard Rorty speaks of hope as a ‘good’ form of biopower (1999, p. 69) and Ghassan Hage of hope as formative of a ‘caring society’, one that is ontologically opposite to the ‘White paranoia’ that he so readily has studied (2003). Bearing in mind the securitised state in which we live, as well as the rapid diffusion of right wing populism across the global North, it could very well be argued that the desire for hope among the political and academic left has now reached an all time high (for examples see, Aronson, 2017; Robin, 2016; Solnit, 2016).

However, if one looks at the conceptual history of hope, the idea that hope is inherently at odds with fear, insecurity and exclusion begins to seem less certain. Although maintaining a desire for hope, Bloch has identified the location of hope as ‘the place of death’ (1986, p. 112) and Jacques Derrida has associated hope with ‘fear and trembling’ (1992, p. 5). More recently, Terry Eagleton has claimed that there is no ‘authentic hope’ without tragedy (2015, p. 115). Hesiod’s narration of the legend of Pandora (Hesiod, 2006) – the first historical record of hope that has survived to our days, written approximately 700 BC – is another example of hope’s ambiguous relation to human suffering and insecurity. According to the legend, hope is placed within the box of miseries that Pandora is ordered by Zeus to release onto mankind. As her final act, however, Pandora closes the box and keeps hope, personified in the goddess Elpis, alone from being dispersed to humanity. The positioning of hope within the box of miseries – both belonging to the category of suffering and, in the final instance, being separated from it – have puzzled interpreters of Hesiod’s poem. Friedrich Nietzsche, for example, has claimed that Hesiod’s poem is evidence that hope ‘is in truth the worst of all evils, because it protracts the torment of men’ (1996, p. 45). Others have argued that Elpis more accurately should be translated as expectation, not hope, and that its withholding thus should be read as an act of kindness, saving mankind from the ‘worst of evils’, namely a ‘continual expectation of evil [that] would have made life a torture beyond bearing’ (Verdeinius, 1985, p. 69). This torture is of course the condition we are claimed to find ourselves in today, always anticipating the next attack (Dillon & Reid, 2009; Evans & Reid, 2014; Massumi, 2005; 2007). However one interprets the tale, it is safe to say that it details an ambiguous relationship between hope and insecurity, one that is remarkably different from the desire for hope that characterises our present political discussions. Indeed, if one is to believe the legend, insecurity and suffering appears to be not hope’s ontological opposite, but its original location.

This article seeks to render visible how this paradoxical relationship between hope and security is expressed within present technologies and apparatuses of security. As such, the article aims to show not only how hope is an active and important part of technologies of security, but also how hope can be productive of the insecurities, fear and exclusions that such politics entails. The aim is to problematise the à priori definition of hope as a subversive experience that our present securitised state is either foreign or antagonistic to. As part of this ambition, it is arguably necessary to rethink our descriptions of both security and of our biopoliticised present: to move away from one-sided interpretations of discourses of security as dominated by fear, despair and hate – what Evans and Reid has labelled a ‘biopolitical aesthetic’ (2014, p. 178) of suffering, perceived to be ubiquitous in our political present. If contingency (Dillon, 2007), indeterminacy (Massumi, 2005; 2007), and the appearance of constant movement (Braun & Wakefield, 2018) are all central to (neo)liberal biopolitics, then what role can and does hope play in this appearance?

To develop this argument, the article takes as its study object one of the most common tropes of the liberal post 9/11 war on terror, namely the idea that hope will triumph over hate and fear, bringing security in its wake. Empirically, attention is paid to the US presidential discourse of Obama, in particular to the administration’s strategic narrative towards the global Muslim population, which was designed to spread a message of hope and unity in order to continuously pre-empt terrorist recruitment (Obama, 2014). The discourse of Obama is chosen because of the paradigmatic positon it continues to hold in respect to politics of hope in general, as well as to a particular conflation of hope and security. To be sure, this vision continues to haunt our collective political imagination, finding ever new guises in political figures such as Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau (who recently professed commitment to ‘hope over fear’ in his address to the UN General Assembly (Trudeau, 2016)), French President Emmanuel Macron, whose victory The Guardian called a ‘victory for hope’ (The Guardian, 2017), but also in more leftist figures such as the Swedish Social Democrats, whose traditional vision of an equal society has increasingly been replaced by a vision for a society in which everyone can hope (Socialdemokraterna, 2012).

