5.1 The Role of Imagination in Hoping

Both philosophers and lay-people tend to assume that hoping for something characteristically involves imagining it (Aristotle Reference Aristotle and Freese2020: 1370a6; Bovens Reference Bovens1999; Calhoun Reference Calhoun2018; Kwong Reference Kwong2019; Humbert-Droz and Vazard Reference Humbert-Droz and Vazard2023; Huber Reference Huber2025). A detained refugee hoping to be reunited with her family doesn’t merely desire that outcome and believe it’s possible, she is also disposed to imagine the reunion in her mind: the first hug at the doorstep, the relief on her mother’s face, perhaps the earlier notification that her asylum request had been approved, or the journey to her family’s home. When we hope, that is, we often picture the desired outcome, projecting ourselves imaginatively into a scenario in which it has been realized, or we imagine the paths that could bring us there.

Some philosophers have suggested that fantasizing about or imagining some outcome is not only characteristic of hoping, but constitutive of it. In an important early amendment of the standard account, Luc Bovens argued that we couldn’t rightly say that the host of a gathering hoped some individual would attend if he hadn’t, in addition to desiring it and believing it possible, engaged in at least some “mental imaging” of that outcome — thinking how nice it would be to see that person, or how well they would get along with some other guest, etc. (1999: 674). More recently, Cheshire Calhoun has argued that hoping necessarily involves “imaginatively inhabiting” the positive realization of the future state (2018: 3). The difference between a hopeful agent and a despairing one, she suggests, is that the former previsages in their reflective imagination a future in which the desired outcome has successfully come about, while the latter does not or cannot (2018: 85). And Jack Kwong has contended that, to hope for p, we need to not only desire p and believe that p is possible, but also be able to see some “way” that p could come about. The person who hopes, that is, is able to imaginatively visualize the steps between their present state and some desired future state, whereas the despairing person cannot (2019: 244).Footnote ⁷

These constitutive accounts of the relation between imagination and hope have come under criticism recently from Humbert-Droz and Vazard (Reference Humbert-Droz and Vazard2023) and Huber (Reference Huber2025), who observe that there are types of hopes that do not require the bearer to engage in any imaginative activity. I might hope that it is sunny tomorrow during a family picnic, but I don’t seem to need to visualize the blanket spread out beneath warm rays to be able to do so. Likewise, when I hope in the split-second before it arrives that the runaway trolley will not hit a crossing pedestrian, I simply don’t have time to imagine that outcome or the way it might come about — the pedestrian diving out of the way, the trolley coming to a screeching halt (Huber Reference Huber2025: 158). Thus, the claim that some form of imaginative activity is necessary to hoping seems, at first glance, false. Instead, it is argued, we should understand imaginings as a mere common “output” of hope (Martin Reference Martin2011: 157; Humbert-Droz and Vazard Reference Humbert-Droz and Vazard2023: 8).

These arguments against strong versions of the constitutive claim do indeed look damaging. However, their scope is more limited than it might at first seem. For one, the cases that falsify the constitutive claim tend to involve, as Huber acknowledges, trivial, highly probable, or episodic hopes (2025: 158). In contrast, the kinds of hopes we’re concerned with here, the kinds of hopes whose loss might threaten a refugee’s general well-being, are not trivial, highly-probable, or episodic, but substantial hopes that need to be sustained for a long time in the face of low odds — they are hopes about whether one will be granted safety from an oppressive regime, or be able to see loved ones again, or leave a prison that has afforded them only misery. Critiques of Kwong’s “pathways” account are similarly limited. Palmqvist argues that it is defeated by Jonathan Lear’s notion of “radical hope” — in his potent example, the Crow chief Plenty Coups’ hope for Crow survival and eventual flourishing absent any determinate idea of how that might come about after the destruction of their previous way of life (Palmqvist Reference Palmqvist2021: 688; Lear Reference Lear2006). But as a number of philosophers have argued, radical hope should probably be understood as different in kind from ordinary hopes — more of an anticipatory stance toward the future as one open to possibility or intervention than an intentional attitude regarding some specific future outcome (Calhoun Reference Calhoun2018: 75; Ratcliffe Reference Ratcliffe2013: 601; Blöser, et al. Reference Blöser, Huber and Moellendorf2020: 2). If radical hope is indeed different in kind, it’s not clear that theories of ordinary hope like Kwong’s should be expected to be able to capture it.

