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The acknowledgement of the complexities of post-conflict peacebuilding has, in recent times, spurred several critical perspectives seeking to shed light on what is left unexplored by mainstream approaches to peace, focussing particularly on marginalised narratives, experiences and struggles. Since this effort is understood to entail more than the simple extension of local ownership initiatives in essentially unchanged liberal frameworks, critical perspectives have been pushing peacebuilding towards radically different ways of thinking about governance, conflict and peace, by looking at examples coming from societies perceived as not invested in modernity or liberalism. This paper investigates this effort to open up the so-called local turn in peacebuilding to radical difference through engagement with worldviews coming from Indigenous communities, narratives and knowledge. The paper will argue that whilst this appears to have the potential to push peacebuilding beyond its comfort zone, by forcing theory to confront questions pertaining to human-centrism in the context of colonial erasure and structural violence, a turn to Indigeneity operated without a fundamental questioning of the impact of the legacies of liberal peace 'thinking', runs the risk of reproducing forms of appropriation and marginalisation of Indigenous knowledge, and might simply 'save' liberal peacebuilding through the back door.

The notion of the Anthropocene has become an instrumental backdrop against which post-foundational social theory and political research frame political action in a way that defies modern certainty and, somewhat paradoxically, anthropocentrism, under conditions of drastic ecological changes. But what exactly is the theoretical promise of the Anthropocene? This paper seeks to explore what the concept can offer to critical social science and, conversely, how these critical approaches define and locate the analytical and the political purchase of the Anthropocene, through the critical lens of Indigenous scholarship. The paper genealogically retraces the transition from a science-led, discontinuous-descriptive to a continuous-ontological conceptualization of the Anthropocene. It then unpacks how the notions of ecological relationality and non-human agency deployed in the latter closely parallel certain lines of argumentation in Indigenous thought and politics. Drawing on critical Indigenous studies, the paper formulates a critique of how relational perspectives enfold alternative ontologies and politics within an overarching Anthropocene ontology that is not only problematically universalizing, but also replaces the genuine engagement with differences and resistance.

This article examines how the growing complexity of peacebuilding settings is transforming the classic notion of purposeful agency into a non-purposeful, adaptive form of being in such contexts. Through an analysis of critical peacebuilding literature and a reflection on the UN’s peacebuilding practices in the field, the article first argues that complexity has been gradually replacing linear, top-down strategies with approaches seeking to draw attention to interdependencies, relationality and uncertainty. The article then suggests that engaging with complexity has critical implications for the traditional understanding of purposeful agency in the peacebuilding milieu that go beyond those of the governmentality critique, which conceptualizes the complexity turn as a strategy for extending control over post-conflict societies. Complexity is eventually conceived of in the article as a performative contextual quality that stems from the non-linear, co-emergent and unpredictable entanglement of interactions between actors in peacebuilding processes. This state of entanglement hinders the autonomous, purposeful agential condition of these actors in war-torn scenarios – in this article, peacebuilding implementers specifically – in which agency seems more and more restricted to its adaptive nature.