ABSTRACT
This chapter explores how authorities and states may exploit individuals’ needs to sustain fragile asylum hope and how such hope can be manipulated as a means of control. By emphasising the structural conditions at play, it illustrates how hope can be harnessed to maintain individuals in a state of compliance and docility throughout years of uncertain waiting, during which they anticipate some form of future direction or stability. The chapter examines three ethnographic cases of people dealing with the objects of hope provided by the government. In doing so, the analysis illustrates what it is like to live day-by-day with fleeting, short-term hopes presented by authorities, to navigate between various objects of hope as conditions change, or to manage as desired objects of hope are continually shifted forward, remaining barely within reach. This constant suspension by authorities generates uncertainty and a sense of docile stuckedness. In this way, providing small glimmers of hope becomes a political tool for sustaining neoliberal governmentality.