Notably, despite their critiques of the constitutive claim, both Humbert-Droz and Vazard and Huber end up ascribing important functions to hopeful imaginings, arguing that it is the imagination that gives hope much of its epistemic value and motivational power (Humbert-Droz and Vazard Reference Humbert-Droz and Vazard2023: 15; Huber Reference Huber2025: 159). In developing those claims, both sets of authors focus on imagining the desired outcome of a hope. I will focus, in contrast, on Kwong’s account, which focuses on the pathways by which that outcome might obtain, and so seems particularly relevant to cases of substantial hopes whose odds are low, or whose potential paths to realization are obscure or fraught.

Consider, then, Kwong’s familiar example of a philosopher struggling with a difficult paper: Margaret has a sense that her intriguing ideas could eventually fit together in a coherent argument, but after numerous frustrating attempts to structure her thoughts, she cannot see a way forward and gives up on the project in despair. Soon afterwards, she attends a lecture that seems to offer a new theoretical framework for her essay. She is not certain that the framework will ultimately solve her problems, but she can see some new avenues of research and potential connections. Her hope rekindled, she takes up the essay again.

Taking the earlier critiques into account, a moderated version of Kwong’s constitutive claim still seems available to us: being able to see some way that a desired outcome could come about — being able to imagine some path between one’s present circumstances and a desired future outcome — is often integral to our capacity to sustain substantial hopes. And when our hopes are beset by difficult circumstances, low odds, dispiriting setbacks, or a high degree of uncertainty, there is likely to be an even tighter connection between our capacity for hope and our ability to imaginatively “see” some way the desired outcome could come about.Footnote ⁸ This formulation both (a) narrows the scope of cases to which the constitutive claim applies and (b) slightly weakens it in order to avoid the earlier objections. But it retains the potent insight that imaginings are not merely an output of hope, but often a condition — though not a strictly necessary condition — of hope.

5.2 Limits of the Imagination

When we hope, there is typically a gap between our present circumstances and the desired future outcome. Kwong argues that our capacity to generate or sustain hope often depends on our ability to imaginatively “fill in” that space with some “path” from our present position to that desired future outcome — some conceivable and at least plausible set of events or interim steps that constitute a “way” it could come about. Despair, in contrast, occurs when one is unable to imaginatively fill that gap between present and future with any intermediate steps. In such cases, the space between present and future seems an unbridgeable chasm rather than traversable terrain (Kwong Reference Kwong2019: 247).

This helps explain why the constitutive claim falls prey to cases of “trivial” hopes like “I hope it’s sunny tomorrow,” and why this kind of imaginative work is particularly important for substantive hopes with a high degree of uncertainty or low odds. Hoping that it will be sunny tomorrow doesn’t require an act of imaginative “filling in” of that intervening space because we generally have a background assumption that there is a “way” that it being sunny tomorrow could come about — namely, that it is not rainy or cloudy. That said, for someone for whom it being sunny tomorrow is not a trivial, but a substantive hope (say, James Ramsay in Woolf’s To the Lighthouse), or when the possibility looks particularly slim (the meteorologist has decreed that a big storm is coming), then Kwong’s suggestion seems to hold: James’s hope that it will be fine enough to visit the lighthouse tomorrow will likely be buoyed by any imaginative work he can do to see some way it could come about (e.g. that the coming storm will turn north and avoid the Hebrides, that the naysaying meteorologist is often wrong).

Moreover, as I will demonstrate momentarily, the more concretely and realistically we can fill in that intervening space with interim steps, the more our hope will be buoyed by those imaginative acts. Conversely, circumstantial features of our worlds that frustrate our imaginative capacity to bridge the gap between the present and the desired future with sufficiently determinate and realistic ideas about how those ends might come about can put pressure on our ability to maintain particular hopes.

Of course, our imaginations are potent and resourceful, drawing on the vast panoply of our experience to creatively combine, translate, and model in ways that allow us to project toward unexperienced possibilities. How, then, can our spatial circumstances limit our imagination in the manner described?