In Obama’s formulation, hope and the lack of hope are key signifiers of de/radicalisation. Continuing a long-standing tradition within US counterterrorism discourse (see for instance Bush, 2006), Obama has repeatedly referred to the lack of hope as a root cause of violence, a deficiency in need of external correction. According to Obama, ‘groups like al Qaeda and ISIL exploit the anger that festers when people feel that injustice and corruption leave them with no chance of improving their lives’ (Obama, 2015a, emphasis added). Obama defines hope both as a strategic and social affect - the ‘most powerful weapon in our arsenal’ (2009a), one whose utilisation is claimed to be an ‘obligation’ (2016a). In the wake of the 2016 attacks in Brussels, Obama described this weapon as capable of being moved from one body to another: ‘It is not a static hope [but] a living and breathing hope. It’s not a gift we simply receive, but one we must give to others, a gift to carry forth’ (2016a). Hope, in this schema, is not merely something we have, or something that we experience. It is not personal or individual. On the contrary, hope is better understood as a social and political affect or entity – hope acts, it is designed to assemble bodies into formation, to produce subjectivities and to create a particular form of life – one that is deemed safer, less violent, less disruptive of the here and now.

Hope could thus be called, in Giorgio Agamben’s terms, a biopolitical technology, an apparatus through which the substance of life is both contained, valued and constituted (2011). Based on this perspective, this article does not seek to analyse simply what hope is – to search for its ontological definition – but rather to question what hope does, how it gives form and value to different lives, how it regulates processes of becoming. Importantly, it reads such practices both as produced by hope and as productive, if not performative, of hope. According to Peter Burke, there is no ‘Hope, with a capital H, in the singular’, but rather ‘varieties of hope, […] hopes in the plural’ (2012, p. 207).

With the ambition to establish a theoretical framework to study hope as a biopolitical technology, the article departs with a theoretical exposé into the relation between hope and security. Following this discussion is an analysis of the use of hope – and the perceived relation between hope and security – in the practices of US counterterrorism communications, focusing on President Obama’s key public diplomacy addresses directed towards what Obama refers to as the ‘Muslim world’ (2009b). As stated above, the purpose of this analysis is to challenge prevalent ideas about hope within critical theory, namely that hope is fundamentally opposed to logics and practices of security, that hope is productive of a solidaristic and open subject and that hope allows us to imagine and act towards a radically different future. In contrast to such ideas, the analysis shows how security works through hope not only in order to separate different forms of life from one another but also to pre-empt the future from coming into presence.

Theorising the relationship between hope and security

While the theoretical framework that this article employs borrows heavily from general post-structural insights, such as the attention afforded to discourse and to relations of power and exclusion, it nonetheless problematizes a certain way of speaking about hope that is prevalent in the critique of the post 9/11 state of security and beyond. According to this way of speaking, hope represents a radical alternative to the logic of security, an embrace of contingency and vulnerability that practices and discourses of security constantly seek to foreclose (Burke, 2011; Evans & Reid, 2014; Rorty, 1999). In contrast to security, which is claimed to govern through control and exclusion, hope is often described as an inclusive affect or disposition, one that opens the present towards possibility and to the future.¹

Susan McManus has referred to this manner of speaking as the ‘hope project’ (2011), a term that calls attention to the privileged position afforded to hope within the academic and political left. The commonality of this narrative means that hope, with a few exceptions,² remains understudied as a biopolitical technology or as a form of sovereign power, a bias that this article seeks to remedy. While McManus speaks of a ‘project’, the way of speaking that I will address in this chapter is however not as coherent, as instrumental nor as well-defined as the notion of a project implies. While based on a broad post structural spirit, the ‘hope project’ is not a unified or pre-defined research agenda. Some advocates for hope, such as Massumi (2002), Anderson (2006) and Hardt and Negri (quoted in Brown, Szeman, Negri, & Hardt, 2002), base their research on the philosophy of Baruch Spinoza, others employ a Derridean perspective (e.g. Skrimshire, 2008) and others still depart from Foucauldian biopolitics (e.g. Duffield, 2007; Evans & Reid, 2014). Instead of the ‘hope project’, I will therefore refer to this way of speaking as the ‘hope narrative’. What unites this narrative, is not a common ontological and epistemological foundation, but rather a shared desire for hope and a shared description of the present as fundamentally antagonistic to hope.

