This piece is part of Letters on Pragmatic Hope, an essay series in which Wesleyan professors and administrators reflect on a daunting question: How can students act with purpose and efficacy amid an increasingly authoritarian environment? The series aims to gather responses from a diverse group of Wesleyan faculty, offering a vision for how students can turn despair into pragmatism and action.
I grew up between Colorado, Maui, and Tehran. That accident of geography meant I experienced authoritarianism first as a child who had known freedom, and democracy later as an adult who understood what its absence costs.
When I moved to Iran at age five, the eight-year war with Iraq had already taken my teenage uncle, whom I never met but whose name marked the street where I grew up. It had taken the light from my grandmother’s eyes. Like hundreds of thousands of others, she kept a dimly lit shrine for her lost son, his lost future, and the quiet, daily work of rebuilding under oppression. We filled pots with water, sat by gaslight, and read poetry together.
Whether you have lived under authoritarianism or only begun to recognize its early signs, this is not a story about one country. It is about how societies change, and about the choices people make when fear begins to replace possibility. This letter invites you to think of hope as a strategy for wherever you call home now and wherever you choose to build a life in the future. Hope, not as denial or comfort, but as a deliberate response to corrosive ideas that allow authoritarianism to take hold, the belief that nothing can improve, that cooperation is futile, that possibility itself is naïve. To abandon hope is to decide that possibility is already lost.
Hope in cooperation
Hope in cooperation is not naïve optimism; it is a strategic choice grounded in how complex systems endure. Economics and political life offer many examples where defectors appear to win. In complex systems, those who exploit and extract without contributing to the collective good can gain in the short term. Formal models reveal a consistent pattern: When interactions repeat, cooperation outperforms defection. It sustains relationships and institutions that make future cooperation possible.
You have seen this. The free rider in a group project succeeds only when surrounded by people willing to carry the work. When two free riders meet, both fail. When committed partners work together, the outcome exceeds the sum of individual effort. The same pattern scales up to societies. Political movements collapse when factions spend more energy destroying one another than building something together. The Iranian Revolution devoured many of its own participants—communists executed, moderates purged, secularists exiled—and redirected energy from building toward suppression. In Weimar Germany, parties that collectively outnumbered extremists fractured into mutual contempt, clearing the path for catastrophe.
Defectors do not build because building requires trust, patience, and a vision that extends beyond personal victory. After periods of destruction, it is always cooperators who rebuild: the networks of the Underground Railroad, the collective courage of the Civil Rights Movement, the remarkable collective effort that rebuilt Japan after World War II. These efforts shared a common feature, a belief that a shared future was possible even when evidence for that belief felt thin.
Cynicism follows the logic of defection. So does bitterness. So does the temptation to declare entire groups irredeemable. These impulses can feel protective, even rational, in moments of uncertainty, but they narrow strategic possibility until only conflict remains. Cooperation requires something harder: the willingness to act without guarantees, to invest in relationships that may not immediately reward you, and to insist that humanity is not a finite resource divided among winners and losers.
Hope that it is not too late for a country
Hope that it is not too late for a country begins with the decision to remain invested in its future. Choosing hope means choosing to build where you are, even when outcomes are not guaranteed. The alternative is ceding ground before the work is finished.
This is true of any country. Every society carries deep histories of racism, sexism, corruption, and injustice. Some confront these realities openly; others deny them or treat them as inevitable. The difference, where progress becomes possible, is whether people build institutions and cultural norms that allow these failures to be named, challenged, and changed rather than accepted as the natural order of things. Around the world, many societies have begun to move in this direction, unevenly and imperfectly, and technology has made it increasingly difficult to hide injustice and easier for people to organize, learn from one another, and imagine alternatives. When people sustain hope and push for change in one place, it reshapes expectations elsewhere, gradually shifting norms and expanding what others believe is possible in their own societies.
Nepal’s decade-long People’s Movement that ended centuries of monarchy and established democratic representation, despite ongoing challenges, demonstrated how sustained civic engagement can fundamentally reshape political possibility. South Korea’s mass candlelight protests in 2016–2017 peacefully removed a corrupt president through weeks of organized demonstration, showing how citizens can hold power accountable even in established democracies. These are not isolated incidents. In 2019, sustained protests in Sudan toppled a 30-year dictatorship. In Chile, mass demonstrations from 2019–2022 forced a constitutional referendum. These examples form a global pattern of people refusing to accept authoritarianism as inevitable.
Here in the United States, imperfectly and incompletely, that infrastructure still exists. The ability to organize, to protest, to challenge power through courts, to vote, and to build coalitions across difference creates space where cooperation can still function. Marriage equality, environmental protections, and changing norms around consent did not emerge from consensus. They came from people acting from the place of hope in what was possible. The backlash against these gains now is not only resistance; it is also evidence that the ground has already shifted.
But hope does not require that you remain in one place. Many people leave because staying is unsafe, impossible, or because life carries them elsewhere. Diasporas carry hope differently. Iranian diaspora communities sustained opposition networks, documented abuses, and kept international attention focused on human rights violations even when domestic organizing became impossible. The Rwandan diaspora played crucial roles in genocide tribunals and reconciliation processes. Through memory, through remittances, through advocacy, through the refusal to let a country’s future be reduced to its present moment, diasporas sustain pressure and possibility across borders. Wherever you are, whether in your country of origin, a country you have chosen, or one you know only through the news, the same principle holds: No country is beyond hope as long as people remain willing to imagine it otherwise.