Importantly, for Kwong, hope is not kindled or buttressed merely by imagining some way that the desired outcome could come about; we must also see that path as a “genuine possibility” (2019: 246). Put in another way, our imagination, in conceiving of a path to some desired outcome, must have a certain fidelity to reality to be capable of sustaining our hope. Indeed, a properly constrained imagination is often the difference between sustaining hope and hope faltering or lapsing into mere wishful thinking: Margaret will likely have a hard time sustaining hope for her writing project if the only way she can see that project being completed is divine intervention or involves an unbelievable inflation of her philosophical abilities. Far from being wholly insensitive to facts about the world (as its reputation usually has it), then, imagination is most hope sustaining when responsive to the way the world actually is.Footnote ⁹

Likewise, the more concretely we can imaginatively fill in the gap between our present and some desired future, the more sustainable our hope will be. If Margaret has only a vague sense that something in that lecture could benefit her paper, her hope is likely to be weaker than if she picks up on a specific theory that she can see being helpful in framing the opening salvo of her argument. Huber similarly insists on the importance of hope having “concrete imaginative content” about both the desired outcome and the pathways and strategies that might bring it about (2025: 15, 18). Being able to do this — being able to imaginatively “see” how we can get from “here” to “there” — requires a certain amount of epistemic access to the intervening terrain between our present and some desired future. As Amy Kind has argued, the imagination is highly dependent on the availability of raw, relevant experiential resources (Reference Kind2022: 39). When combined with the realism constraint introduced above, this suggests that accurate, concrete information about the space between present and future that we can use to imaginatively populate that gap will be particularly helpful in generating or sustaining hope.

Consider an example common in the philosophical literature on hope: in the film Shawshank Redemption, both Andy and Red agree that their odds of successfully escaping from prison are only 1 in 1,000, but Andy maintains hope for that possibility, while Red despairs over it (Bovens Reference Bovens1999: 668). Philosophers have tried to explain this difference in attitude in a variety of ways, many of them plausible, but one notable difference between the two characters is the depth of Andy’s knowledge about the steps he would need to take to get out of prison — how he could negotiate the intervening space between his present circumstances and his hoped-for liberation. Andy sees the empty hollow behind his cell wall, the connection of that passage to the prison’s sewage system, and the terminus of those sewers beyond the prison walls, enlivening his hope with determinate, accurate conceptions (gleaned from prison blueprints) of the obstacles he will need to overcome to escape. This imaginative conception of the intervening space between present and future furnishes Andy with affective scaffolding on which his hopes can climb. Red, on the other hand, can only see the impenetrable, insurmountable walls encircling him. The space between his confined present and a hoped-for future beyond those walls is not populated with any concrete, realistic steps he might take to bridge the gap, so it appears to him a chasm, and he despairs.

Circumstantial conditions that limit imaginative access to the intermediate space between one’s present and a desired future — and that therefore frustrate an individual’s capacity to fill in that intermediary space with concrete and constrained imaginings of ways that outcome might come about — are likely to undermine hope. This, I will endeavor to show, is precisely what today’s highly liminal forms of refugee detention tend to do: in their intensive containment, immobilization, and isolation, they cut off detainees’ epistemic access to the world outside those spaces, and so also their imaginative access. By making the space between refugees’ present and their desired futures imaginatively opaque, they add to the sense of being in limbo described earlier and make it difficult to imagine in a concrete and constrained — and so hope-sustaining — way how those outcomes could come about.

Conversely, environments that multiply paths to individuals’ desired futures by augmenting spatial or temporal connections to that future or furnishing imaginative resources should have the opposite effect. We might think that casinos do something like this. If someone hopes to get rich quick, stepping into a casino with its blinking money signs, clear sightlines to other players cashing in at the cage, banks of slot machines suggesting that a windfall is a mere lever pull away, etc. would multiply that individual’s resources for “seeing” how today could be their lucky day. How specific environments impact an individual’s hope depends in part on the content of that hope, but in general, environments that foster connections between an individual’s present circumstances and some desired future would tend to be hope-enhancing, while environments that cut off physical and imaginative access to that intervening landscape tend to be hope-dampening. In the next sections, I elaborate two ways in which contemporary refugee detention spaces have the latter effect.

