This chapter engages with and contextualises a strand of critical theory, expressed most explicitly in the decolonial work of Sylvia Wynter, who sees complexity as a promise of hope, as formative of a new order of decolonial knowledge, beyond the biopolitics of Modernity. In contrast to this framing of hope as expressed through a relational ontology of immanence and complex entanglement, this chapter analyses how the complexity sciences have been appropriated by the US military as a means to govern complex co-dependencies of environmental, technological and human systems – a means to unlock the ‘driving forces behind creation itself’. By interrogating how the concepts of complexity and emergence have been politicised and militarised, the chapter aims to showcase how the idea of complexity has come to naturalise and (re)produce the power relations and exclusions of our political present, to re-configure and renaturalise modernity’s colonial matrix.