In this paper I set out a conception of hope that is distinctively political and that makes hope for a just and democratic society reasonable, by showing how political hope can bridge the gap between an ideal of a just and democratic society and the obvious ways in which our actual world falls short of this ideal. Furthermore, I show how hope functions as a necessary epistemic support for reasons to aim for justice despite the distance prospect of its achievement. Political hope thus bridges both a normative and an epistemic gap, each of which threatens the legitimacy of democratic regimes. I identify three orders of political hope and make the argument that democratic hope, correctly understood, requires that any normative conception of democracy must contain, as a matter of analytical necessity , a corresponding conception of hope.

As humanity faces the prospect of imminent civilizational catastrophe, the aspirational sense that the future contains the potential for better ways of living and being appears to be fading under the strain of pervasive polycrisis. This special issue focuses on the question of whether it remains possible to reanimate critical utopian hope in the current climate of profound anxiety, pessimism, and dread over the multiple, intersecting global crises of our time. After first highlighting the dual crisis of hope and utopian ethical-political thinking today, it complicates conventional wisdom regarding hope and utopianism by showing that these notions are fundamentally shaped by experiences of disappointment, failure, and uncertainty. Utopian hope about the future, in other words, is not antithetical or irrelevant to the age of global polycrisis but precisely what should be occasioned by the stark realities of our times. From this standpoint, the introduction explains how the contributions to this special issue explore fragile, precarious yet realistic prospects for collective hope and, across a selection of concrete sociopolitical challenges, demonstrate that transformative changes still can be made to bring about the better futures we may imagine without being disconnected from the demand for pragmatism and the real prospect of failure.

This article reconstructs Hannah Arendt’s arguments in relation to crisis and hope against the rise of modern society, with a focus on the global crisis posed by nuclear weapons. Although Arendt was critical of twentieth century utopianism, she provides a standpoint for non-perfectionist utopian hope in the twin phenomena of natality and political action. Braiding together Arendt’s account of the modern world with the invention of atomic weapons, this article provides a twofold contribution to understanding the emergence of nuclear modernity and the possibility of averting looming nuclear catastrophe. First, the entanglement between the production of nuclear weapons and mass consumer capitalism spotlights the role of technoscientific instrumentality in facilitating organized complicity with modes of destruction capable of extinguishing all life on the planet. Second, Arendt’s ontology of natality sheds light on the potential of human beings to imagine novel ways of living and acting together, which speaks to the “miraculous” capacity of human freedom to bring about transformative sociopolitical change. Several initiatives regarding nuclear weapons non-proliferation and abolition are examined to demonstrate what transformative change has been achieved already as well as what still may be realistically hoped for to reach a world without nuclear weapons.

Amid fears of looming global catastrophe, an apocalyptic political sensibility dominates, perhaps best captured in repeated laments that the future has been cancelled. In such a moment, hope can feel both necessary and impossible, can feel decidedly utopian. But is a critical utopian hope possible? The answer ultimately lies in the world of practice rather than theory, but here I offer cautions and resources for those with a will to hope. First, I consider the relationship between utopianism and resentment of the world, suggesting both apocalyptic and utopian politics are motivated by feelings of disappointment. The dangers of this affective orientation are illustrated by examining the excesses of twentieth-century utopian urban planning. Further, the utopian desire to inhabit a new and better world requires the destruction of existing worlds. The necessity of destruction to creativity, explored through fictional representations of architects in the work of Ayn Rand and J.G. Ballard, reveals an ambiguity in our hope of make the world anew. This tension is further developed by examining speculative fictions from Ursula Le Guin and Octavia Butler, which dramatise the link between solipsism and the destruction of world-building. I then identify a source for a critical practice of utopian hope in William James’ claim we have a right to believe in anything we are willing to work to make a reality. While making space for hope, such a right demands action to build a different world, a practical effort requiring care for the world as whole, for those elements we hate as well as those we love. To extend what this careful practice of hope offers a critical utopianism, I end by reflecting on community-led urban innovations and outlining a democratic utopian disposition that embraces a heterotopian politics, which accepts our ideal visions are ultimately impossible but necessary to alleviating contemporary injustices and creating space for unexpected developments.

