A young indigenous woman wearing a traditional feathered headdress listening at a UN Forum

Timed to coincide with the annual meeting of the United Nations Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues, the Second Global Summit on Indigenous Peacebuilding was held in New York City (Manuel Elías/UN Photo)

Indigenous peacebuilders have a different answer to Carney’s rupture

As the liberal order fractures, Indigenous peacebuilders are pressing forward – they never trusted it to begin with.

Erin Hurley

8 May 20264 min read

More than 150 Indigenous leaders from across the world gathered at Thomas Berry Place in New York last week for the Second Global Summit on Indigenous Peacebuilding, timed to coincide with the annual meeting of the United Nations Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues. Two years earlier, the first such Summit had been hosted at the United States Institute of Peace in Washington, which was effectively dismantled and renamed for President Donald Trump in 2025.

The 2026 Summit met without institutional support, but grew in numbers, scope, and ambition, laying out a practical architecture for Indigenous peacebuilding at the global level.

This is a curious thing. By conventional standards, Indigenous peoples have less diplomatic leverage than almost any other actors in international politics. Their major institutional gains were secured through the US-led international order now being dismantled from within – what Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney aptly described in Davos as a rupture, not a transition.

If the old order is breaking down, why are the actors seemingly most exposed pressing forward rather than pausing to find their footing? The short answer is, because they have been practising and imagining something different for a very long time. As a result, the rupture changes their position far less than it changes everyone else’s. That difference is reflected in how they see the path ahead.

What appears, from the outside, as persistence under constraint is in fact a distinct mode of political action.

In the speech he gave in Davos, Carney’s response to the rupture was a middle-power path: countries like Canada combining principled values with pragmatic engagement, building coalitions issue by issue, refusing to negotiate alone with hegemons. That is one path. The Indigenous peacebuilders meeting in Queens are laying out a different one.

For Indigenous peoples, as with many small states in the Global South, the hypocrisies of the liberal international order were not aberrations but defining features of the system. Carney’s call to stop pretending is heard differently for actors who never put the sign in the window in the first place.

The costs are unevenly distributed. Many armed conflicts are concentrated in biodiversity-rich regions that overlap with Indigenous territories – now the front lines of global competition over land and resources. In these zones, weak protections and extractive pressure routinely translate into displacement, criminalisation, and violence.

But the deeper answer lies elsewhere. Indigenous peoples have practised alternative forms of international relations for far longer than the post-1945 order has existed – approaches to treaty-making and diplomacy grounded in kinship, reciprocity, and multi-generational obligation.

Proceedings during the Second Global Summit on Indigenous Peacebuilding (Supplied)

The Summit’s convener, Binalakshmi Nepram, put it plainly: Indigenous peoples are “offering pathways to peace rooted in centuries of wisdom”. These pathways are meaningfully different from the dominant paradigms shaping today’s order, which have largely been grounded in Western traditions of statecraft and development, often emphasising extraction, efficiency, and short-term returns.

For more than 50 years, Indigenous peoples have also been working from inside the liberal international order – not to capture it, but to reshape it. The UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples is one such expression, affirming collective rights alongside individual ones, challenging the legal foundations of colonial authority, and expanding the meaning of self-determination beyond the model of sovereign statehood.

Political scientist Sheryl Lightfoot, a Summit participant, has described global Indigenous politics as a “subtle revolution” with the capacity to forge a more inclusive international order. What appears, from the outside, as persistence under constraint is in fact a distinct mode of political action – one that does not depend on dominance, or control of the system, to generate change. The Summit in Queens – away from the usual diplomatic hustle in Manhattan – was not a departure from that work. It was its next iteration. Participants included Australia’s Ambassador for First Nations People Justin Mohamed, Guatemalan leader Otilia Lux de Cotí, President of the American Indian Law Alliance Betty Lyons, Aotearoa-New Zealand Ambassador for Oceania in the Indigenous Youth Storytellers Circle Em-Haley Kūkūtai Walker, among others.

Speaking as the head of a wealthy Western state, Carney did something remarkable at Davos. He named the rules-based international order as a system sustained by collective performance of a lie – and called on middle powers to stop pretending and start building. Critical scholars, political leaders from the Global South, and Indigenous activists have argued as much for decades, largely from the margins. Carney said it from inside the club, from one of the most prominent platforms in global politics.

But diagnosis and prescription are not the same thing. Carney’s ideal remains a project of managed state-centric order. It is a more honest version of the same architecture. If the goal is stability, that may be enough. But if the goal is peace – durable, structural, grounded in something other than the balance of power among states – it is not.

The Indigenous peacebuilders in Queens are not offering a better-managed version of the existing system. They are offering something structurally different. Middle powers serious about building something new would do well to pause and look beyond their own councils.

About the author

Erin Hurley

Erin Hurley, PhD, is an expert on the intersection between foreign policy and domestic politics.

Topics

Diplomacy Human rights United Nations Conflict & war