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The Polycrisis Needs a Sustainability- and Resilience-Oriented Paradigm Shift Through Innovation

This article examines the polycrisis as a framework for understanding and governing interconnected risks across social, ecological, economic, and political systems. Using a comparative analysis of the European Union and China, the authors explore how different approaches to transition governance can support sustainability under conditions of overlapping crises and systemic uncertainty. The article identifies four […]

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The Financial System is a Giant Polycrisis Waiting to Happen

The author argues that today’s financial system faces a polycrisis characterized by multiple vulnerabilities including highly leveraged Treasury basis trades, record sovereign debt levels, commercial real estate refinancing pressures, growing exposure within opaque non-bank financial institutions, dangerously concentrated AI-driven equity markets, and destabilizing geopolitical pressures from conflicts involving Iran and Russia. Unlike 2008, where stress

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Twenty-First Century European B/Orders and Transborder Living-Spaces in Times of Polycrisis

This introduction to the special issue on 21st century European b/orders and transborder living-spaces in times of crisis discusses contemporary dynamics of re-bordering in Europe in the course of the polycrisis. The authors argue that what was once a model of cross-border integration, in which border regions served as laboratories for multilevel governance and transborder

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The 2026 Global Report on Food Crises

The 2026 Global Report on Food Crises finds that 266 million people across 47 countries faced high levels of acute food insecurity in 2025 — with famine confirmed simultaneously in parts of the Gaza Strip and Sudan. Conflict remained the primary driver, affecting over 147 million people, while humanitarian and development financing collapsed to decade-low

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Mental Health in the Time of Polycrisis: Geopolitical Determinants and Modern Psychiatry

The authors advance geopsychiatry as a framework for understanding how the compounding pressures of today’s polycrisis are reshaping psychiatric vulnerabilities across communities and societies. Focusing on the emblematic and mutually reinforcing domains of wars, climate breakdown, and mass forced displacement, the authors show how geopolitical instability generates direct mental health burdens through proximal mechanisms such

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Three Global Threats Stand Out in a More Uncertain and Insecure World

In this publication, GlobeScan presents the results of its latest global urgent problems survey. Results show that war and conflict, climate change, and extreme poverty form a distinct top tier of perceived urgency. Together, these concerns capture a broader sense of insecurity spanning safety, environmental stability, and basic economic well-being, reflecting a world where multiple

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The Urgency of Building Systemic Risk Capacity in a Polycrisis World

The authors argue that the world urgently needs to build systemic risk capacity to address an unprecedented polycrisis. They explain that modern crises are unprecedented in their scale, speed, and global interconnectedness, amplified by inequality, environmental degradation, and advanced technologies. Because cascading and compounding risks now routinely overwhelm existing institutions, the authors call for a

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The Geopolitical Transformation of the EU in the Era of Polycrisis: Hybrid Adaptation of a Compound Polity After 2022

This article examines the geopolitical transformation of the European Union within the context of polycrisis, explaining how interconnected pressures are reshaping European governance, its adaptive capacity, and its patterns of legitimation. The analysis demonstrates that the EU has not evolved into a coherent, sovereign geopolitical actor, but rather into a more strategically adaptive and selectively

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The End of Easy Globalisation

This report provides an outlook of the current global context, arguing that the period of easy globalisation is over and that the 2020s constitute a fourth systemic crisis — a “crisis of global integration” — driven by three mutually reinforcing forces: the return of multipolarity under nuclear constraint, a structural shift from commodity abundance to

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Fractured Reality

This report examines the evolving impact of digital technologies on European democracy, arguing that platforms algorithmically privilege negative and conflictual content, fragmenting shared reality into what the authors term a “fantasy-industrial complex,” while foreign control of dominant digital infrastructure exposes democratic discourse to direct and indirect interference. The report presents recommendations from fostering alternative public

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