Global crises and utopian hope: an introduction

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.