Category: Blog

Cæcilie Svop Jensen, with Meeri Tiensuu and Bayan Arouri

We live today in what Aradau (2014) has described as a contemporary era of ‘un-ness’ – uncertainty, unpredictability and unknowability which affects how people resist and hope. While resistance and practices of hope have the potential to drive social change, their interrelation remains largely undertheorized (see Agyei and Iglesias Ortiz 2025). As one of the central points of investigation in the FoRE/HOPE project, this interrelation was also explored through participatory workshops in both 2025 and 2026 at the annual Development Days conference in Helsinki.

During the Development Days 2025 Conference, FoRE/HOPE organized an explorative workshop that invited participants to reflect on the concepts of hope and resistance as a source of knowledge. The workshop also explored their potential to challenge excluding oppressive and exploitative structures, as well as situations of violence, wars and discrimination. 

The aim of this first workshop was to scope out participants’ understanding of hope, resistance and the potential and characteristics they imbued them with. It also sought to examine how participants understand the relationship between the concepts. Hope and resistance are deeply ambiguous concepts and experiences, and their relationship therefore also understood differently. This was also reflected in the workshop.

We began by asking participants what gives them hope. The answers were diverse and inspiring, reflecting the unique perspectives of each individual. Some participants found hope in people who stick with their values, while others were uplifted by encounters with other people. One poignant thought shared was, “you can do acts of hope, even if you are not hopeful,” highlighting the power of action in fostering hope, but also, interestingly, the transformative potential residing, even in the loss of hope. Nature also played a significant role, with mentions of the forest and music as sources of solace and inspiration. Additionally, many found hope in training and educating future generations, emphasizing the importance of investing in students and the future. It was evident that sources of hope varied widely, ranging from personal and communal to political and non-political. Participants drew hope from small acts of kindness as well as more structural efforts in education to alleviate or manage discrimination.  

The workshop continued by reflecting on the following two questions: What comes to your mind when you hear the words ‘hope’ and ‘resistance’? In which everyday spaces do you imagine/see practices of hope and resistance? We intentionally asked people to reflect on both concepts together, to get a sense of how they intersect in people’s minds. For the first question, participants mentioned change and action, imagining different futures, stability, solidarity, liberation movements, not giving up, people standing their ground, encounters, small children, homeland, freedom, poetry and possibilities. In the second part of the exercise, they located hope and resistance in diverse spaces, including streets, political demonstrations, universities, homes, forests, family, crosscuts/shortcuts, dining table discussions, workplaces and research communities, libraries, everyday spaces of survival, and ‘while driving’.

These answers suggest that hope and resistance are woven into complex interactions between human-to-human relationships, objects, individual emotions and larger communal practices. They also locate hope and resistance in very different spaces, both formal and informal as well as part of both temporally disrupted and more continuous processes.  

In the last activity, people rotated in groups to discuss three questions that focused on the relationships between hope and resistance. This was interesting because the tensions involved in working with these concepts came out in the discussions. For instance, some participants reflected on how resistance could romanticize everyday actions as resistance, making subconscious mundane acts into politicized forms of resistance. Conversely, others saw everyday practices of resistance as a way to highlight agency and potential for political change in small acts, in turn fueling hope. Hope itself was also contested, in particular when it came to discussing whether hope itself is political, and driving resistance, or merely a more ‘passive’ emotion that can sometimes hinder resistance through the passive act of hoping for a better future, rather than working for one.

In one group, the focus was on how human interaction played a role in resistance and hope. They highlighted shared understandings of the world, community building and making, (un)shared responsibility and agency. At the same time, they emphasized tensions, frictions, power struggles and margins. Reflecting on these answers, we discussed how the very ambiguities embedded in hope and resistance make their investigation as combined phenomena even more interesting.

Our second workshop, in 2026, built on the experiences of the first. This time we wanted to explore a specific exercise in the context of un-ness, namely how imagining a better world, or utopias, could fuel/disrupt/impede, intersections of hope and resistance. The theme of the 2026 conference, Development in ruins, hope in the cracks, can in itself be seen as a testament to the (un)settling feelings of disillusionment with global challenges and their solutions, circulating among people working with these issues. This also prompts reflections on hope and, importantly, the loss of hope and resistance in these contexts. How can utopias nurture hope and resistance, if at all?  

