Scrutinising UN peacebuilding: entangled peace and its limits

ABSTRACT This article examines the suitability of entanglements and relations to think and see peacebuilding events. Through a reflection upon the limited results of the United Nations (UN) in securing lasting peace in war-torn scenarios, the text critically engages with three debates on contemporary peacebuilding literature: the inclusion of ‘the locals’, the achievement of an organisational system-wide coherence and the agential condition of peacebuilding actors. Whilst acknowledging the analytical potential of affirming the entangled ontogenesis of actors and processes in the conflict-affected configuration, the article ends with a cautionary argument about entanglement fetishism, namely the celebratory, normative and exclusionary projection of a relational world. Entangled peace is an invitation to read the peacebuilding milieu, and by extension the broader theatre of the real, as radical openness, where events emanate from the collision of an infinite multiplicity of possible worlds.


Introduction
In the recent years a plethora of accounts across the social and natural sciences have instrumentalised entanglements and relations as a mode of reading world events. 1 Noticeably inspired by continental philosophers such as Alfred North Whitehead, 2 these contemporary conversations embrace a wide tradition of thought that supersedes an elemental and primal essence of the being with a non-essentialised, relational and processual form of becoming, which is never found in isolation, but constitutively entangled with further processes of becoming. 3 Entangled ontologies thus claim that beings and processes of the world co-emerge and compose one another in relation. Hence, relations precede beings or, in below terminology, actors. A crucial implication of this relational form of seeing the world, which has not come without its detractors, 4 involves the fade of the modern subject-object Cartesian dualism, which unleashes a hubristic and hierarchised ontology where the (human) subject becomes a sine qua non condition for the existence of the world. This form of knowing involves a hierarchical separation between the 'knower' (i.e. the UN) and the 'known' (i.e. the local civil society). Resonating with Barad, beyond modern epistemologies underpinned by a hubristic Man that knows the world, the article intends to argue that 'the knower cannot be assumed to be a self-contained rational human subject. Rather, subjects (like objects) are differentially constituted by intra-actions', 5 meaning that entanglements are the constitutive elements of beings, which are never static or essentialised, but always on continuous processual mutual reinvention. The author continues: 'knowing is not a play of ideas within the mind of a Cartesian subject that stands outside the physical world the subject seeks to know. (. . .) Knowing is a physical practice of engagement'. 6 Thus entangled sensitivities unveil the vulnerability of all beings and processes, whose very existence hinges on their ontological relational condition. As Haraway puts it, things never become in the world in an essentialised form, but emanate from 'a vital entanglement of heterogeneous scales, times, and kinds of beings webbed into fleshly presence, always a becoming, always constituted in relating'. 7 Relationality is increasingly emerging as an analytical framework for the study of International Relations as well as the area of Critical Peace and Conflict Studies. 8 In critical peacebuilding debates authors have emphasised the suitability to focus on relations and interactions between actors and processes in conflict-affected contexts in order to capture the complex interconnectedness that shape the peacebuilding milieu. In brief, the relational perspective in peacebuilding centres on the unpredictable negotiations between actors and processes in war-torn scenarios and, particularly, on what the outcomes of these encounters will entail. Brigg argues that the prime position of a peacebuilder in a relational approach is the acknowledgement of the absence of authority and capacity of the individual to know the world over the recipient of peacebuilding, as that epistemological collision mutually constitutes its participants. The author suggests that in relational and flatter ontologies hierarchy is less important than openness and change. 9 Thus Brigg emphasises the need to recognise other forms of thinking, doing and knowing as constituencies of our forms of thinking, doing and knowing. 10 In all, relational peacebuilding perspectives focus on the outcomes of nonlinear transactions and entanglements between actors and processes to reach a more comprehensive understanding of the complexity of contemporary social phenomena, in which entanglements produce sharp and obvious unexpected effects, such as the 'local resistance' that critics of liberal peacebuilding have pointed out. 11 The following text scrutinises the suitability of the entangled lens to reflect upon the seeming limited results of UN peacebuilding endeavours in conflict-affected scenarios, with a focus on the cases of Sierra Leone, Burundi and the Central African Republic (CAR). The chosen qualitative mode of enquiry is based on an exploratory approach to narratives and practices emerging from reports and interviews, which allows for the production of a broader picture of the emergent challenges in the peacebuilding milieu.