Hope that dialogue remains possible
Believe people you disagree with may still be reachable. Writing off large portions of a society guarantees the fracture we claim to fear—when groups are treated as irredeemable, the only remaining solutions become exclusion, domination, or destruction.
The work of maintaining dialogue across difference requires specific practices, not just good intentions. It means learning to separate ideas from identity, to find the person beneath the position.
Consider the Moral Monday movement in North Carolina. When the state legislature passed regressive voting laws and budget cuts in 2013, organizers didn’t write off conservative voters as lost causes. Instead, they built coalitions across racial, religious, and political lines by focusing on shared values: fair wages, quality schools, healthcare access. They found common ground with rural white communities hurt by the same policies affecting communities of color. The movement didn’t succeed by converting everyone, but by refusing to cede the possibility of connection, creating spaces where people could recognize shared interests beneath surface-level political labels.
In practice, this often means simple but difficult habits:
- Ask questions instead of making declarations. “What matters most to you about this issue?” opens more doors than “You’re wrong because…”
- Find the underlying value beneath the policy disagreement. Two people who disagree about healthcare policy may both care deeply about family security.
- Acknowledge what you genuinely share. Not false equivalence, but real common ground: concern for children’s futures, frustration with corruption, desire for community safety.
- Know when to disengage. Not every conversation is productive. Some people argue in bad faith. Protecting your energy is not abandoning hope; it’s allocating it strategically.
You can oppose ideas fiercely without dehumanizing the people who hold them. Strength and kindness are not opposites. Every person who refuses to write off entire groups, who stands firm in principle while remaining open to dialogue, becomes a node in a network that is harder to fracture and harder to control. Authoritarianism concentrates power by dividing people into irreconcilable camps. Pragmatic hope distributes power by maintaining relationships across difference.
When we practice finding mutual values and build from there, we refuse to hand authoritarians the fractured society they need to thrive.
Hope that we can act under uncertainty
Scientists do not wait for guaranteed outcomes before running experiments. We act from principle, from the belief that inquiry matters, that evidence matters, that the work itself has value independent of any single result.
You cannot control whether authoritarianism advances or retreats. What you can control is how you prepare for any future. Building skills, creating networks, and developing knowledge are forms of preparation. In an optimistic future, these become tools for building better systems. In a darker one, they help preserve truth, sustain communities, and maintain spaces where cooperation and knowledge can survive.
The #MeToo movement drew strength from decades of organizing, legal groundwork, and networks of support that existed long before the moment of visibility arrived. During Nazi occupation, Polish teachers ran underground schools in basements, preserving language and culture so that there would still be a Poland to rebuild when the war ended. Hope, in these moments, was not certainty. It was the decision to continue building even when outcomes were unknown.
Hope that you can continue
Today, as I watch mourners lighting candles for those lost to violence and political conflict, I see a new generation grappling with how to hold on to hope in the face of grief. In Iran, this struggle has unfolded for decades. In recent weeks, thousands of new shrines fill homes across Iran.
Around the world and here in the US today, the weight of loss, and what it signifies, can feel overwhelming. It becomes difficult to remain present, to continue feeling, to resist the instinct to shut down. And yet people choose to endure.
The authoritarian pitch is often the same: Surrender or despair. Pragmatic hope insists on a third option: Continue. Build capacity quietly, in the margins and in the cracks, because the act of building itself creates possibility. Skills accumulate. Relationships deepen. Capability compounds in ways that cannot be predicted in advance.
In Iran, the women who survived the revolution and eight-year war continued to fight for dignity and basic freedom, sometimes through protest, often through persistence. They studied. They worked. They made themselves indispensable within a system that sought to limit them. Today, nearly seventy percent of Iran’s STEM graduates are women. One became the first woman ever to win the Fields Medal in Mathematics. That is not an accident. It is strategy. It is hope expressed through continuation, through building power patiently within constraint. Iran today is far more liberal than the country I grew up in because of this persistence. And as Iran bleeds again, many of the protesters in the streets are women, carrying forward that same refusal to surrender.
But what does continuation mean when the worst has already happened? When catastrophe is not a future threat but a present reality? Then continuation becomes repair.
Post-apartheid South Africa chose neither vengeance nor forgetting. The Truth and Reconciliation Commission created space for confession, for acknowledgment, and for movement forward without denying the past. After Rwanda’s genocide, community-based Gacaca courts refused both the impossibility of prosecuting 1–2 million perpetrators in formal courts and the injustice of blanket amnesty. These efforts were imperfect, but they reflected a belief that societies could continue without abandoning their humanity—that even after the worst, repair remains possible.
I cannot promise you that democracy will prevail. I cannot promise that maintaining your principles will not sometimes come at a cost. But people who struggle without losing their humanity retain something bitterness cannot provide: the ability to build the world they claim to want, and when necessary, to repair what has been broken.
The question, then, is not whether the outcome will be good. False hope promises certainty, insists everything will work out, and mistakes wishful thinking for strategy. Pragmatic hope is different. It is whether you will build the capacity to act regardless of outcome, and whether you can do so without sacrificing who you are. Pragmatic hope does not deny uncertainty; it prepares for it. It does not wait for rescue; it builds resilience. It does not require guaranteed success; it finds meaning in the work itself. This is pragmatic hope. This is the work.
Maryam Gooyabadi is an Assistant Professor of the Practice in Quantitative Analysis, and can be reached at mgooyabadi@wesleyan.edu.
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