Reflections of a contributor to the project, Forms of Resistance & Practices of Hope
By Prince Duah Agyei
On September 17, 2025, during a forehopers lunch break, I found myself in a conversation that has stayed with me ever since. Around the table, we spoke of the ways violence continues to shape human mobility, often surreptitiously and cloaked in the language of opportunity. Modern slavery, we noted, persists under the guise of promised employment, the lure of a better life, or the illusion of opportunity abroad. The discussion was sobering. Migration is never simply about movement, it is also about the risks of exploitation, exclusion, and precarity. And yet, even when people are presented with the full facts, when they know of the dangers, of broken promises, of uncertainties, of loneliness and of the possibility of being trapped in cycles of exploitation, they still choose to travel. This realization provoked a central question for me: why do people really migrate?
It is a question that resists simple answers. To leave one’s home, to cross borders, and to enter the unknown is not merely an economic calculation. It is an act animated by hope, the hope for transformation, renewal, and something more than what is available at home. At the same time, such journeys are a form of resistance, against unlivable conditions, against the suffocating weight of systemic inequality, and against the foreclosure of possibility. Migration, then, embodies both hope and resistance: it is daring in the face of risk, and imaginative in the face of despair. This vignette captures in miniature the broader concerns of the project, Forms of Resistance & Practices of Hope, within which my own scholarly contributions sought to explore precisely this interrelation among West African (African Migrants). In addition to conducting ethnographic conversations and generating data, as well as contributing to the design and teaching of the course Intersections of Peace, Resistance and Hope at Tampere University, my one-year involvement in the project resulted in the production of two articles, both currently at different stages of review.
The first article (co-authored with Angel Iglesias Ortiz), Resistance and Hope in Balance: Toward a Complementary Conceptual Framework, arose from the recognition that the relationship between resistance and hope has too often been left under-theorized. Resistance is frequently conceptualized as oppositional action directed against domination, while hope is treated as an abstract, aspirational orientation toward the future. What was missing was an exploration of their complementarity. Drawing on cases from Africa, Asia, and North America, we argued that everyday acts of defiance, whether exhausting all legal channels against deportation, gathering at borders to challenge separation, or refusing to accept unjust rulings, are not merely gestures of survival but are sustained by hope. Conversely, hope itself becomes political and tangible only when enacted through such everyday practices of resistance. In this way, the article sought to bridge the conceptual gap between two powerful but often disconnected discourses, demonstrating that hope and resistance together enable new possibilities for social and political change.
The second article, Hope, Resistance, and the Migrant Condition, took this conceptual work further by grounding it in ethnographic research with West African migrants in Finland. Here, the narratives of participants revealed the fragile but resilient ways hope and resistance intertwine in the everyday. Migrants drew on hope not only as the initial motivation to move, pursuing education, economic opportunity, or family life, but also as a sustaining force when confronted with exclusion, discrimination, or bureaucratic obstacles. Their resistance took many forms: submitting petitions to parliament, appealing legal decisions, engaging the media to shift public discourse, persisting in academic work despite institutional barriers, and, in some cases, adopting strategic inaction as a survival strategy. These acts were rarely spectacular or collective, but they were deeply political in how they preserved the possibility of alternative futures. In these lived experiences, hope and resistance emerged not as separate domains but as mutually constitutive forces.
Looking back, I see the September 17 lunch conversation as a symbolic entry point into the questions I pursued throughout the project. It reminded me that even when the risks are clear and the dangers undeniable, people still dare to migrate. This daring is not reducible to naivety or desperation. It is a politics of hope in action. To migrate thus, is to refuse the limits imposed by place, circumstance, or exclusion. It is to resist being confined to a present deemed unlivable and to assert that another life is possible, even if uncertain.
This reflection reinforces what I have come to understand through this project: that resistance and hope are necessary companions, both in the lives of those who move and in the work of those who study them. For me, scholarship itself has become a practice of hopeful resistance, an insistence on recognizing the agency of marginalized voices, on theorizing their everyday struggles as meaningful, and on refusing the erasures of systemic violence. My two articles represent modest contributions to this larger endeavor: attempts to theorize the interplay of resistance and hope, and to document how this interplay shapes migrant lives in Europe today.
In the end, my involvement in the project was not merely an academic exercise but a space for profound learning. It showed me that to engage critically with resistance and hope is to engage with the very conditions of human persistence under uncertainty. It is to recognize that while violence and exclusion persist, so too do the everyday practices through which people resist and imagine otherwise. And perhaps most importantly, it reminded me that as scholars, we too must embody resistance and hope, resisting despair within our institutions, and holding on to the hope that our work can illuminate, however modestly, paths toward more just futures. When I think back to that lunch on September 17, I realize the question we asked then still lingers: why do people really migrate? The conversations, the writings, and the shared reflections of this project suggest an answer. People migrate because even in the face of danger and disappointment, they dare to hope, and in daring, they resist.