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Jonathan Derbyshire characterizes the year 2022 as a polycrisis, discusses the origins of the term, and provides the definition: “Noun: collective term for interlocking and simultaneous crises of an environmental, geopolitical and economic nature.”
Year in a Word: Polycrisis Read More »
Hugo Dixon argues that the present polycrisis need not lead to a new Cold War or bifurcated world order, but could instead produce a polycentric order made up of multiple centres of authority, with the US as a leader but not a hegemon.
Polycrisis may Lead to Polycentric World Order Read More »
Mosharraf Zaidi argues that Pakistan has for decades experienced a polycrisis composed of abject poverty, gender inequality, insecurity of life and property, risk of mass killing, and threat of sovereign default, with no improvements in sight. Additional stresses include extreme weather, a politically involved military, right-wing extremist groups, and the ongoing conflict with India. The author
Our ‘Permacrisis of Polycrisis’ Read More »
The author depicts “polycrisis as a wake-up call for siloed technocratic elites to peer out of the silos at the interaction term” – as a reaction to our tendency to address crises in isolation from one another. He highlights climate change as the “metacrisis” within the polycrisis that is increasingly correlating once separable risks, as
Notes on the Polycrisis Read More »
Güney Işikara argues that “obscure jargon” like ‘overlapping emergencies’ and polycrisis “serve, with or without intention, to conceal the culprit, namely the totality of capitalist relations” as the fundamental source of the world’s problems. “Within this depoliticizing and neutralizing narrative, capitalism at best looms as an imperceptible, shadowy figure in the background, not worth problematizing,
Beating Around the Bush: Polycrisis, Overlapping Emergencies, and Capitalism Read More »
Geoff Mulgan argues that the United Kingdom suffers from an “imagination gap” that impedes its ability to navigate multiple crises, manifest in short-sighted policies and over-reliance on past solutions. He explains how politics, financing, and academia contribute to the gap and provides historical examples where imaginative experimentation helped solve crises. Mulgan concludes that “it is
Thomas Homer-Dixon and Johan Rockström argue that global crises are accelerating in their occurrence, amplifying in their effects, and synchronizing due to largely unseen causal connections between them. The result is a polycrisis, a term that “implies that humanity is dealing with a complex knot of seemingly distinct but actually deeply entangled crises.” The authors
What Happens when a Cascade of Crises Collide? Read More »
Economics commentator Noah Smith opposes the term polycrisis, arguing that it overestimates the interconnectivity and severity of contemporary crises. He further posits that there are buffers in place in most systems and that people come together at times of crises, preventing them from escalating or compounding. “I don’t see a polycrisis; I see an emerging
Against Polycrisis Read More »
Samanth Subramanian contests the utility of the term “polycrisis” and the novelty of the present situation it is used to capture. Where Adam Tooze argues that the present situation is unique for its lack of single causes and single fixes, Subramanian proposes that many historical episodes featured this condition, including the financial crises of the
The Case Against ‘Polycrisis’ Read More »
Stephen M. Walt considers a number of global shocks that have all happened in close temporal proximity to one another and are “overwhelming our collective ability to respond”: the breakup of the Soviet empire, China’s rise, 9/11 and the global war on terror, the 2008 financial meltdown, the Arab Spring, the global refugee crisis, the
How Many Shocks Can the World Take? Read More »
