Héctor Acero Ferrer is Director of Lifelong Learning at ICS, as well as a PhD candidate in the VUA-ICS Conjoint PhD program.
One of the primary questions occupying the minds of many today is this: in the face of the growing erosion of the safeguards meant to protect the most vulnerable in our world, what are we—ordinary, everyday people—called to do? How are we to fulfill our responsibility toward neighbours at risk amid marginalization and oppression? Within the humanities, these are precisely the kinds of questions that surface repeatedly in our classrooms and in response to our presentations and publications— questions which, I dare say, we are often not fully equipped to answer.
In June 2025, the Institute for Christian Studies joined the Canadian Interfaith Conversation at the Canadian Museum for Human Rights to reflect on these very concerns. During the biennial Our Whole Society conference, participants from multiple faith traditions gathered to explore the relationship between the practice of hope and the protection of human rights in a fractured world.
In his keynote address, scholar and former prosecutor at the International Criminal Court Payam Akhavan spoke of a hope in human rights, one that is palpably present in regions that have witnessed the most reprehensible human atrocities. As I listened to Akhavan’s presentation, it became clear that its most significant insight lay not simply in its content, but in the posture he adopted toward those he has served in his professional work. Time and again, Akhavan redirected the audience’s attention to the wisdom he had encountered in the communities he sought to defend. In this instance, he highlighted the hope for human rights expressed by those whose rights have been most severely threatened in the Balkans, Rwanda, and Canada’s North, and whose circumstances seemed to offer little reason for hope at all. His reflections illuminated a form of wisdom that emerged not from juridical expertise alone, but from the lived experience of communities themselves, often in tension with, and even exceeding, the frameworks through which justice was formally administered on their behalf.
For many conference participants, Akhavan’s presentation marked a moment of profound learning because it shifted the dominant problem-solving orientation from one rooted in ingenuity to one grounded in listening. As I attended to his words, I became acutely aware of how often I myself operate in what might be called an “innovation mode”: assuming that, if I just think hard enough, I can generate adequate responses to these pressing realities. Akhavan’s gentle insistence unsettled this reflex, exposing the arrogance that so often accompanies our drive to innovate, particularly when confronting the most urgent challenges faced by the world’s most vulnerable communities. His invitation was instead to cultivate a posture of listening, grounded in the recognition that if answers are to emerge at all, they will arise from the very communities we claim to serve.
This realization led me to reflect more deeply on the hybridity that marks my own life: born and raised in war-torn Colombia, yet having lived my entire adult life in Canada. At times, as I engage in reflection and conversation about the most pressing questions of our moment, I hear echoes of the wisdom held by vulnerable Colombian communities, which I encountered and witnessed during my childhood. Taking seriously Akhavan’s invitation to listen, I found myself returning again and again to a familiar saying that captures something essential about the Colombian way of being in the world:
La esperanza es lo último que se pierde.
Loosely translated into English as “hope is what’s lost at last,” I have long struggled to convey the depth of this idiom to Canadian interlocutors. Over time, I have come to realize that this difficulty stems, in part, from my own failure to fully grasp the nature of the suffering that pervaded Colombia. Distanced from that suffering, I have often failed to understand how hope might be sustained in—and even generated by—situations that appear, on their face, entirely hopeless. Hope, in this sense, is not equivalent to the reasonable expectation of “getting a better job,” “ensuring the planned outcome of a trip,” or “being reciprocated by a loved one.” Rather, hope names the expectation of that which is fundamentally unreasonable. To be called to hope, then, is to be invited to anticipate something so unlikely that only a miracle could bring it about.
This description may seem to veer dangerously close to unfounded optimism. Nothing could be further from reality. While the outcome hoped for is profoundly unlikely given prevailing conditions, hope itself functions as a form of responsibility. In this sense, hope is inseparable from action. The addressee of the phrase “hope is what’s lost at last” is charged with imagining and enacting a plan of action that might render the miracle plausible. They are expected—in much the same way that the philosopher Hannah Arendt describes—to usher something entirely new into the world, something capable of reconfiguring an otherwise predetermined chain of events.
In the communities where this idiom is commonly used—and perhaps overused—action almost always rests on this future-oriented hope, which uncovers alternative possibilities by re-imagining pasts marked by oppression, violence, and death. Importantly, this form of hope is rarely an individual affair; it is instead predicated on an entire community’s cultivation of alternative ways of understanding their shared struggles. Here is where the radicality of this hope lies. Not in the mere presence of suffering, but in the recognition that the suffering is shared. Accordingly, this hope recognizes that a future beyond suffering must necessarily be a shared future. For this reason, telling one another to keep hope alive is a way to remind us that we are accountable to each other as we imagine how we can transform our histories, our traumas, our memories into futures marked by healing and flourishing.
Yet not everything about this understanding of hope is purely generative or empowering. Hope is a double-edged sword—a blessing and a burden borne collectively by survivors of conflict, victims of ecological catastrophe, and people living in conditions of poverty that are difficult to imagine for most. Amid exhaustion and depletion, some of the most vulnerable individuals and communities invest extraordinary effort in remembering and re-imagining, repeatedly re-narrating themselves in the pursuit of action plans, possibilities, and miracles. It is remarkable to witness both their resilience and their capacity to imagine and act. At the same time, it is deeply unsettling to compare this reality with the lack of imagination and indifference that so often accompany abundance and success elsewhere in our world.
It is at this point that my reflections converge once again with those undertaken by Akhavan, who reminded us of the hope in human dignity that is palpably present in regions that have witnessed the most reprehensible human atrocities. Drawing on his own life story, he illustrated how the motivation to pursue change must emerge from the conviction that systems of oppression and violence—however exhaustive they may seem—do not have the final word.
For Akhavan, the hope articulated by victims of violence is deeply connected to the recognition that we have done better before and can do so again. He insisted that careful attention to history reveals countless instances of resistance and creative imagination that have fuelled initiatives responsible for at least some degree of protection for the world’s most vulnerable communities. While my own outlook may not be as optimistic as Akhavan’s, I find it impossible not to be hopeful when I witness the sustained and dedicated action of so many vulnerable people in Colombia and in other places around the world who, amid poverty and war, continue to hold one another accountable to their communities by reminding each other that “hope is what’s lost at last.” ◆
Here is a clip from Akhavan’s lecture:
This is a painfully refreshing view of hope.