Strategic optimism as a concept for imagining and transforming justice, politics and resistance

It is rare to attend a conference in honour of an author, in the presence of the said author. In all my 25 years of academic experience in both Brazilian, European and UK based universities, I have only seen this happening once or twice. The conference Costas Douzinas: Rights, Resistance and Critique, held on the 26^th and 27^th of June 2026 at Birkbeck, and organised around the publishing of an edited collection,[1] is evidence of both the depth of Douzinas’ scholarship and his solidarity to his former students. Different from most legal theory – and even critical legal theory – produced in Europe, Douzinas’ work resonates in the Global South. And I believe this has to do with his origins and history. Being a UK based scholar who survived an authoritarian dictatorship in Greece, partially explains how his theory was developed from both political and academic experiences and disseminated over the years and across the continents.

However, here comes a first objection related to the title of this short essay: the matter of the role of the critic, which is crucial to understand Douzinas’ academic and political work. Just phrasing these two activities (academia and politics) in the same sentence might raise some questions and controversy. Should academics engage in politics? Is it possible to be an academic and a politician? It is common to find academics who will dismiss the role of politics and claim incompatibility between being an academic and being a politician. This can take many forms. The first and now more common form is a claim of “neutrality.” Academics need to be neutral, we are told, and as such cannot engage with politics. This has taken an extreme form with the rise of fascism worldwide. Censorship, unfair dismissals and political persecution has affected academics everywhere – including myself. The claim of neutrality often hides a fascist drive to turn politics into crime – the “Schools Without Parties” movements in Brazil that persecute primary and secondary teachers, and the gigantic list of censored books that were removed from libraries and schools in so many states in the US, prove this point.

The second form of this claim can come from critical theory itself. I vividly remember one conference at Birkbeck where one of the discussants trashed the work of another presenter mostly because it was too permeated by “activism” and that was “not the role of the critic” he would say – or the role of critique. Activism can be permitted or tolerated but is that the role of the critic? Should an academic engage in political activism? In another example, during a summer school we were told by an American professor that that these two roles, the academic and the activist, were completely separated roles. It was not possible to mingle the two. At the time I wondered if the word “activist” had a different and specific meaning for those defending this separation. Perhaps in the USA it would mean only people who campaign for a specific cause and are privately funded to do it. Nevertheless, I raised the issue on that occasion and still believe in this argument: the complete separation between academics and activists is a social experience only possible in the Global North.

In the majority of the world, in places where political persecution and foreign funded authoritarianism have often been the rule, it was often the academics who resisted and suffered. There are practical and historical reasons for that. Having a permanent academic position, with some freedom of thought and expression guaranteed in advance, was a privilege that not many other professionals would have in such conditions. These fundamental rights, nevertheless, are not to be taken for granted. As an example, I remember the famous episode where Professor Evaristo de Moraes Filho (who used to teach Employment Law at the Federal University of Rio, UFRJ) was taken for interrogation for 48 hours, just so he would miss a meeting of the International Labour Organisation (ILO) where the Brazilian Military dictatorship feared his opinions could make them lose international support and jeopardise their authoritarian rule.

But I learned later in the Global North academia, that it is not uncommon in Europe and in the UK for academics to engage with politics. But only in a much more controlled sense. In ideal conditions, as scientists would say, UK academia even incentivises that. Academic research and outputs should have “real impact,” we are told by our colleagues who are worried about the Research Excellence Framework (REF) results. So, it is not so rare for academics to work with – or even for – political institutions, but they would more often do it as “specialists,” as someone working for some technical department in international organisations, or in the Executive branch of power, or as a consultants to the Judiciary or Legislative. Analysing, reporting and delivering answers from surveys, drafting legislation, and helping to decide cases are all considered valid (and valuable!) ways of engaging your academic career with(in) politics.

But all that is very different from what happened with Costas Douzinas, as highlighted in the conference recently held at Birkbeck. Costas did not engage in politics from a specialist position – although he could have. He occupied his political role as an intellectual.[2] As a member of parliament, a politician, he would usually be referred to as “the Professor” – both by his voters and his opponents. As highlighted by those who worked as his advisors at the Greek Parliament in Athens during this time, Douzinas brought to the political arena words and notions that had vanished since the end of history: resistance, deconstruction, philosophy. One voter reportedly said Douzinas actions and speeches made it possible for people to believe in politics once more. That is why I disagreed with the portrayal of Costas as an “accidental politician” – such as was proposed during the conference in honour of his work. Helping to build a political party, keeping a government standing and engaging in real politik is never an accident – but something that needs to be built over a lifetime.

