Hope for leadership: Introduction to the special issue “leadership and the future of humanity”

Hope amidst despair

One could argue that without suffering we would not need hope. An ontology of hope is therefore a way to conceptualise the world as a place where suffering is part of the human condition and hope is a strategy to overcome hopelessness and helplessness by imagining a better future. Events like the ones we are witnessing in Gaza, Ukraine, Sudan and other places of oppression and conflict in the world remind us of previous human tragedies in which oppressed people have faced erasure. These include the period in which settler-colonialism caused native Americans to lose their ‘way of life’ (Lear, 2006) or times when the Jewish people faced extermination during the Holocaust (Bashir and Goldberg, 2018). It is helpful to revisit the words of philosophers who have engaged with these tragedies to understand the role of hope today.

At the heart of John Lear’s book, Radical Hope (2006), lies the story of the cultural catastrophe that befell the Crow Tribe in the US. The great Chief of the Crows, Plenty Coups, narrates how his way of life ceased to exist when the buffalo disappeared, and when life in the reservation they were forced into made it impossible to practice their traditional culture. Much later, Plenty Coups tells an anthropologist ‘After this nothing happened.’ Lear’s exploration of these four words leads him to conceptualise how people cannot narrate a life that has no connection with their past. In these situations, radical hope is needed for people to still believe that a future can exist despite the feeling that it has become impossible, since the past that drives hope is no more. Lear tells us that ‘[w]hat makes. . . hope radical is that it is directed toward a future goodness that transcends the current ability to understand what it is. Radical hope anticipates a good for which those who have the hope as yet lack the appropriate concepts with which to understand it’ (p. 103). This hope cannot be narrated but it is connected to past values, such as Plenty Coups’ memory of being a glorious warrior. Through appeals to these values people overcome the fear of uncertainty, and retain the ability to articulate a new future, even as ‘the very shape of this hope remained to be defined’ (Taylor, 2007). Lear’s definition of hope goes beyond imagination. It becomes a vital property of staying alive, even if we do not know what the future will bring.

Theodor W. Adorno also conceptualises radical hope. He is renowned for the dark pronouncement that ‘all post-Auschwitz culture, including its urgent critique, is garbage’ (Adorno, 1966/, 1973: 359). For him, the Holocaust undermined any meaning and values that can be associated with the past: ‘Adorno and his contemporaries faced a future in which they no longer could appeal to the idea of human progress or the belief in the ultimate goodness of existence’ (Jütten, 2019: 287). The right response here, Adorno argues, is to have the courage to know the worst. Jütten (2019) reminds us that, despite this negativism, Adorno suggests two reasons for hope. One is that it provides an opportunity to address the suffering we saw in the post war world. The second is that it helps us to imagine the alternative of a future good, one that could never hold the promise of being too good. Without hope, the future of humanity is menaced by encroaching darkness, climate catastrophe and the possibility of nuclear annihilation. Hence, whilst Lear’s conception of radical hope is about a future which is radically different, for Adorno the future will always contain the horror of the past and radical hope can help us transcend this suffering.

Similarly to Adorno, Hannah Arendt escaped Nazi Germany. She became a refugee, first in France, and then an exile in the United States. Yet she looks at hope from a place of love (Heberlein, 2021). In a recent interview, her biographer Ann Herbelein explains the role of hope for Arendt, as connected to her understanding of amor mundi, “love of the world,” at the root of a care for life and the world, despite all its imperfections. She summarises Arendt’s position as follows:

‘We must be able to love the world as it is, in all its brokenness and imperfection. To achieve that requires hope, hope that change is possible, hope for the future. Hope is necessary. Without hope, without the ability to imagine a life beyond its present circumstances, a person may be prone to give up.’ ⁶

Arendt does not offer a theorisation of hope as such. She is mostly focused on action and on doing (Hill, 2021). Her essay ‘On Humanity in Dark Times’, originally written in 1959, tells us that ‘In hope, the soul overleaps reality, as in fear it shrinks back from it’ (Arendt, 1968: 6). Hope aids action while fear paralyses it. Thus, in her book The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951), Arendt offers an analysis of how in totalitarian regimes (her focus was on the rise of Nazism) people shut their eyes to the elimination of parts of the population, particularly the Jewish community. At some point, the failure to speak out against injustice, hatred and violence becomes complicity, and facilitates hopelessness. Interestingly, her book starts with a discussion of hope: ‘Desperate hope and desperate fear often seem closer to the centre of such events than balanced judgment and measured insight’ (p. vii).

