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Paper short abstract

Drawing on ethnographic research among US preppers, mainly in Arizona, this paper explores how anticipations of collapse nurture a politics of revenge, where preparedness reshapes relations to others, erodes shared obligations, and reimagines political life beyond liberal-democratic frameworks.

Paper long abstract

In popular and media imaginaries, US preppers often appear as figures of technical competence, valued for their mastery of supplies, weapons, and survival skills. Ethnographic fieldwork among conservative preppers in the United States, primarily in Arizona, shows that these technical repertoires are inseparable from a broader moral and political orientation toward the future. Through everyday practices—stockpiling food and ammunition, training bodies, fortifying homes—preppers enact specific ways of relating to authority, obligation, and collectivity, grounded in distrust of state mediation and in the valorisation of autonomy, vigilance, and armed self-reliance.

Within these social worlds, dystopian futures are invested with a logic of revenge. Collapse is not simply feared or endured, but anticipated as a moment of moral reversal through which a world perceived as corrupted by liberal institutions will be set right. Catastrophe promises a redistribution of power and worth: dependence and protection are imagined as giving way to exposure, hierarchy, and sanction, while the prepared project themselves as legitimate bearers of authority.

Elaborating on revenge as a structuring horizon, this contribution reflects on how troubled futures reshape everyday experiences of liberalism and democracy in increasingly polarised contexts. Prepping thus appears less as a response to risk than as a lived process through which the contractual foundations of social order are destabilised and political life is reimagined beyond the moral and institutional terms of contemporary democratic pacts.