The article is organised into three main sections, corresponding to an engagement with three contemporary critical peacebuilding debates. First, through critically reflecting upon the limited results of UN peacebuilding efforts in knowing and engaging 'the locals' in peacebuilding projects, the text problematises the UN mode of knowing and capturing the host society as an essentialised and objectifiable actor. Rather, this piece hints that the observer/UN and the observed/'locals' are mutually constituted in relation. Second, thinking with the UN flawed performance to achieve organisational system-wide coherence as a necessary step to enhance the peacebuilding outcomes, the text interrogates the assumption of a Newtonian linear unfolding of events in conflict-affected scenarios. Beyond deterministic cause-effect relations, the article invokes a reconfigured notion of causality that might have significant implications for the expectations of peacebuilders in the field. Third, in light of the UN faulty performance amidst numerous deployed actors in peacebuilding settings, the article suggests that the growing complexity of the war-torn milieu questions actors' autonomous and purposeful agency, which is conceived of as vulnerable to their relational condition. In the conclusion, whilst acknowledging the analytical potential of affirming the entangled ontogenesis of actors and processes, the article also makes a cautionary argument about what is defined in the following pages as entanglement fetishism, namely the emancipatory, normative and deterministic projection of a relational world. Far from this, entangled peace is an invitation to think peacebuilding instances, and by extension the broader world, as radical openness, where events emanate from the collision of an infinite multiplicity of possible worlds.

Failing to include 'the locals' in UN peacebuilding
In pursuit of broadening legitimacy and effectiveness in peacebuilding engagements, the UN peacebuilding apparatus has gradually sought to turn the highly liberal, top-down and externally-led engagements from the 1990s and early 2000s into bottom-up, contextsensitive processes, where the interests of 'the locals' ostensibly prevail. The 2000 Brahimi report expressed that 'the need for the United Nations to reach out to civil society (. . .) who can be useful partners in the promotion of peace and security for all'. 12 Whilst the Department of Political Affairs was the main UN responsible body for peacebuilding tasks from the 1992 institutional reform, since 2005 the international organisation has materialised these efforts on the ground mostly through the Peacebuilding Commission (PBC), an inter-governmental advisory body for which the local civil society is conceptualised as a key element for the so-called national (or local) ownership principle, an essential feature of UN peacebuilding processes according to which 'it is the citizens of the countries where peacebuilding is underway'. 13 More recently, the 2015 final report from the High-Level Independent Panel on Peace Operations (HIPPO) reinforced that UN missions should seek objective feedback from local and international civil society experts to improve their impact. 14 Shepherd develops a concise critical analysis of this conceptual and operational UN journey. The author observes how local civil societies, in the frame of the UN peacebuilding enterprise, have evolved over time from a passive to an implementing actor: 'The emphasis on "national ownership" and the construction of the national community as agent of its own renaissance is in keeping with the construction of civil society actors as agents of change'. 15 Yet, unveiling the problematic patronising intimacies of the entwinement between the externals and the locals, the author observes that the elements belonging to the latter are 'at once valued (in the process of extraction) and yet subordinated'. 16 Despite efforts made by UN policy-makers towards centring the peacebuilding process on 'the locals', externally-led engagements are becoming increasingly protracted and real self-government remains deferred. 17 Numerous scholars have rethought and criticised why these international policy attempts have had rather limited results in turning externally-led peacebuilding processes into bottom-up processes in which field-based local actors adopt a central role. 18 From a Foucauldian perspective, arguably the dominant trend over the last two decades in the analysis of external-local relations in critical peacebuilding debates, Chandler argues in a conspicuous analysis that the conceptual production of civil society in the international peacebuilding framework reproduces the foundations of an ontology of difference which previously established the taxonomies of 12  race and culture, successively, as well as their resulting exclusionary and violent implications. 19 In a similar vein, Richmond argues that external actors create a hegemonic discourse and regulatory framework that intervened societies can hardly escape from. Their emancipation, that author suggests, hinges on the capacity or will of the locals to circumscribe to these externally-led peacebuilding endeavours. 20 Seeking to surpass the Foucauldian impasse, Danielsson, noticeably inspired by entangled thinking, argues that the process of knowledge production on the 'local turn' debate should not be grasped through the modern binary colonisers/internationals vs colonised/locals, but instead as an embodied, situated and co-constituted phenomenon. Following Haraway, Danielsson admits that a situated knowledge might 'inform a new type of scholarly critique better suited to making known, disentangling and critiquing the contemporary politics and power relations of peacebuilding inclusivity projects'. 