Below I will rehearse some of the most common traits of the ‘hope narrative’. Particular attention is paid to Richard Rorty’s notion of social hope (1999), as it has been claimed to closely resemble Obama’s own conceptualisation of hope (Kloppenberg, 2011). My discussion will focus on the sense of openness that is attributed to hope in and by the hope narrative: openness to the unknown, to the future and to social difference, traits all perceived to be fundamentally opposite to contemporary politics of security. In the concluding paragraphs of this section, I will seek to move beyond this narrative, in order to theorise hope as a biopolitical technology, central, not opposite to, techniques and logics of security.

The juxtaposition between hope and security is arguably one of the most common features of the hope narrative. In an attempt to define what he calls ‘social hope’ (1999), Rorty has called for politics to overcome its ‘desire for stability, security and order’ and instead recognize contingency as possibility, substituting security for the ‘romance of unpredictable change’ (1999, p. 88). According to Rorty not only are quests for ‘absolute knowledge’ impossible, ‘hopeless’ (1999, p. 49) – representing nothing but ‘attempt[s] to escape from the world’ (1999, p. 33) – they are also epistemologically opposed to hope, based as they are on a desire to foreclose the contingency that Rorty deems as hope’s precondition. Other voices within the ‘hope narrative’ have voiced similar concerns. In our contemporary security context, Anthony Burke has argued that we should forego the linear promise of security, which according to Burke has ‘written us – shaped and limited our possibility, the possibilities for ourselves, our relationships, and our available images of political, social and economic order’ (2007, p. 31). Ahmed has similarly asked whether we can ‘maintain hope when ‘the war on terror’ is justified as an ethical right’ (2004, p. 184). To be sure, the concern and desire for hope is also evident amongst literature critical of the what David Chandler has called ‘postmodern’ (2014, p. 62) forms of security governance, which emphasise time to be non-linear and the future to be essentially unknown (Anderson, 2010; Martin, 2014; Massumi, 2007). While urged to embrace contingency, the life produced by such practices has nonetheless been claimed to be anchored to the actuality of one time, to be obsessed by a future only comprehensible in catastrophic terms (Dillon, 2011, p. 784). As such, it has been argued that such policies are inherently devoid of hope, formative rather of a nihilistic and reactive life without imaginative power, unable to conceive of a world beyond the demands of insecurity (Evans & Reid, 2014, p. 125; 196; see also Chandler, 2013, p. 163).

Another common way of speaking about hope is to locate its foundation in an inherent potentiality and contingency of human nature. According to Rorty, the human is an animal without essence: ‘humanity is an open-ended notion […] the word human names a fuzzy but promising project rather than an essence’ (1999, p. 52). In dedication to this antiessentialism, Rorty calls for philosophy to become ‘an aid to creating ourselves rather than to knowing ourselves’ (1999, p. 69), fostering a ‘generous hope’ that is capable of sustaining itself without recourse to ideas of a fixed human nature (1999, p. 209). Rorty perceives this generous hope to be formative of an inclusive and contingent subject, whose identity is not formed through the projection of ahistoric differences. Debased from essentialism, commitment to hope would thus make way for a new figure of human con-vivality – of ‘new ways of being human, and a new earth for these new humans to inhabit’ (1999, p. 88). As such, we are told that Rorty’s hopeful community does not attempt to subsume the multitude of human existence into one figure of Humanity, nor that it conforms life to a given norm, as per the workings of disciplinary power (Foucault, 2008, p. 259). On the contrary, hope is taken to express a ‘kind of anti-authoritarian philosophy [that] helps people set aside religious and ethnic identities in favour of an image of themselves as part of a great human adventure, one carried out on a global scale’ (Rorty, 1999, pp. 238–9).