5.3 Spatial Liminality and Imaginative Horizons

The first has to do with the spatial structure of the kinds of liminal spaces I have described, particularly their containment and isolation. Detention, by definition, shortens the agential, perceptual, experiential, and epistemic horizons of the detained. One cannot see much past the barbed-wire-topped fences of an asylum processing center, or experience much of the world beyond a closed camp. This means that detained refugees have quite limited access — of these various modes — to the intermediate space of potential between their present circumstances and some desired, external future. The space between our present and our futures need not always be conceptualized in such a distinctly spatial manner. But for people on the move whose hopes are so often located elsewhere, and whose ability to realize those hopes is so often structured by long and difficult journeys to those places, the visibility and imaginability of the intermediate geographic space between present and future will tend to be particularly significant to their ability to hope. And because, as I argued in the previous section, an individual’s imaginative grasp of that intermediate space is (at least partly) dependent on their experiential and epistemic access to it, detained refugees often find themselves with diminished resources for imaginatively “seeing” how some desired future could come about. Detention involves not just the circumscription of one’s agency, then, but one’s imaginative capacities as well, and this in turn frustrates detainees’ abilities to sustain substantial hopes.

The profound isolation of today’s liminal refugee spaces likewise limits refugees’ imaginative access to that intermediate space. Spatial isolation typically entails social isolation — indeed, critics have argued that this is one of the primary motivations for the continued location of refugee spaces in far-flung locales — and so detained refugees are deprived of a further source of epistemic, and so imaginative, access to that intermediate space of possibility: social interactions (Mountz Reference Mountz2020: 141). In his memoir of the five years he spent wrongfully imprisoned in Guantanamo, Murat Kurnaz describes the way his first meeting with a lawyer restored hope to the prisoners on his block: “[we] were connected to the world again! We knew what was happening outside Guantanamo!” (Reference Kurnaz2008: 207).Footnote ¹⁰ I take it that part of the significance of that experience for Kurnaz was that this meager epistemic access to the outside world also gave him imaginative access to potential ways his release might come about — for example, simply knowing where he was, or that a legal case was being developed on his behalf. As such, he was able to fill in the space between present and future in a more determinate and constrained, and so hope-sustaining, way. Conversely, by depriving detainees of imaginative access to the intermediate space between their present reality and a desired future, spaces of extreme spatial and social isolation of this sort — cases that are increasingly common in the carceral, liminal landscapes that have come to mark the contemporary response to asylum seekers and refugees in protracted displacement — undermine refugees’ ability to sustain hope. Instead, the unyielding material environment and isolation ensure that refugees’ surroundings remain affectively “smooth,” lacking any of the affective scaffolding on which hope might get a foothold.

Finally, isolation also makes the intermediary space between present and desired future obscure or illegible. The places we inhabit and move through typically open up to one another in a kind of nesting structure: I am currently writing at a desk, which is tucked under the eave, in a room, which is within a larger building, which in turn opens up upon on a particular street, that lies at the edge of a city, etc. That nesting structure is not just spatial: the fact that my house opens up to the street upon which it is situated is a fact not only about the location of my home but about the scope and patterns of my experience and agency, and, I think, of my imaginative capacities as well. While all places have this nesting structure, not all spaces nest in the same way (Malpas Reference Malpas2018: 112). And consequently, not all spaces afford their inhabitants the same imaginative grasp of the intermediate spaces that connect their present circumstances to hoped-for futures outside them. A refugee detention center located on an island in the middle of a forbidding ocean or a camp in a stark, uninhabited desert seem to lack, in a significant sense, this middle ground of nested spaces that inhabitants must imaginatively traverse in order to see a way to some desired future. Consider, for example, Australia’s Manus Island Regional Processing Centre, located on leased territory on an island off the coast of Papua New Guinea. Surrounded by fences and barbed wire and facing out at the broad expanse of the Pacific Ocean, detainees spent years with no experiential, perceptual, or imaginative access to the spaces surrounding them, with only the vast and unforgiving sea laying between them and their hopes for a better life on the Australian mainland. The intervening space remains, again, affectively smooth, furnishing inhabitants with no scaffolding on which their hopes could rest. Liminal spaces like Manus make opaque, indeterminate, or illegible the relation between detainees’ present and any hoped-for futures – in a manner often more radical than other forms of incarceration, such as the Shawshank example highlighted earlier – undermining their ability to imaginatively fill in the intervening space with determinate, constrained ideas about how those outcomes could come about. This leaves inhabitants feeling stuck in limbo — cut off from desired future possibilities, imaginatively marooned in the space of their present, and unable to maintain hope for possibilities that they can no longer see a path towards. While (as noted in section 3) containment and isolation are features of incarceration generally, these properties are intensified in much of the contemporary asylum detention landscape. And that more radical liminality tends to put stronger pressure on refugees’ ability to sustain hope.