The main objective of this paper is to reflect on the consequences of migration on language and how it affects political action in the host community amidst successive migratory crises. Drawing from the perspectives of Hannah Arendt and Jacques Derrida on mother tongue, the central argument posits that diasporic communities encounter three possible forms of political action. The first involves a loss of identification, understood by Arendt as assimilation. Secondly, there is resentment, hindering the formation of new social bonds. The third entails living with the irreducible tension of not belonging to either the native language world or that of the host community’s language. Although new communities are formed, the mother tongue, following Derrida, persists in its absence. Arendt conceptualizes this phenomenon as the conscious pariah, while Derrida terms it the marrano, both representing a state of being one-in-two, existing in a liminal space between two worlds without fully belonging to either. It is argued that this situation is transitional and gradually diminishes across successive generations. However, it is most evident in the second generation, as the first typically socializes in the home country, while the third often attains citizenship in the host state. The notable aspect of the irreducible tension of being one-in-two, an experience shared by Arendt and Derrida, is that it serves as a potent source for instituting and fostering interdependent bonds by having two consequences: greater sensitivity to hermeneutical injustices and an increased capacity for exclusion by perceiving where inequalities are occurring within democratic regimes.

This paper defines and develops an existential security approach to nuclear politics. Its findings suggest humanity suffers an emergency condition by the objective existential threat of nuclear war. The Liberal International Order has not addressed this existential (in)security, prioritising liberal internationalism and the maintenance of the nuclear order. Current prospects of a severe NATO-Russia war, a Sino-American conflict or an uncontained iteration of either, could warp into a systemic war leading to mutual extermination, fatally unravelling the legitimacy of the US-led world order, its reliance on national security, collective defence, and deterrence practice. If existential security is imperilled by the risk of nuclear war – explicitly – why does the recognition of this threat not warrant a re-ordering of the LIO? The dangerous routine of nuclearism provides states with ontological security internationally, which undermines the liberal or decent self-identity, domestically. A reordering of the international system offers one escape from these contradictions. This would involve a restoration of great power relations in a ‘common security’ arrangement.

Does democracy require procedural consensus among its citizens, and should such consensus be actively pursued? While democratic institutions structure decision-making, they also entrench power relations, warranting critical scrutiny. This paper takes issue with a democratic proceduralism that demands support for democratic institutions and procedures while ignoring the way in which they reinforce power asymmetries. Recognizing how institutional design choices shape political outcomes allows us to better understand the dimensions that structure conflicts over decision-making procedures. I argue that conflicts about egalitarianism and pluralism in the substantive policy space are reflected in the procedural “process space,” and show how they motivate calls for institutional stability or change. I conclude by endorsing a political constitutionalism that views the concrete design of democratic procedures as fallible, preliminary and revisable and helps to inform public and academic discourses on institutional design.

This paper illustrates one way in which thinking about the democratic underlabourer model in relation to intra-state politics can be helpful for working up an analogous model for international politics. This move involves both a critical engagement with the initial articulation of the democratic underlabourer model and making explicit some of its background commitments. Drawing on my own work on refugees, it offers an extended example of what I refer to as ‘the constitutional underlabourer model’. In the final section, I considered two potential challenges to this model and show that addressing them involves drawing out potentials of the model that my example had failed to make explicit and hence helps to elaborate a richer understanding of the constitutional underlabourer model and its attractions.

The article analyzes politically motivated property damage and destruction, or property disobedience, an increasingly prominent feature of contemporary worldwide protest politics. It then explores the possibility that political theory as democratic underlaboring potentially offers a useful of framework for analysis. One possible advantage to democratic underlaboring is that it calls on us to heed how political participants in protest movements, as well as their critics, interpret their acts. Doing so offers a crucial first step toward respectfully but critically analyzing contemporary modes of political protest within more-or-less democratic contexts. One possible disadvantage is methodological: democratic underlaboring presupposes more-or-less democratic political conditions in a global context characterized by the ascent of authoritarian populism. The essay begins starts by describing key features of property disobedience and highlighting its growing significance, before exploring democratic underlaboring as a possible methodological approach. Then, with attention to some resulting research-related puzzles, I discuss possible weaknesses. Specifically, democratic backsliding threatens to undermine crucial building blocks on which democratic underlaboring necessarily relies, in part by blurring the divide between more-or-less democratic

In this contribution I argue that the appeal to the ‘democratic underlabourer thesis’ in the context of international political theorising is premature at best. While theorists who are democratically minded often assume their democratic commitments to equate to an unconditional egalitarian commitment, I argue that as a political, governance-related concept, democratic equality is in fact conditional. More specifically, it is conditional upon all parties endorsing a further set of related beliefs and convictions regarding moral and political relations between persons as well as relevant governmental institutions. As such, democratic mindedness reflects commitment to a set of doctrinal beliefs that are too restrictive in the international political context, where general commitment to democracy cannot be assumed. In lieu of democratic mindedness I sketch a possible conception of ‘open-mindedness’ as a more adequate dispositional approach in the context of current international political theorising.