New Journal of Politics blog post on my forthcoming article Disappointed Hope

What if disappointment did not necessarily translate into hopelessness and fatalism? My new Journal of Politics blog post explores the transformative potential of the resisters’ (disappointed) hope in the example of the Egyptian Revolution.

The blog is based on my new Journal of Politics article “Disappointed Hope: Reimagining Resistance in the Wake of the Egyptian Revolution”. You can read it here: https://journals.uchicago.edu/doi/10.1086/726935

The paper examines how resisters can engage with disappointment in a politically productive manner and reshape their horizon of hope toward a sober recognition and negotiation of the complexities of resistant action within oppressive conditions.

I draw on Ernst Bloch’s notion of educated hope and recent interventions in utopian studies to interrogate how resisters can reconfigure their horizon of hope in response to disappointment. I argue that the resisters’ grappling with their disappointment can redirect their hope toward a persistent striving for greater freedom and justice that is based on a concrete negotiation of the possibilities for action and willing to bear the risk of failure. I develop the political relevance of disappointed hope through a selected firsthand account of the Arab Spring uprising in Egypt, Cairo: Memoir of a City Transformed, written by a prominent Egyptian activist and writer Ahdaf Soueif.