5.4 Temporal Liminality and Imaginative Horizons

The second way in which such spaces make it difficult for displaced persons to imaginatively — and so hopefully — fill in the space between their present and some desired future is via their temporal liminality. For detained refugees, the temporal location of particular hoped-for events or possibilities — being resettled, receiving an asylum decision, even being permitted to formally apply for asylum — is often opaque or indeterminate. Our ability to imaginatively fill in the space between present and future with a sense of the way in which some possibility could come about often depends on having some understanding of the structure of that temporal period — particularly, the rough temporal location of important nodes around which other plans and possibilities could be organized. When the structure of that time is opaque and the temporal location of specific possibilities are indeterminate, we can struggle to see how things might fall into place around them in a way that would enliven our hopes. Refugees and asylum seekers housed in the kinds of liminal spaces I have described are often deprived of any such determinate grasp of their futures, and often more radically than in ordinary incarceration. Yaser, a Syrian refugee waiting with his family in a detention center on Samos in Greece, attributed the hopelessness endemic to the camp to this opacity: “I try to live from day to day, but the hopelessness really gnaws away at you. We have totally no idea how long we will have to live here” (Verhaert Reference Verhaert2018). The issue here cannot be uncertainty, which, as I noted earlier, is constitutive of hope. But profound unclarity about when certain possibilities might occur turns the space between present and future into barren terrain — one that cannot be filled in imaginatively given the lack of determinate information about when those future possibilities might occur — and so devoid of the sort of affective scaffolding that might support one’s hopes. A psychiatrist working with suicidal prisoners on Nauru echoed this analysis:

This opacity is often exacerbated by a lack of clarity about the temporal location of the present as well. Asylum seekers in Australia’s detention centers on Manus and Nauru have described how the intense isolation, passivity, experiential homogeneity of those spaces disrupts and warps their sense of time. Describing that experiential monotony, Behrouz Boochani notes: this “is the most shocking paradox in the life of a prisoner / Time dissolving before you” (Reference Boochani2018: 131). Benjamin, a prisoner on Nauru, similarly observed that “it’s like time has been stopped,” connecting this temporal distortion explicitly to the pervasive sense of hopelessness amongst those in the camp (Benjamin Reference Benjamin2017). Part of the connection here, I think, is that it is difficult to orient oneself imaginatively to future possibilities if one does not know where one is in time, and thus in relation to those future possibilities. As I noted earlier, for many refugees their detention exists in a kind of liminal space of having departed but never having arrived. And this feeling of being in limbo, of being lost in time or feeling that time has stopped, can make the temporal interval between present and future indeterminate, or their relation opaque, such that it becomes exceedingly difficult to imaginatively see — in a sufficiently determinate and constrained way — how some desired future possibility could come about. That temporal limbo is instituted through policies and practices like indefinite detention, routine institutional delays in asylum and resettlement processes, and the general opacity of legal proceedings. But it is also instituted spatially via the extreme isolation of such spaces and their material and infrastructural poverty, which, as noted in section 4, leaves detainees with precious little in the way of activity that could structure their time.

Our ability to maintain substantial hopes often depends on our ability to imaginatively fill in the space between our present circumstances and some desired future outcome with determinate, constrained ideas about how that outcome could be realized. As refugees are detained at greater rates, and increasingly consigned to more and more liminal detention spaces, they are also increasingly deprived of imaginative access to the intermediate landscape between their present circumstances and any desired future, and this damages their hope. Instead, the space between present and future is experienced as a profound chasm: the desired end remains in view, but the way there is not. This, Kwong argues, is precisely what despair consists in (2019: 247).Footnote ¹¹ And it maps neatly the disquieting sense of being stuck in limbo that many encamped refugees and asylum seekers report — cut off from a desired future, displaced people become stranded in a present that is often miserable and degrading.