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Reporting on the first day of the World Economic Forum’s 2023 summit in Davos, Time magazine writer Yasmeen Serhan notes that “polycrisis” is the “most ubiquitous buzzword” of the meeting.
Why ‘Polycrisis’ was the Buzzword of Day 1 in Davos Read More »
In this inaugural panel of the 2023 World Economic Forum summit Adam Tooze asserts that the term polycrisis aptly characterizes the state of the world, while Historian Niall Ferguson dismisses polycrisis as an “illusion” or “mirage” and argues that humanity’s present troubles are “just history happening.”
De-Globalization or Re-Globalization? Read More »
Ian Bremmer and Cliff Kupchan present their top ten geopolitical risks for 2023: an increasingly rogue and reckless Russia; an increasingly powerful and unconstrained Xi Jinping; the weaponization of artificial intelligence; shockwaves of global inflation; Iran backed into a corner; higher energy prices; reversals of development; political divisions in the United States; the disruptive digital
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 »