Desperate hope sounds like a hope gone wrong, perhaps one that lacks historical concreteness or connection to reality. It signals the essential need that people have for hope even when their inability to anchor the possibility of a better future in the past or present, or even in a set of values (see Lear above), means that it goes unfulfilled. This is because during dark times of despair (i.e. war, violence, displacement) the fear that creeps over them/ us is so blinding, confusing, and devastating, that they/ we cannot distinguish anymore what is a truth or a lie, what is reality and what values we should use to guide action. It is possible to imagine how, for Arendt (1963), this cognitive and emotional paralysis permitted what she controversially called ‘the banality of evil’ – that is, the inability of bureaucratic functionaries to imagine the world from someone else’s viewpoint, leading many to willingly participate in a mass slaughter of the innocents. Arendt’s desperate hope, therefore, is nothing else than the hopelessness that Freire talks to us about, the one that ‘paralyzes us, immobilizes us’ (Freire, 1994/, 2016: 16). Lear, Adorno, Arendt, and Freire all speak of the dark times of catastrophe. They provide us with insights on why hope is important to overcome suffering and explore why hopelessness is instead at the root of catastrophic decisions. Adopting an ontology of hope means to ask ourselves whether leaders anchor their ideas, values and actions in hope or hopelessness. Each points humanity in radically different directions.

Hopeless leadership

We define hopeless leadership as the leadership of those who exploit despair and uncertainty to manufacture fear and loathing in order to move their followers into action against particular outgroups. This dynamic has been evident throughout the career of Donald Trump (Goethals, 2024; Tourish, 2024), culminating in the January 6^th attack on the Capitol – the subject of a paper in this SI by Suze Wilson and Sarah Chace. Their paper is a reminder of how hopeless leaders prey upon the hopeless moods of their followers, but invariably make the problems that concern them so much worse. And yet Hayden’s discussion in this issue of the role of hopeful leadership in undermining Stalinist rule in Czechoslovakia also reminds us that no form of autocracy is as secure on the inside as it appears to many on the outside of its tyrannical reach.

Hopeless leadership relies on lies, half-truths and propaganda (Arendt, 1951; Gabriel, 2024), thereby undermining the conditions that make democratic discourse possible. It is a core characteristic of populism. Yet despite appealing to a mass audience, it mainly benefits a few leaders at the top and neglects the harmful consequences for society in the present and the future (Tourish, 2023).

Thus, hopeless leaders trigger a fear that is at the root of followers’ desire for a stronger leader who can protect them from ‘the threat.’ Yet the threat is itself often created and reinforced by the same leader’s rhetoric, intended to increase fear. Hence, the cycle of hopelessness continues to grow, and is very difficult to stop. The polling firm IPSOS interviewed 20,630 adults in 28 countries around the world in late 2023. Overall, 63% of respondents felt they needed ‘a strong leader’ to take their country back from the rich and powerful. The figure was 66% in the United States, 68% in Britain and 38% in Germany. 58% felt that their country was in decline (68% in Britain and 59% in the US), while 57% overall felt their country was ‘broken.’ ⁷ Fear of this kind breeds pessimism and is readily exploited by hopeless leaders to manufacture aggression, resentment and support. Thus, 59% of the IPSOS respondents agreed that when jobs were scarce priority should be given to hiring people from their own country rather than immigrants.