21 Along these interpretative lines, the case of the UN peacebuilding involvement in post-conflict Sierra Leone offers suggestive observations. In this country, civil society organisations and personalities have often questioned the PBC for failing to comprehensively conceptualise, capture and engage local civil society. A few interviews illustrate these standpoints. The bishop Joseph Humper, former commissioner of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, highlighted the UN disregard to genuinely include local civil society in the peace process. 22 In addition, the head office of Fambul Tok, a Freetownbased NGO, defined the PBC mandate as narrow and not visible, claiming it dealt mostly with state actors, leaving minimal space for others. 23 Finally, the Country Director of Search for Common Ground, another Sierra Leonean NGO, highlighted the UN-civil society relationship as still presenting a challenge, as power relations continue to be uneven. 24 This ontological limitation, for which the UN cannot grasp and include an apparently 'out-there' objectifiable actor, has been reinforced by evidence from reports and field interviews with experts. On the one hand, the Peacebuilding Fund's (PBF) National Steering Committee election of two civil society representatives, one from the West African Network for Peacebuilding (WANEP) and another from the Mano River Women's Network for Peace (MARWOPNET) resulted controversial, conducing field practitioners to complain that the chosen two were primarily urban-based actors, i.e. not representative of the grass-roots level, and that they had been hand-picked by the Government. 25 On the other hand, commentators have also problematised the highly institutionalised form of engagement that the UN peacebuilding machinery offers to the Sierra Leonean host society. For example, the National Steering Committee, aimed at assisting in post-conflict arrangements, and the Truth and Reconciliation Commission were expected to accommodate the demands and the voice of the local civil society through institutionalised mechanisms. Similarly, the south-south learning process paved the ground for Sierra Leonean civil society representatives and elected officials to engage in structured dialogue about the electoral processes with their Burundian counter-parts, thus aiming to enhance the electoral contexts of 2007 and 2010, respectively. The particular south-south learning process, Jenkins suggests, 'while no doubt useful at the margins, frequently serve as an occasion for UN officials to highlight the invaluable role they are playing'. 26 The author exemplifies how, in the frame of this south-south learning process, the Deputy SRSG (Special Representative of the Secretary General) took the opportunity to reiterate in a celebratory pose the value of the PBC's support to Sierra Leone's Election Commission and police force, and the PBC's commitment to doing the same in Burundi. Indeed, despite all these UN-supported efforts, several field actors reported the organisation's flaws in bringing the peace process closer to the local civil society, thus questioning the highly institutionalised nature of the engagement. Amongst several hindrances, the PBC-civil society relationship deteriorated over time because the PBC would announce meetings at very short notice. These pressing timings hinder a wide and thorough consultation with civil society, which often depends on short project budgets and therefore does not have the institutional capacity to engage in protracted or periodic policy discussions. 27 Here, the lens of entangled ontologies introduced above allows for a fresh reading of these operational setbacks and deciphers in a nuanced mode the incapacity of the UN to grasp a representative sample of the local civil society. Moreover, the highly technical and institutionalised form of engagement offered by the UN is also compromised. These ontological limitations show how the international organisation imagines local civil society as an essentialised, objectifiable and manipulable object that can be externally known and engaged in a peacebuilding process. Illustrative of this ontological quandary, the current Sierra Leonean minister of Tourism, Memunatu Pratt, was a relevant figure of the Sierra Leonean local civil society by the time the PBC included the country in its agenda in 2007. Particularly, Pratt was the head of the Department of Peace and Conflict Studies at Fourah Bay College, the University of Sierra Leone, and she was also actively involved in various peacebuilding initiatives and entities, including the Freetown-based WANEP. The UN Peacebuilding Task Force as well as the UN Development Program (UNDP) in Sierra Leone regularly consulted Pratt regarding aspects closely connected to the peacebuilding process, such as poverty reduction strategies and mass youth unemployment, amongst other issues. The Pratt-UN relation became so intimate that she was eventually appointed to the UN-backed Special Court for Sierra Leone from 2007 to 2010. From the entangled ontological angle, the ontogenesis of both Pratt and the UN stems from their co-constitutive relation, which makes it unfeasible to trace a clear ontological cut to distinguish what is the international organisation and what is the local civil society representative. What ultimately sets the conceptualisation of local civil society is not a limited ontological definition, but the countless entangled interactions from which it stems.