Within the wider ‘hope narrative’, we find this idea readily repeated. Ahmed speaks of hope as a ‘sense [of] gathering together’, a matter of ‘opening up the world’ (2004, p. 184). Ronald Aronson too describes hope as an ‘experience of coming together’, formative of an ever growing subject: ‘a we committed to expanding and deepening democracy’ (2017). According to Hardt and Negri, hope is an act of resistance, one that ‘ultimately resides in comraderie, the possibility of the creation of a fraternal society of equals’ (quoted in Brown et al., 2002, p. 200). Like Rorty, Hardt and Negri find the capacity for this activity in what they perceive to be a non-extinguishable ‘potentiality of being’ (Negri quoted in and translated by Nielson, 2004, p. 68). Burke’s vision of a ‘humanity after biopolitics’ (2011, emphasis added) offers a similar narrative. In this article, which arguably provides the theoretical and philosophical rationale for Burke’s more recent attempts to establish a form of ‘security cosmopolitanism’ (2013), Burke identifies in human nature’s ‘groundlessness’ an inextinguishable ‘hopeful creativity’ that is ultimately untameable by biopolitics.

Other voices, some of them explicitly rejecting Burke’s ethical vision (Chandler, Cudworth, & Hobden, 2017), nonetheless mimics his desire for hope. Among these voices we find Chandler’s call to replace the postmodern subject of governance with a ‘transformative subject’ aspiring to ‘remake the world’ (2013, p. 139), Mark Duffield’s advocacy for an ‘international citizenship’ representative of the ‘magic of life itself’, namely, the ‘possibilities for new encounters, mutual recognition, reciprocity and hope’ (2007, p. 232, emphasis added) as well as Evans and Reid’s advocacy for a ‘critical pedagogy’ to the ‘globally oppressed’ that would ‘release a potential which was already there in the making’ (2014, p. 192, emphasis added). Worth recalling are also Massumi’s definition of hope as a form of ‘global becoming’ (2002, p. 242), and Hage’s equation between hope and a ‘caring society’ (2003), both rehearsed in the introduction to this article.

According to such definitions, hope is simultaneously present and absent. Hope is seen both as intrinsic to all life – an inextinguishable and uncontainable human force of creativity that forever transcends totalitarian attempts of sovereign power, as defined by Burke (2011, p. 108) – and as being formative of a particular transcendent form of life. In Burke’s formulation, hope is both an ‘empirical fact and [a] moral imperative’ (2011, p. 109). Hope is both the prerequisite of politics, signalling an openness, a relationality, without which no politics would be possible, as well as the result of politics, seemingly in constant need of production and support - the instrumental task of what Rorty calls a ‘good’ form of ‘biopower’ (1999, p. 69). Through such descriptions, hope becomes as an end in itself, the true object of politics. What ultimately matters, Rorty argues, is not whether particular hopes are realised or not, but whether politics realises hope: the production of a critical ‘imaginative power’ (1999, p. 87) that would increase the scope of ‘human freedom’ (1999, p. 129). To that end, we learn that it is ‘the vista, not the endpoint, [that] matters’, that ‘Growth itself […] is the only moral end’ (1999, p. 28) and that ‘the telos of movement and flux is not solely mastery, but also stimulation’ (1999, p. 34). Rorty further states that the hope this figure embodies is ‘the only basis for a worthwhile human life’ (1999, p. 204).

In contrast to this way of speaking, this article reads hope as a biopolitical technology. As such, it treats hope not as opposite to the exclusions generated by practices of security, but as central to their operation. To understand hope as a biopolitical technology entails treating hope not as a fact of life, but as part of what Reid, following Foucault, calls an ‘imperative discourse on life’ (2011, p. 772), one that seek to define life, to value and to exclude forms of life deemed different and inferior. In other words, the article treats hope not as an ontological category, but as what Agamben has called an ‘ontological operator’ (1999, p. 147) engaged in what Agamben perceives as a ‘relentless fight’ (2011, p. 14) between the substance of life and the ‘historical element’ through which living beings are captured: ‘the set of institutions, of processes of subjectification and of rules in which power relations become concrete’ (2011, p. 6).

To define hope as a biopolitical technology further implies that the ontology of hope cannot be taken for granted. According to Agamben, the activity of use is a performative process, one that is constitutive both of the object in use and of the subjects that are placed in relation to this object. In his concluding work on the figure of the Homo Sacer, Agamben traced this performative dimension historically to the Greek category of work, ergon, meaning to produce, to bring forth, to ‘come into presence’ (2015, p. 48). As Agamben details, the practice of use is defined from the outset as a relational process, one that inserts an object in a sphere consisting of other concepts, subjects and objects. To be used is to affect and to be affected by these relations (2015, p. 29). From this perspective, the use of hope – which, if we recall, Obama defines as ‘the most powerful weapon in our arsenal’ (Obama, 2009a) – does things to hope. It technologises and instrumentalises hope, it defines hope as an object that can be transferred between bodies through different means. Through this technologisation, certain subjects are placed in particular relations to hope. Some are deemed to be in need of hope and some are perceived to be capable of using hope. These traits are not inherent in hope, but produced in part by the biotechnologisation of hope in US security discourse.