Today, Israel’s Benjamin Netanyahu claims that the road to peace and security lies through a full-scale war against Palestinians, who are often depicted as subhuman. ⁸ He embodies hopeless leadership by manufacturing a sense of constant crisis. To do so he frames Palestinians as morally inferior and historically antisemitic, hence always ready to attack and kill Israelis: “Netanyahu uses this altered version of history in weaving a narrative for his foreign policy and fostering an atmosphere of existential panic in Israel” (Leslie, 2018 p. 78). We join with the prominent critical sociologist Michael Burawoy (2024: 3), who has written indignantly, ‘Does the memory of one holocaust and the fear of a second justify the extermination of another race?’ The violence we have recently witnessed compels us to break from the dispassionate norms of academic writing and quote the words of Echchaibi (2024: 1), in a piece entitled ‘A scream for Gaza,’ ‘Are the tears of a trembling orphaned child worth nothing anymore? Is the wailing of a mother who lost 50 members of her family just a spectacle we scroll through on TikTok? What number of dead and maimed civilians, of destroyed homes, of scorched neighbourhoods and cities, will ever satiate this interminable vengeance?’

Israeli colonial governance has given rise to different forms of resistance in the occupied West Bank and Gaza since 1948 (Pappe, 2022; Awad, 2023 for a review). At the moment, Hamas is the most prominent Palestinian Islamic Resistance Movement (Baconi, 2018). It is classified as a proscribed terrorist organization by UK law ⁹ , and by many other Western countries. In his 2018 book on Hamas’s’ history, Baconi articulates how Israel’s approach of ‘managing’ rather than resolving the conflict with Palestinians has resulted in Hamas becoming more and more militarised. It has targeted Israeli civilians through the launch of rockets, and with suicide bombers, culminating in the atrocious attacks of October 7^th 2023. Hamas’s violence has heightened the perceived threat of Palestinians in Israel, pushing voters to support progressively more right-wing governments (Glover, 2024). Given Nethanyahu’s need for continuous crisis, it is not surprising – but is still astonishing - that he has helped to maintain Hamas’s control in Gaza. In 2019 he explicitly stated that ‘“whoever is against a Palestinian state should be for” transferring the funds to Gaza [to Hamas], because maintaining a separation between the PA [Palestinian Authority] in the West Bank and Hamas in Gaza helps prevent the establishment of a Palestinian state’ (Harkov, 2019). Hence, Hamas's militarisation has played into Netanyahu’s narrative of Palestinians as an aggressive force to counter with violence and vengeance.

To our end, the relationship between Nethanyahu’s and Hamas’s leadership is the perfect example of how hopeless leadership creates horrific cycles of violence that are almost impossible to break. This was entirely predictable. Khalidi (2020: 180) summarises an activist’s verdict after visiting PLO bases in Lebanon as follows: ‘the use of force only strengthened a pre-existing and pervasive sense of victimhood among Israelis, while it unified Israeli society, reinforced the most militant tendencies in Zionism and bolstered the support of external actors.’ Hopeless leadership feeds a perpetual sense of crisis, where a ‘threat’ is designed to sustain the leader as the only solution to the threat. A further example of this emerges in Wilson and Chase’s paper in this special issue, centred on the January 6^th assault on the Capitol, and the role of Trump in moving followers into destructive action against a powerful symbol of democracy.

Can this cycle of hopelessness be broken? We hope so! The 1998 Good Friday Agreement in Northern Ireland brought an end to the worst of the violence in Northern Ireland. ¹⁰ A total of 3532 people were killed and over 47,000 injured (McKittrick et al., 1999). The death toll out of a small population of 1.5 million was the equivalent of 115,000 in the UK or 600,000 in the USA. Hopeless leaders prospered by stoking division, hatred and fear, all of which kept the area on the verge of a full-scale civil war for decades. It is important to acknowledge that the British Government was also a protagonist in the conflict. Atrocities committed in pursuit of revenge stoked yet more dehumanisation of The Other and fed insatiable demands for retaliation. But as Glover (2024: xiii) points out in relation to Israel and Palestine, ‘groups who are victims of backlash are far more likely to think about how they in turn can hit back.’ This suits hopeless leaders, many of whom would otherwise languish in a state of well-deserved obscurity. They urge ever more conflict in pursuit of an impossible final victory for their side. Consequently, in Northern Ireland, what Smyth and Hamilton (2003: 14) called ‘a universal culture of victimhood’ took root. Complete catastrophe was only narrowly averted by a combination of mutual exhaustion and the extraordinary efforts of a handful of hopeful leaders committed to a peaceful resolution, at great personal risk (Murphy et al., 2021). If it happened there, when many times it felt that all hope was lost, perhaps hope can be found elsewhere.