Also, I kindly disagree with some of my colleagues who proposed a differentiation between Costas Douzinas’ academic and political work, and a separation within his own work. Of course it is necessary to divide conference panels by topics and books into different sessions, but I don’t believe Douzina’s work can be properly divided into disciplines and academic categories. It could probably be divided by time, chronologically. But at the conference Costas’ published work was framed in different categories which could be identified as “aesthetic”; “Human Rights”; and “politics and resistance”. In my opinion it is precisely the link between his academic and political work, his writings and the struggles in which he engaged, that makes his scholarship so impactful. To prove my point, I need to tell a short story.

In 2013, there were a number of Brazilian PhD students and Visiting Academics at Birkbeck. During that year, we saw, from an ocean of distance, the rise of massive demonstrations in Brazil – at some point, there were more than a million people taking to the streets every day for weeks. However, looking at the picture we could get from social networks and the main media, we were immediately scared by how this large street movement was being captured by far-right leaders and politicians – who had been out of the political scene since the fall of the Military Dictatorship, but would eventually get back to power for the first time, since democracy emerged. Seeing our doubts, Costas presented us with his idea of “strategic optimism.”

Douzinas reminded us that never before in history had so many people knew how to read; he reminded us that never before in history, had we have seen so many democratic regimes and popular claims for democracy and democratic rule and elections. He said that even if these reactionary forces would eventually win elections, we would be able to take back power from them again – in which he was right. Later in life, I encountered an interview with Brazilian playwright Ariano Suassuna, who also survived a dictatorship, in which he expressed a similar approach to optimism. For Suassuna, it is better to be an optimist than a pessimist, because pessimism often turns into a reactionary force. Optimism should be understood as a “realistic hope.”[3] Strategic optimism, for Douzinas, is a notion that strengthens the possibility of change. Also similarly to Suassuna is the fact that Costas always had an eye for popular manifestations of culture. His work has always highlighted democratic and aesthetic aspects of demonstrations – such as Silly Walks or wearing a mask – and how these were important to for dethroning elite politicians and regimes who thought too much of themselves.

However, if this notion of strategic optimism was only recently formulated by Douzinas with an application to the current political context, it was already present in his work – at least since his 1994 journal article with Ronnie Warrington.[4] It was originally formulated in the form of an association between justice and hope that could respond to abstract claims of neutral justice produced by liberal jurisprudence. Douzinas and Warrington have suggested that this hope can only be achieved through an emphasis on alterity. They have claimed that a just society presupposes our capacity to reject the world as it is and to develop hope – a hope that some agency might intervene and deliver justice to this society.[5] And also that looking after and caring for the other is the way forward to deliver justice beyond the limits of the law – transgressing the borders of neoliberal aesthetics and authority. To find hope we need to think of justice as an “ethics of response to the concrete person,”[6] where modern law and abstract jurisprudence is not the last authority – and does not have the last word. This ethics of alterity could lead us to a notion of justice of equivalence, comparison and attribution that would be just in recognizing the impossibility of abandoning the other – of passing by and ignoring suffering.[7]

Finally, I need to say that it was quite important to see Douzinas, perhaps for the first time for some of us, claiming to be a Natural Lawyer. Justice and Jusnaturalism are too powerful concepts to be left in the hands of conservatives and reactionary legal theorists. Douzinas’ strategic optimism can take the form of hope and this is the only way to face fear. This opposition between fear and hope has often shaped the results of elections and I am – strategically and optimistically – convinced this is the way forward to face far-right politics in our age. We have a concrete need of more critical legal theorists engaged in political activity capable of enacting change in the world. We have a material need to engage critique into actual political change. And we need to hope together that real change will happen. As Karl Marx famously stated, philosophers have explained the world, but what really matters is to change it.

Dr Marcus V. A. B. De Matos is Senior Lecturer in Law at Brunel University, UK

[1] Alexis Alvarez-Nakagawa and Illan rua Wall, eds, Rights, Resistance and Critique: The Legal Theory of Costas Douzinas (Routledge, 2026), https://doi.org/10.4324/9781032622224.

[2] ‘Umberto Eco, The Art of Fiction No. 197’, The Paris Review, accessed 27 July 2026, https://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/5856/the-art-of-fiction-no-197-umberto-eco.

[3] Ariano Suassuna faz reflexão sobre seu olhar pela vida, n.d., accessed 27 July 2026, https://www.youtube.com/shorts/OaV35TYtr4U.

[4] Costas Douzinas and Ronnie Warrington, ‘The Face of Justice: A Jurisprudence of Alterity’, Social & Legal Studies 3, no. 3 (1994): 405–25, https://doi.org/10.1177/096466399400300306.

[5] Douzinas and Warrington, ‘The Face of Justice’, 406.

[6] Douzinas and Warrington, ‘The Face of Justice’, 424.

[7] V. A. B. De Matos Marcus, ‘The Right to Bury the Dead: Alterity, Hope and Revolution’, in Rights, Resistance and Critique (Routledge, 2026).