Through this definition, hope cannot be predefined as opposite to traditional concepts of security, such as fear and hate. Neither can hope be pre-defined as ontologically open to, or productive of, an unknown future. On the contrary, hope’s insertion into security places hope in a constitutive relation to such concepts. In the next section, I will seek to render visible these constitutive relations, analysing how the use of hope is envisioned by US security discourse: what meaning is given to hope, how hope is meant to be actualised and what form of life its actualisation is meant to produce. Focus will be granted specifically to strategic communication targeting the global Muslim population, deemed, as they are implicitly or explicitly, to be particularly vulnerable to, and a constant target of, terrorist recruitment and propaganda (Jackson, 2007; Kundnani, 2012).

The use of hope by US counterterrorism communications

Those tasked to implement hope during the Obama period are several agencies working on different aspects of use including both the US military (Wrangel, 2014) and the full range of the US development industry (Tängh Wrangel, 2017). The means employed by these different agencies varies greatly, from material development programmes such as Feed the Future to the 2010 military surge in Afghanistan, described by Obama as delivering a ‘promise of a better future’ to the Afghan population (2009c). However, none of these material means are separated from the ideological sphere, which for Obama constitutes the principal level of radicalisation: ‘war[‘s] most fundamental source’ (Obama, 2014). According to the 2010 National Framework of Strategic Communication, ‘every action that the United States Government takes sends a message, well beyond those managed by the communications community’ (White House, 2010, p. 3). The 2010 framework thus details the urgent need to foster ‘a culture of communication’ (2010, p. 3) within the US security apparatus at large, to ‘synchronise […] our words and deeds’ (2010, p. 2).³ Hope is thus ultimately defined as an immaterial technology, a matter of communication, of narrative. Its primary battlefield is ideology, its aim is not to modulate the ontology of the world, but how this ontology is felt, perceived and acted upon.

In regards to the global Muslim population, one of hope’s primary objectives is to dismantle the idea that faith is formative of distinct and mutually exclusive identities, based on incompatible teleological trajectories – an idea that Obama holds to be an ongoing cause of both fear and violence. In his much coveted Nobel lecture, Obama described such ideas as incompatible with the humanitarian cause: ‘no Holy War can ever be a just war. For if you truly believe that you are carrying out divine will, then then there is no need for restraint – no need to spare the pregnant mother, or the medic, or the Red Cross worker, or even a person of one’s own faith’ (2009d). If hope is divorced from such linear ideas, however, then Obama perceives hope to offer a basis for a ‘common humanity’ (2009d).

Real faith, which in Obama’s vocabulary in many ways is equated to hope, is without such teleological content, and as such, it is articulated as transcendent of particular religions. Real faith, we are told, is also a matter of trust– ‘a faith in other people’ (2009b), one that ‘assume[s] the best in each other and not just the worst’ (2016b). It is further described as a ‘courage to reach out to others across [the] divide, rather than push people away […] a courage to go against the conventional wisdom’ (2016b). Much like Rorty’s call for ‘new ways of being human’, the ‘new beginning’ that Obama promised in his celebrated Cairo address to the ‘Muslim world’ was thus not based on an identification of shared historical or biological properties, nor on a fixed idea of a utopian future, but on a recognition that our identities are not fixed, that we are not ‘imprisoned by the past’ (2009b), but forever engaged in processes of becoming. Rehearsing a common trope of the ‘hope narrative’, Obama urged that we should not fear change, but embrace it. Ultimately, it is our inescapable relationship to change, to the ‘ambiguities of history’ (2009d), that is held to define our humanity – our ‘interdependence’, our ‘common aspirations’, and our in-built ‘ability to reimagine the world, to remake this world’ (2009d). According to Hirokazu Miyazaki, it is this ‘lack of specificity’ (2008, p. 5) that is the ‘most distinctive component’ of Obama’s hope, an emptiness he claims make it general, not particular, inviting ‘us all to replicate it as our own personal and specific hope’ (2008, p. 8).