Hopeful leadership: A call for research and action

Critical scholars are committed to critiquing the assumptions and power structures reflected in hopeless leadership (Bolden, 2024). They are also sceptical of those who encourage us to think of leaders only as ‘visionaries’ who mobilise followers towards a common goal by envisioning a better future (see Waldman, 2023, for an example of this approach). In both politics and business, such leadership regularly turns out to be a deception, since many leaders use hopeful rhetoric to divert attention from their ruthless pursuit of self-interest (Learmonth and Morrell, 2021). In contemplating this unappealing vista, we return to our ontology of hope. Different as they are, we believe that each of the papers in this Special Issue does likewise.

Luo et al. (2022) argue that hope has four characteristics. First, it is projective. It is concerned with possibility and therefore with what might be achievable in the future. It is also, inescapably, an emotional experience, since it relates to and seeks to arouse desire. Third, hope is positive. It helps people to cope during times of crisis and difficulty and is therefore bound up with faith or belief. Finally, hope must deal with what is at least possible, even if it is conceivable that a particular desired future (e.g. solving the climate crisis) might not happen. Luo et al. (2020: 122) therefore define hope as ‘a belief that a positive future outcome is possible combined with a desire for that outcome.’

Hopeful leadership involves both critique of what is and the theorisation and elaboration of what could be. Burawoy (2021: 3) terms this ‘the utopian imagination,’ which he describes as

‘A one-sided elaboration of actually existing institutions, organizations, what Erik Wright called “real utopias,” what Max Weber called “ideal-types.” Suspended between their utopian aspirations and anti-utopian constraints, sociologists become archaeologists excavating the world for emancipatory possibilities, now and in the past, here and there. The sociologist is impelled to discover the embryos of alternative worlds by an incessant lament directed at the existing world.’

It is insufficient to settle for critique, and each of the papers in this Special Issue seeks to move beyond it. Equally, it is unsatisfying to produce models of perfect leadership, false utopias, that have never been realised – e.g. ‘transformational’ leaders whose visions infallibly reflect unitarist interests, ‘servant’ leaders interested only in the welfare of others, or ‘authentic’ leaders who unfailingly bring only positive values to their work (see O’Rourke’s critique in this Special Issue). Hence, we do not theorise hopeful leadership, grounded in the utopian imagination, as the pursuit of perfect peacefulness, or sainthood. We instead define hopeful leadership as the continuous belief in, and search for, possible, better, even if imperfect futures (Ericsson and Kostera, 2019; Kostera, 2020). In this sense, hopeful leadership has a strong element of stewardship towards the future of humanity.

This conception, we suggest, shares the same three basic features of what Wright (2010: 10) termed ‘emancipatory social science,’ namely: ‘elaborating a systematic diagnosis and critique of the world as it exists; envisioning viable alternatives; and understanding the obstacles, possibilities, and dilemmas of transformation.’ The notion of ‘viable alternatives’, or actual utopias, serves as a link to Rawls’s (1971/1999) influential theory of justice. Rawls challenged us to imagine our ideal society in the future, but with the proviso that we would have no idea of our own standing within it – rich or poor, powerful or powerless, gay, straight, or transgender. What principles would guide our choices? The risk, here, of course, is that we come up with a perfect model that has never existed or never could. We need viable rather than ideal alternatives to the present – what Rawls (2001: 4-5) went on to describe as ‘realistic utopias.’ Fujimoto et al's discussion of the role of collective leadership in promoting a more sustainable world, and combatting climate change, is one example of sober reflection on the enormous challenges we face, and how more hopeful leadership is vital if we are to avert catastrophe. It remains notable that while sustainability has become a buzzword, mainstream leadership theorising continues to pay so little attention to climate change. One might imagine that neither the problem nor its resolution have anything to do with business organizations.

