In critical theories of security, it is often claimed that the governance of life operates by the production of fear, an emotion marked by its political character, working as to arrest bodies in the present. Simultaneously, hope is often announced as fear’s binary opposite, as the condition of possibility of a future beyond the present. Hope is thereby rendered as an ethical imperative, opposed by default to both power and politics. Through a reading of contemporary affective theoretical critique, this paper questions the role of this analytical binary in masking the articulation of hope as a political concept of governance and power, central as hope arguably has been in the creation of the liberal subject. As such, this paper interrogates whether not the analytical distinction between hope and fear rather is political, functioning as to confirm rather than challenge the affective, temporal and political framing of the War on Terror – thereby disallowing from the outset a reading of fear and hope as simultaneous modes of governance, hailing bodies into place by offering both the dream and fear of another world.