Unattaining system-wide coherence in UN peacebuilding
In a 1997 report former UN Secretary General (SG) Kofi Annan suggested addressing issues such as the relationship between the New York-based headquarters and field missions, the effectiveness on the ground level and the suitability of merging operational concepts like peace, security, development and human rights. 28 Along with the shift towards the inclusion of the local civil society in the peacebuilding enterprise described in the previous section, the creation of the PBC in 2005 stressed the necessity for a 'coordinated, coherent and integrated approach (. . .) and to advise on and propose integrated strategies for postconflict peacebuilding', 29 particularly between donor States, the UN Headquarters and field missions. As former SG Ban Ki-Moon expressed in a 2009 report, coherence is critical to peacebuilding processes, as these require a tight coordination between security, political and development stakeholders, within and outside of the UN. 30 De Coning points out that the key operational issue of UN coherence and its associated mechanisms of coordination and integration is that it seeks to be system-wide, hence the apparent significant complexity of the process. 31 The author continues to classify this UN system-wide endeavour as facing four major challenges, namely facilitating its own internal coherence, supporting coherence amongst all host government's agencies, encouraging coherence among all international or external actors, and facilitating coherence between the external and internal actors.' 32 In the words of the HIPPO report, 'coordination mechanisms should facilitate strategic coherence between the various organizations' presence and operations in-country.' 33 De Coning identifies that while coherence is the aim, coordination encompasses the whole set of technical mechanisms through which coherence is achieved.
Despite all the above discursive and operational efforts, UN results in achieving a system-wide coherence and intracoordination have been significantly limited. 34 With a focus on the case of the UN peacebuilding engagement in Burundi, the following lines instrumentalise the entangled lens to problematise how the UN expects ground strategies to unfold in a cause-effect linear and predictable manner. Throughout the decade from 2004 to 2014, one of the most significant endeavours of UN peace operations deployed in Burundi was towards system-wide coherence. 35  BINUB was mandated to implement a multidimensional, integrated and coordinated mandate tackling a wide range of areas, including security. With this goal, BINUB's head took on the responsibility for four additional field roles, including the ERSG, the Resident Coordinator, the Humanitarian Coordinator and the head of the UN Information Centre. Later in 2010, the United Nations Office in Burundi (BNUB) replaced BINUB stressing the 'importance of establishing a fully integrated office with effective coordination of strategy and programs among the UN agencies, funds and programs in Burundi'. 37 Several setbacks illustrate how unexpected events hinder the UN longed-for outcomes of peacebuilding strategies. 38 First, the unforeseen expulsion of BINUB's Special Representative of the Secretary General, Youseff Mahmoud, and BNUB's security chief, Paul Debbie, by the Nkuruziza government in 2010 and 2014, respectively, severely affected UN's efforts towards organisational intraccordination and coherence. Second, reported hostile and even disrespectful behaviours of UN peacebuilding officers towards local population in Bujumbura resulted in a deterioration of the trust the UN offered to Burundians. A former Security Sector Reform officer of the United Nations Operation in Burundi (ONUB) criticised during an interview that 'the UN presence in Bujumbura was too visible, with UN officers insensitively displaying wealth, creating distrust and dislike amongst locals'. 39 Third, the intra-UN turf battles resulting from conflicts of interest as well as issues of leadership and personality traits were overtly recognised in assessment reports as an operational inability for which the PBC failed to deploy a coordinated peacebuilding action in Burundi. 40 Asked about the deployment of BINUB in Burundi and its efforts towards coordination, a policy expert commented: 'there were still turf battles under the same headings, so they did not really succeed in this goal, at least in the beginning'. 41 In spite of the UN conviction that coherence leads to better peacebuilding, a formulation that resonates with cause-effect linear framings, the complexity and unforeseen clashes of war-torn scenarios impede coherence to be ever fully attained. 