In our view, hopeful leadership must involve a rejection of so-called heroic models of leadership, in which some version of a Superhero rides to our rescue, dispensing flawless answers to our problems. The hope for heroic leadership can become a form of cultural dope, transforming followers into the passive recipients of the alleged wisdom of others, and blinding them to the limitations of their offerings. We need, instead, examples of leadership as a process of influence that is embedded in movements which pursue a wider good than self-interest or the short-term victory of ‘our side.’ As a relational possibility, hope is seen less as an individual orientation and more as co-constructed collective state (Ludema et al., 1997), aimed at creating a shared sense of purpose. It is an approach which expands the size of the group we consider as ‘us,’ and shrinks the size of those groups that we think of as ‘them.’ ¹¹

Examples of such leadership do exist. New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern has been praised by practitioners (Hunt, 2021) and academics (Wilson, 2020) for being particularly effective in harnessing collective identities to mobilize followers towards positive, collective forms of action. Vignoles and colleagues (2021) explore how, during the Covid crisis, Ardern used language to promote coordinated unity (instead of division or ‘othering’). This included metaphors that stressed a converging purpose – e.g. ‘marathons’ and ‘races’, as well as ‘journeys’, paired with collective anchor words (e.g. ‘we’, ‘together’). This emphasis on ‘collective well-being and protection, and a sense of togetherness’ shows how ‘Ardern positioned herself as having a shared stake with her audience in the decisions made, constructed her decisions as moral imperatives, and attributed collective agency to the nation to address the pandemic through mutual solidarity’ (Vignoles et al., 2021: 823, italics in original).

In conclusion, by embracing Freire’s ontology of hope, we as critical scholars of leadership refuse to stop hoping that leaders can play an important role in improving the human condition. We are not naïve, and do not imply that ‘hopeful leadership’ or the promotion of collective agency will fully overcome tensions arising from differentiated interests in society. As Gosling (2024: 442) points out in relation to the possibility of effective climate change leadership: ‘There is no plausible way in which even the most orderly transition from reliance on fossil fuels will be uncontentious or uncontested. Thus “leadership in climate change” implies also leadership of protest, resistance, rebellion and revolt.’ Leadership, command and management – all subject to bitter strife – may be required to address it (Grint, 2024). Totally unified societies and complete agreement on values ‘have never existed or have existed only at the edge of a headman’s axe’ (Gopnik, 2024). It is precisely because of the permanent existence of these tensions arising from conflicting interests that it is imperative for leaders to adopt an ‘ontology of hope’ that stresses the possibility of building a more just future. These challenges run through the papers that follow.

We believe that each article in this Special Issue addresses important questions for the theory and practice of hopeful leadership. It is fitting that Wilson and Chace draw our attention to the January 6^th 2021 assault on the US Capitol by followers of Donald Trump. They describe this as a ‘paradigm shift’ in American and world politics. Trump’s leadership, now that of a convicted felon, remains a pressing threat to our ability to co-create a better world. O’Rourke discusses the experiences of LGBT leaders in the workplace, and the pressure they feel to be ‘authentic,’ including to publicly reveal their sexuality and gender. The gains made by LGBT people have been among the most significant and justly celebrated of the last few decades. O’Rourke shows that this progress has not abolished pressures that straight people rarely experience. Fujimoto et al's paper raises important questions about the role of collective leadership in promoting sustainable development. This is not presented as a panacea, but it poses significant challenges to how mainstream leaders continue to prioritise many issues above the existential threat of climate change. Lastly, and fittingly, this SI closes by a direct examination of hope under conditions of Stalinist autocracy. It is hard to remember that Communist control of Eastern Europe felt unshakeable as late as the 1980s. Yet Hayden’s study of the Charter 77 movement in Czechoslovakia shows that hope, and the movements based on it, were indispensable ingredients of the spirit of revolt without which nothing would ever have been different. As he argues, truth-telling in the face of heavy odds was a vital precursor to the development of hope strong enough to change society.

Inevitably, each paper poses questions that require further thought. We urge readers to see them as only the beginning of a dialogue about hopeful leadership. The utopian imagination, properly understood, is neither frivolous nor impractical. It can help us to replace hopeless leadership with a greater understanding of what a better future for humanity looks like, and the role of hopeful leadership – practiced by us all - in bringing it about.