We shaped the workshop around this central question. Participants were first asked to individually answer questions about their own utopias, what they contained, what they did not entail, what kinds of problems they wanted to have alleviated in them. We then worked in groups to combine individual visions into joint utopia(s). In the end, each group had to fill out their ideas by completing the sentence “We live in utopia when…”.  

The workshop was informed by two interlocking starting points. First, seeing hope as political practice (see also Lindroth and Sinevaara 2020), and understanding it not as passive optimism, but as a collective, political force co-constructed through everyday practices, organized resistance, and efforts toward social change. Second, approaching utopias as tangible political agency (Boulding 2000). This rests on the idea that imagining positive futures is not (merely) wishful thinking. Rather, they can expand what is thinkable, challenge dominant narratives, and make alternative realities imaginable and therefore possible.​ As Boulding puts it, if we cannot imagine a better world, we do not know how to work towards one.  

The workshop showed how difficult these starting points can be to implement in practice. Participants found it difficult to imagine a better world, without attaching notions of naivete or pointlessness to it. This ambivalence was also reflected in some of the perceptions of hope encountered in the first workshop. In addition, discussions noted how people’s different utopias are not always compatible, invoking problems of how to co-create a utopia that does not impede other utopias. These tensions exposed the inherent challenges in collective utopia-making. It was also not generally agreed by participants that the exercise itself, writing down what could be, had merit for actual, tangible change in the world.  

The utopia exercises did initiate important reflections on what living in a better world means, individually and in community, but also revealed the difficulty with imagining that which does not (yet) exist. The difficulty with the exercise, for one team member at least, also reflected a broader issue of loss of hope. If the ability to hope for a better future, arguably deeply tied to the imagining of utopias, is political agency, what happens to that agency if we do not exercise it? It seemed difficult to look beyond the hopelessness of current global challenges, like trying to use an old muscle that had been inactive for too long. Building on theoretical perspectives  on resistance that argue that we can understand resistance and the shape it takes, through analyzing that which it is resisting, this raises a further question: To understand how we change systems of oppression, do we also need to practice envisioning worlds without them, analyzing their social and political structures and the ways they are built? 

The two workshops showed that hope and resistance form uneasy and complex relationships while their entanglements are impossible to ignore. Hope, for instance, is not a stable or fixed component of resistance. Sometimes hopelessness or survival drive resistance, sometimes hope is vital for initiating forms of resistance. While participants identified many everyday practices through which hope and resistance take shape, they also highlighted how difficult it is to cultivate and sustain hope in contexts of uncertainty and disillusionment. Rather than coherent utopias, what emerged were fragments, tensions, and hesitant attempts to imagine otherwise and that which is not yet there.  

Investigating hope and resistance together however, can deepen understandings of the dynamics of social change, by highlighting the uneven and disrupted ways hope manifest in forms of resistance, including the loss or absence of hope. In exploring the relationships between hope, utopia and resistance, the workshops also sparked important reflections on whether and how hope as a form of political agency, can be practiced in the context of resistance and social change. Ultimately, the workshops invited us to continue untangling how to practice hope in the future not as a certainty but as a fragile and at the same time collective effort to envision alternatives. Despite the tensions, these practives may hold potential to reshape how we understand the future, how we resist and how we pursue social change and justice.  

References 

Agyei, P. D., & Iglesias Ortiz, A. (2025). Resistance and Hope in Balance: Toward a Complementary Conceptual Framework. Journal of Immigrant & Refugee Studies, 1–13. https://doi.org/10.1080/15562948.2025.2606199 

Boulding, E. (2000). Cultures of Peace: The Hidden Side of History. Syracuse University Press 

Lindroth, M. & Sinevaara-Niskanen, H. (2020). Politics of hope: Transformation or stagnation? In The Routledge Handbook of Transformative Global Studies (1st ed., pp. 231–243). Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780429470325-17 

Reflections of a contributor to the project, Forms of Resistance & Practices of Hope

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.