42 Therefore, the limits of coherence-oriented mechanisms such as coordination, integration and highly technocratic planning illustrate how the outcomes of peacebuilding scenarios stem from non-linear, unpredictable and entangled micro-political processes unleashed by a wide range of actors and processes at the ground level. 43 Critical peacebuilding conversations on non-linearity have criticised the modern expectation that social events in the world occur in a linear, progressive and quasi-teleological fashion, which bases on the Newtonian contentious assertion that world events occur in sequential spacetime framings. Non-linear peacebuilding literature questions that phenomena in conflict-affected scenarios unfold in a deterministic, predictable and cause-and-effect linear path. Far from this, these accounts stress that actors and processes in the war-torn milieu collide in a rather uncontrollable mode. Chandler criticises how previous linear peacebuilding frameworks, which were highly intrusive, linear and top-down, were guided by the assumption that rational subjects from conflict-affected societies were awaiting to be freed by the external intervening actor. The author continues by elucidating how non-linear peacebuilding represents a shift away from liberal rationality and a theoretical and practical move towards a sensitivity with deeper and entwined social practices that eventually compose the overall peacebuilding outcome. 44 Seeking to move forward the affirmation of non-linear peacebuilding, this section, following Barad's application of entanglements, hints that the sequence of unexpected events involving field actors invites us to rework the notion of causality, which cannot be explained as specific relations between isolated objects, as one cause-thing resulting in an effect-thing separately. Cause and effect emerge through intra-action, namely they are mutually constituted at the point of their entanglement. 45 Causality is thus reconfigured as the outcome of unforeseeable relations, which renders the creativity of the future beyond deterministic linear unfolding of events. 46 In sum, the asset of the entangled mode of looking into Burundi's peacebuilding case lies in the embrace of the indeterminacy of the future, which becomes an unknowable outcome that hinges on the chancy encounters between actors and processes. Thus, nonlinear notions of causality and spacetime framings open up the possibilities for reconceptualising how actors such as the UN engage with the world with which they are ontologically entwined. The UN fruitlessly expects that a better coordination of its parts will result in system-wide coherence, for these parts have no autonomy per se, but they are contingent: they are produced through their interactions with other UN components. Hence advocates for the non-linear essence of the peacebuilding milieu tend to invoke a relational and process-based approach, arguably better suited to deal with unexpected outcomes, uncertainties or continuously transforming patterns. As Zanotti suggests, 'in a world of emergences, political action always takes place in conditions of uncertainty regarding the effects it triggers. The possibility that universal norms, principles, or totalizing planning rationalities may offer a valid ground for making sound decisions is slim'. 47 Unlike transformative interventions which ultimately seek for changes of 'outthere' objectified externalities expected to be sensitive to a cause-effect linear scheme, for instance the endeavour towards securing peacebuilding through a coherent field strategy, the entangled mode of thinking the world potentially enables actors such as UN peacebuilders to abandon the anxious pursuit of linear and rigid strategic goals.

Rethinking the UN agency in complex peacebuilding
In addition to the debates about the problematics of recentring the peacebuilding enterprise on 'the locals' as well as the endeavour towards a system-wide coherence as prime conditions for the success of peacebuilding engagements, this section unpacks the 44 David Chandler, 'Peacebuilding and the Politics of Non-Linearity: Rethinking "Hidden" Agency and "Resistance,"' Peacebuilding 1, no. efforts and the implications of the UN goal to overcome the challenge of delivering peacebuilding amidst a plethora of actors with dissimilar political rationalities. UN peacebuilding performance does not occur in isolation, but amongst a multiplicity of actors and processes that constantly interact, negotiate and collide with the UN. This quasi-chaotic amalgamation of actors is illustrated in the following pages through the paradigmatic case of the CAR, 48 which over the last two decades has hosted over a dozen of peace missions, most of them led and/or authorised by the UN, the European Union (EU), the African Union (AU), the Central African Economic and Monetary Community (CEMAC) and the Economic Community of Central African States (ECCAS).