Although this may seem both progressive and subversive, the use of hope by the US security apparatus is however not built on trust, nor is it, as we shall see, antithetical to present biopolitics of security, and their attempts to govern ‘through contingency’ (Dillon, 2007, p. 41). On the contrary, the use of hope is intimately related to many of its constitutive elements. These include, as we shall see, the identification of human nature as a site of potential danger (Dillon & Reid, 2009), the invocation of permanent intervention (e.g. Duffield, 2007; Massumi, 2007), the radical exclusion of the global Muslim population from political rights (e.g. Kundnani, 2012), and, not the least, the effective denial of our capacity to imagine another world, free from the insecurities of today (e.g. Dillon, 2011; Evans & Reid, 2014). In what follows, I will address how the use of hope reproduces and reinforces each of these elements.

While Obama defines hope as intrinsic to human nature, an inextinguishable force that defines our humanity, hope is also continuously articulated as a choice, a calling. Like Burke and other advocates for hope, US security discourse paradoxically defines hope both as an eternal trait and a constitutive lack. In Cairo, Obama pleaded to the Muslim World to deny the past and to ‘choose to […] move forward’, to reject fear, cynicism and the idea that ‘we are fated to disagree, and civilizations are doomed to clash’ (2009b). In his 2016 remarks at the National Prayer Breakfast, in which Obama elaborated on the politics and idea of fear, he called for us not to give in to fear, not to ‘succumb to despair, or paralysis, or cynicism’ (2016b). Arguing that fear is a ‘primal emotion, one that we all experience’, Obama warned that fear can be politicised, that it ‘can feed our most selfish impulses, and erode the bonds of community’ (2016b). Unlike fear, however, which Obama defines as primal, hope is articulated as inherently fragile. Unless we are vigilant, Obama proclaims, hope can be denied, it can ‘waiver’ (2016b), it can turn into resentment, ‘giv[ing] way to cynicism, even despair’ (2009e).

To be hopeful, as per Obama’s account, is hence not simply something we are or something we securely have. On the contrary, it is something we must become, something that we must continuously claim allegiance to and protect, else we lose it forever. According to Obama, there is a fear attached to hope. Hope – and the ‘courage’ that it is likened to – is not ‘absen[t] of fear’ (2016b). Hope is not opposite to, but simultaneous to fear, signalling an ability not to be determined by fear alone. What hope does, its imaginative horizon, is hence not to replace the primacy of fear, but to regulate it. As such, we can understand how hope paradoxically takes part in replacing imaginations of a future free from the insecurities that so commonly are associated with fear in US security discourse. We can also identify how a politics of hope can serve to legitimise the state of permanent insecurity and policing in which we live (Bachmann, Bell, & Holmqvist, 2014), legitimising calls for a permanent intervention in the ‘inner world of subjects’ (Chandler, 2013, p. 73) that has come to characterise practices of global security post 9/11. Indeed, to safeguard hope is described as a key objective of US security practices, as detailed by the 2010 National Security Strategy: ‘What happens to the hope of a single child – anywhere – can enrich our world, or impoverish it’ (White House, 2010b, p. 7).

Again, hope is here not ultimately about ‘trust in other people’, as Obama would have us believe, quite the opposite. To be identified as hopeful is to be seen as potentially dangerous, as carrying an inherent contingency within oneself. It is, if one is to paraphrase Ernst Bloch, to live in the not-yet: ‘Only with the farewell to the closed, static concept of being does the real dimension of hope open’ (1986, p. 18). Obama’s empathic recognition of the inherent potentiality of ‘young’ Muslims – the promise issued in Cairo to the young Muslims of the world that they can change the world, that they can become anything – could thus be described as both promise and threat, one that has served as a paradoxical legitimation of the practices of surveillance and intervention faced by the global Muslim population since 9/11 (e.g. Kundnani, 2012). While Obama has gone to great lengths to destabilise the common assumption that violence is inherent in Islam – to emphasise, like his predecessor George W. Bush (Jackson, 2007, p. 64), that America is not at war with Islam and that America is home to millions of Muslims (e.g. Obama, 2009b) – it nonetheless seems as if the identification of the global Muslim population as particularly vulnerable to violent extremism continues to haunt US security discourse. Not only are ‘moderate’ Muslim communities repeatedly charged with a special responsibility to ‘explicitly, forcefully, and consistently’ (Obama, 2014) distance itself from acts and ideologies of terror, Muslim communities are also identified as particularly ‘infected’ (2015b) by extremist ideology.

