The global-capitalist elephant in the room: How resilient peacebuilding hinders substantive transformation and undermines long-term peace prospects

This article reviews critical responses to recent academic debates on resilience and peacebuilding, with a focus on approaches that question the underlying logics of resilient peacebuilding in fundamental ways. It argues that, while resilience in peacebuilding lends agency and new policy direction to peacebuilding actors, enabling them to uphold the image of active global governance, this also helps to legitimize the existence and reproduction of dominant global-capitalist structures and practices that undermine long-term peacebuilding and give rise to risks of conflict and environmental disasters in the first place. We argue that this process hinders transformation away from an infinite growth economy by focusing on imminent systemic risks and solutions while ignoring potential normative–theoretical and practical–experiential alternatives to the global-capitalist frameworks at the heart of the problem.