Reading the war on terror through fear and hope?

Affective warfare and the question of the future

Abstract

In critical theories of security, it is often claimed that the governance of life operates by the production of fear, an emotion marked by its political character, working as to arrest bodies in the present. Simultaneously, hope is often announced as fear’s binary opposite, as the condition of possibility of a future beyond the present. Hope is thereby rendered as an ethical imperative, opposed by default to both power and politics.