In contrast to traditional biopolitical designations of the Muselmann as devoid of hope (de Koning, 2015), the problem that Obama identifies with the ‘Muslim world’ (as if this was ever one world, with one geographical location and with one specific population) – what makes them so easily ‘infected’, i.e. what they lack, and consequently what US counterterrorism communications takes as its task to produce – is not simply hope, but rather the particular form of hope that Obama holds to embrace rather than resent change. By lacking this hope, the ‘Muslim world’ is curiously depicted both as too fearful, and strangely, as we will discuss in more detail below, too hopeful.

In respect to fear, the ‘Muslim world’ is accused of having denied hope, of having succumbed to perceived ‘laws’ of history, desperately clinging to traditional identities. Their lack of hope is articulated as a lack of modernity, or perhaps more accurately, as born out of a misrepresentation of modernity as dictating, rather than releasing change. Obama’s recognition in Cairo that ‘change can bring fear. Fear that because of modernity we lose control over our economic choices, our politics, and most importantly our identities’ (2009b) is a clear testament to this logic. Fear is further articulated as a denial of choice, as being capable of arresting young Muslims in their present form, denying their potentiality, as per Obama’s description of the ‘propaganda’ of ‘violent extremism’ as having ‘coerced young people to travel abroad to fight their wars and turned students – young people full of potential – into suicide bombers’ (Obama, 2014, emphasis added).

Importantly, in US security discourse the desire for fixed identities, regardless of what form this desire takes, is linked not only to fear, but also to a particular form of hope – a linear hope that Obama holds as productive of social antagonisms. The ‘ideology of violent extremism’, in particular, is perceived to feed on this desire, to offer stability and purpose to those ‘who may be disillusioned or wrestling with their identity’ (Obama, 2015c). As such, while Obama continuously addresses this ideology as a ‘nightmarish vision’ (2014), a ‘twisted interpretation of religion’ (2015a), communicated by ‘depraved terrorists’ (2016c) who ‘cannot build or create anything, and therefore peddle only fanaticism and hate’ (2014) – its vision is not perceived to be devoid of hope. On the contrary, what makes the ideology of violent extremism so dangerous, according to US security discourse, is not its ‘nihilism’ (US Department of State, 2016), but the ‘inspiration’ it offers, its ‘attractiveness’ (Obama, 2015a). One senior official within the US counterterrorism community further describes the desirability of these ideas as based on ‘empowerment, adventure, and religious obligation and reward’, and, most notably, its promise to ‘fulfil the ‘Islamic’ vision of creating an Islamic state’ (Hussein, 2015, emphasis added).

Attempting to remedy the lack that the ‘Muslim world’ is defined by – which, again, is not hope per se, but the capacity to be hopeful in contingency, to not desire contingency’s foreclosure – US security discourse emphasises the need to continuously and ceaselessly dismantle and ‘discredit’ (Obama, 2015a) the terrorist narrative. Importantly, the strategy used to this end does not seek to offer an alternative vision of the future, it does not seek to promote ‘better ideas’ (2015a), or a more peaceful utopic desire, it seeks rather to empty its ideological adversary of utopic content, thereby returning the ‘Muslim world’ to contingency. One senior counterterrorism official has described this tactic as an attempt to ‘unnerve the adversary, to get in their heads’, to play ‘offense and not defence’ (Fernandez, 2013). To that end, the most effective message to potential recruits, another official informs, has proven to be a direct attack on the certainty through which the ‘ideology of violent extremism’ articulates its hope, to showcase ISIL’s ‘hypocrisy’, and to communicate that ‘No you’re not going to go to heaven, no you’re going to be treated appallingly when you’re there, no you’re not likely to fight, but you’re likely to be cleaning toilets, no you’re not going to be able to communicate with your family, and by the way, how are you even going to tell your family that you’ve done this’ (Stengel, 2016).

