This article investigates discourses of intercultural education, taking as its starting point two "encounters" in 2010 with contrasting aims and expectations of intercultural education. One is the launch of the 2010 Global Monitoring Report, where intercultural education is viewed as a means of overcoming marginalisation and promoting inclusion, and the other is in a rural Amazonian community context, where intercultural education serves to actively compound processes of exclusion. The article examines these discourses of intercultural education, locating them socially, culturally, politically and historically, and draws distinctions between educational analyses of diversity that emphasise identity and difference and those that prioritise interculturalism. It exposes complex and intersecting dynamics of social change and political contestation in the Amazonian "encounter", which question the viability of globalised (technical-adaptive) strategies for inclusion of people whose intercultural lives are characterised by abjection and marginalisation. (Contains 3 notes.)