In the recent times, the UN peacebuilding efforts to overcome field complexity have been noticeable both at the discursive and operational level. The 2015 HIPPO report endorsed the reliance on cooperation with domestic, regional and global organisations in order to successfully pursue the international peace agenda. The report acknowledges that cooperating with regional and sub-regional actors 'will be an essential aspect of planning and deploying all UN peace operations in the future'. 49 On the ground, the UN has promoted a holistic and multidimensional approach aiming to improve inter-actor relations in the peacebuilding setting. The establishment of United Nations Multidimensional Integrated Stabilisation Mission in the Central African Republic (MINUSCA) in 2014, which sought to merge country-wide peace efforts in one single pole of operations, is a clear example of the UN tendency towards sensitising with and overcoming field complexity. 50 As Juncos suggests, this form of integrated missions ultimately seek to overcome field complexity by achieving coherence amongst UN agencies and departments but also with external actors. 51 This strategy thus presumes that lasting peace results from a coordinated network of interdependent agencies between local, governmental, regional and international actors.
In light of the limited results of MINUSCA and the rest of peacebuilding stakeholders in the CAR over the last two decades, 52 the following lines seek to argue that the deployment of a multiplicity of varied peacebuilding actors illustrates how the messy field entanglements between them undermines their purposeful and autonomous agential condition. 53 To be sure, the question of agency in peacebuilding has not gone unaddressed. Jabri, for example, defines the notion of 'hybrid agency' to refer to the blurry distinction between the local and the external in the peacebuilding setting. To this author, this form of agency speaks to a wider network enabling 'practices that view their target as populations to be governed'. 54 Whilst dispelling facile dichotomies between local and international, Jabri's conceptualisation of agency continues to ground the latter in the imperative, governmentalising and policing element that characterises and delineates the actors seen as part of the peacebuilding architecture. This approach presumes the external actor's desire to enable further governance and constrain other forms of agency in the process, which are the expression of wider forms of contested politics. Without disavowing this critical point, this section attempts to move this conversation forward by hinting at the seemingly unnoticed effect that increasing entangled interactions between peacebuilding actors have in their condition of agents.
Illustrative of how entangled ontologies might reconfigure the notion of agency, when MINUSCA was deployed in the CAR, the African military and policy personnel who had been previously employed by the AU-led International Support Mission to the Central African Republic (MISCA) was simply re-hatted and became UN officers overnight. 55 This is indicative of the vulnerability of agency to ongoing entwinements and negotiations among a wide spectrum of actors. In a thorough analysis of stakeholders' agency in peacebuilding, Zanotti states that agency 'is not the quest for a pristine freedom by a subject that is ontologically independent from, and inevitably crushed by, power. Instead political agency is the result of one's position within social relations. It is constituted within a series of uneven, agonic, situated responses to contingent conditions that in turn it transforms.' 56 Through observing the role played by NGOs in peacebuilding scenarios, this author suggests that agency is based on a 'continuous negotiation between ideal aspirations and contingent possibilities', 57 involving a wide range of actors such as international donors, regional actors as well as local stakeholders.
Informed by the above policy observations and theoretical accounts, the emphasis is hereby laid on the blurring boundaries between actors and their rationalities. At the same time, being cognisant of these entanglements is meaningful in contributing to an understanding of how the structures of power wherein peacebuilding takes place are shaped. In this regard, inter-and intra-actor relations can then be regarded as open-ended processes, constantly evolving on the basis of their mounting entanglements. In other words, this approach can enable a re-engagement with the agency of actors as deriving from the iterative processes seen beyond the phenomena that actors of peacebuilding are reacting against, trying to manipulate, or trying to find some leverage to emancipate themselves from (as if these existed outside themselves). This agential reformulation has major policy-oriented implications for actors such as the UN, currently seeking to focus on designing alternative practices and beliefs. Acknowledging relations as constitutive of their ever-transforming agency binds actors with a condition of vulnerability, which is indicative of the unfeasibility of an autonomous consecution of peacebuilding goals. Building on the previous section, the example of the UN deployment in the CAR amidst a wide range of peacebuilding actors hints at the agential weakness of both peacebuilders and recipients alike, whose entangled and complex form of becoming in the conflictaffected setting surpasses the possibility of a unilaterally manipulable social reality. 55

A cautionary conclusion: the limits of entanglement fetishism
The entangled ontogenesis of actors and processes in the war-torn milieu has been brought forward in this article as a potential analytical contribution to the comprehension of peacebuilding events. With a focus on the limited results of UN peacebuilding in the post-conflict cases of Sierra Leone, Burundi and the CAR, the paper has hinted at the suitability of entanglements and relations to shed light on the underlaying problematics of three notorious contemporary critical peacebuilding debates, namely the inclusion of 'the locals', the achievement of organisational system-wide coherence as a sine qua non condition for the consolidation of lasting peace and the increasingly questioned agency of peacebuilding actors. By engaging with these debates, the entangled lens has allowed for, first, questioning the efforts towards engaging 'the locals' as if these were 'out-there' independent actors, second, reimagining the causality of a sequence of events beyond tethered and deterministic futures and, third, undermining the ostensible autonomous agential condition of actors due to their entangled genealogy. In brief, presuming that relations precede the very ontology of actors reminds us of their vulnerability, which compromises their purposeful interventive performance in the world, let alone the consecution of an objectifiable state of peace as ontologically separated from them. In the words of the English philosopher Alfred North Whitehead, 'the experience of Peace is largely beyond the control of purpose', 58 an assumption that frees peacebuilders from their protracted anxiety induced by a teleological ethos and renders efforts towards peace in an unsettling terrain.