While this logic has clear similarities with the idea of public diplomacy offered by Janice Bially Mattern (2005), who has observed how modern forms of public diplomacy seeks to destabilise identities, the biopoliticisation of hope that here is articulated differs remarkably from traditional definitions of propaganda and strategic communication (Miskimmon, O’Loughlin, & Roselle, 2013). In contrast to these definitions, the use of hope aims not to create, nor imagine the future, but to safeguard against such desires. Its goal is not meant to bring certainty but uncertainty. Indeed, the use of hope seeks to reformulate uncertainty, and the open future that it is associated with, as a promise. It is in this respect that we can identify the biopoliticisation of hope as a radical rejection of the capacity to envision another world beyond the contingencies and insecurities of the present. In Obama’s vocabulary such visions are repeatedly held as antithetical to hope, associated as they are only with reduction, fear and exclusion. As articulated in US security discourse, to be hopeful is explicitly not to be imaginative, but to be devoid of content, and hence open to the future.

Conclusions

Based on this analysis, hope appears to be a key signifier within US security discourse as well as an active part of practices of security. As such, we cannot assume that there is an inherent form of life which hope is formative of, nor can we assume, as we are often told, that hope is opposite to the fear, hate and mistrust experienced in our everyday lives, produced in part by the discourse of security that this article has studied. Neither can hope be assumed to open up our lives to the world and to the future. On the contrary, as above analysis has attempted to show, hope can be simultaneously without content, open to contingency, without end and take an active part in keeping the future from being both imagined and from coming into presence.

Such an articulation of hope, I submit, poses serious questions to our contemporary desire for hope. How to keep open the commitment to hope and to an open future, when such desires are appropriated by the very discourses of security that we seek to oppose and reject? How is one to distinguish between the biopolitisation of hope in US security discourse and the radical desire for hope in contemporary critiques of security – given that both posit, on the one hand, a desire for an empty, contingent hope without end and, on the other hand, proclaim hope to be ‘the only basis for a worthwhile human life’ (Rorty, 1999, p. 204)?

One way to retain hope’s political potency, I would contend, would require that ideas of a genuine form of hope, one that is formative of a transcendent form of life beyond the limits of biopolitics, are abandoned. Such calls risk not only to reinforce the desire for hope that is produced by authoritative discourses of security, they also risk placing hope outside the field of critical empirical inquiry. We should also question, I would argue, whether hope is an end in itself, the true object of politics, or whether not it would be better understood as a means of politics, one whose political purchase demands that it reaches towards something other than its own realisation? To do that would be to bring the imagination back to hope, to allow, as per Reid’s solemn advice, the ‘imaginary [to] find its matter, its reality’ (2012, p. 161). Such a redirection of desires entail that we do no longer act for hope, but of hope in order to create and imagine another world.

Acknowledgements

First of all, I would like to give special credit to the two anonymous reviewers for their attentive reading of this manuscript and for the valuable and insightful comments they provided. Secondly, I would like to thank Heidi Sinevaara-Niskanen and Marjo Lindroth, the editors of this special issue, not only for their guidance and patience with the manuscript but also for organising the Politics of Hope workshop in Copenhagen 2017, where a first draft of this article was first presented. Thanks is also due to Claudia Aradau, Luis Lobo-Guerrero, Maria Stern, Jan Aart Scholte and Erik Andersson for offering cherished feed-back on earlier versions.

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No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

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Claes Tängh Wrangel

Claes Tängh Wrangel is a lecturer in Peace and Development Research at the School of Global Studies, University of Gothenburg. His research interrogates, inter alia, the biopolitics of hope as it operates in the discourse and governance of global security. His work has been published in journals such as Environment and Planning D: Society and Space and Resilience: International Discourses, Practices and Policies.

Notes

1. For a small selection of this way of speaking, see Massumi, 2002, p. 242; Ahmed, 2004; Robin, 2016; Duffield, 2007: 232; Skrimshire, 2008; Burke, 2011; Evans and Reid, 2014, p. 192; Eagleton, 2015; Solnit, 2016

2. See for example; Anderson, 2006, p. 749; 2010; Pedwell. 2012; Grove, 2014, p. 248; Richey, 2015, p. 14; Guerrieri, 2018.

3. See Holmqvist (2013) for a discussion on the increasing role of strategic communication in and by the US security apparatus in relation to changing definitions of war.