Recognising hope: US global development discourse and the promise of despair

Abstract

Practices of global development have been critiqued for reproducing a notion of the suffering poor as bare life; passive, despairing and devoid of both hope and potentiality. In contrast, this article treats the experience of hope not as external to the governance of underdeveloped life but as a biopolitical technology central to its formation. Reading US President Obama’s call to recognise underdeveloped life as inherently hopeful and potential, this article analyses the biopolitics of development at the moment when the separation between lives on the basis of its capacity for hope is explicitly banished. Emerging from this reading is a troubling paradox, one in which hope and despair enter a zone of indistinction. Encouraged to embody this indistinction, it is argued, is a bare and hopeful form of neoliberal life, a potential yet not sovereign being. Hopeful, but without the capacity to conceive of or to act towards a different future.

Living with Paradox in International Development: An Extended Case Study of an International NGO

“…Consequently, a picture emerges of Abdoulaye and his neighbours as active participants and a source of knowledge in this particular debate, rather than passive recipients of external wisdom from NGOs and others. In effect, they are seeking to conceive of and act towards a different future (Wrangel, 2017). While, our vignette paints a more optimistic picture than that of Wrangel, it also highlights the limits of this agency.…”

“…For example, in his discussion of Turkish NGOs and their relationship with European donors, Ketola (2016) suggests nonprofits retain significant agency, despite the power differentials involved. Wrangel (2017) suggests poor people themselves assert a similar autonomy: Although constrained by their lack of capacity to 'conceive of or act towards a different future,' they are nonetheless 'hopeful' rather than passive or despairing (2017: 875).…”

Holding hope: Financial coaching and the depoliticisation of poverty

“…In this conceptualisation, hope is mutable, taking on different meanings and political effects depending on where and how it is employed. This resonates with Tängh Wrangel's (2017) work, which draws on Agamben (1998) to conceptualise hope as a biopolitical technology in global development efforts. Here Tängh Wrangel provocatively tethers the idea of a hopeful life to bare life and through this joint conceptualisation of hope and ‘bareness’ he suggests that hope is ‘stripped of its revolutionary force, articulated without reference to another world, or to another future’ (2017, p.878).…”

“…This resonates with Tängh Wrangel's (2017) work, which draws on Agamben (1998) to conceptualise hope as a biopolitical technology in global development efforts. Here Tängh Wrangel provocatively tethers the idea of a hopeful life to bare life and through this joint conceptualisation of hope and ‘bareness’ he suggests that hope is ‘stripped of its revolutionary force, articulated without reference to another world, or to another future’ (2017, p.878). Similarly, Sparke (2007) – responding to Lawson's (2007) AAG presidential address on the subject of hope – raises concerns about the nature of hope, making a distinction between ‘false hope’, which he warns is of ‘dreadful and deadly consequence’ (p. 338), and ‘sensible hope’, which is staged around ‘struggles for repossession’ (p. 339).…”

The biopolitics of algorithmic governmentality: How the US military imagines war in the age of neurobiology and artificial intelligence

“…Such descriptions put algorithmic governmentality explicitly at odds with biopolitical forms of governmentality, and their focus on promoting and producing imaginaries of a good, healthy, pure and normalized political body (Bachmann et al, 2015: 66) through targeting subjectivity (Agamben, 2011: 6). The potentiality and becoming of life -often claimed to have been the primary target of human security discourses (Chandler, 2013;Dillon and Reid, 2009;Rose and Abi-Rached, 2013;Tängh Wrangel, 2017), as well as of biopolitics at large (Agamben, 1999: 147-148) -are equally placed outside the scope of algorithmic governmentality. Indeed, key texts of algorithmic governmentality either make no mention of biopolitics (Fuchs and Chandler, 2019;Rouvroy and Berns, 2013) or reference biopolitics only in passing in order to contrast biopolitics with the practices of algorithmic governmentality (Amoore, 2020: 169;Aradau and Blanke, 2022: 210).…”