Whilst entangled peace offers a worldview for which all elements constitute one another in relation, this conclusion intends to formulate a word of caution about the problematic implications of what is hereby defined as entanglement fetishism, namely the liberatory, normative and exclusionary projection of a relational world. Kurki, for example, renders the very existence of the cosmos subjected to the relational character of reality. In her own words, 'relations are everywhere in that "everything" is made of multiple relations and every "thing" in relations is situated in them specifically'. 59 In addition to an array of critical voices towards entangled thinking, 60 this article casts doubt on the supremacy of entanglements. What is intended to be brought forward is a mode of seeing the world that acknowledges the vulnerability of beings and processes as a result of their entangled ontogenesis, thus debunking the modern illusory desires of mastery like those of the UN. Nonetheless, through the frame of entangled peace the article has not sought to unleash an emancipatory, deterministic and homogenising project. The present account simply invokes relations as inexorable, even oppressive. As Shaviro suggests, the human fundamental condition 'is one of ubiquitous and inescapable connections. We are continually beset by relations, smothered and suffocated by them'. 61 Inspired by Whitehead, this author asserts that the ultimate metaphysical question is how to escape these overdetermined relations, thus 'finding space that is open for decision'. 62 In a similar vein, Colebrook warns that by reducing the existence of beings to an entangled ontogenesis intensifies the normative stress on life, being and becoming as relation. Thus, to this author imagining a world without relationality enables the possibility for multiple worlds, hence surpassing deterministic tics. 63 In short, seeking to configure an all-encompassing relational world might reproduce a similar exclusionary logic to that of linear, progressive and universalising ventures of modernity, as illustrated by the UN peacebuilding telos. As Scott famously suggested, modernity behaves as a homogenising rationality that reduces and simplifies the cartographies of places and their forms of knowledge production so as to turn these vernacular stories in governable, controllable and mouldable beings. 64 Entangled peace refrains from claims of an entangled ontogenesis of all beings and processes so as to prompt an intervention in the world. It is not the object of entangled peace to unleash a saviour breakthrough towards a longed-for telos. Any other affirmation would fall once again under modern taxonomical and uniforming modes of seeing, thinking and living in the world. Entangled peace attempts to modestly eschew ontological elitism: Entanglements, relations, collisions, tensions, negotiations, frictions, entwinements, knots and so forth have not been approached in this article as rigid, deterministic and totalising cuts that claim how the world should be. Far from the celebratory character of a large part of literature inclined to an unquestioned fashion of entanglement fetishism, entangled peace enables a gaze at conflict-affected scenarios wary of this exclusionary slippage. Indeed, whilst entangled peace recognises the analytical value of sensitising with the relational ontogenesis of actors and processes in the peacebuilding arena, it also admits that a normative version of entangled ontologies does not seem to overcome the problems of exclusion characteristic of modern projects such as the UN peacebuilding endeavour. In conclusion, the article does stand by entangled ontological assumptions, but to the ultimate implications: Entangled peace is an invitation to speculate over the peacebuilding milieu, and by extension the broader world, as radical openness, where events emanate from the clash of an infinite multiplicity of world-making possibilities.

Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).