Academic Journal Article

Dissecting the Polycrisis, Charting the Conceptual Terrain of Enquiry

The author examines the concept of polycrisis by distinguishing between surface-level crises and deeper structural drivers, arguing that prevailing approaches remain overly descriptive and fail to account for underlying causes. Drawing on a historical materialist framework, the author conceptualizes polycrisis as the manifestation of four interconnected structural crises: global capitalism, global gender relations, global race […]

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Flattening the Curve on Societal Crisis: Lessons from History

The authors argue that today’s polycrisis, marked by climate change, inequality, and institutional fragility, echoes recurrent structural challenges seen throughout history. While most historical crises led to violence and collapse, a small number were successfully averted through transformative reforms. Drawing on these rare cases, the authors outline three critical policy lessons: reverse rising inequality to

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Confronting Multiple Global Crises: A Political Economy Approach for the Twenty-first Century

This article develops a political economy framework to analyse multiple, overlapping global crises, including crises of capitalism, labour, gender, race, and ecology. Drawing on the philosophy of internal relations and a historical materialist approach, the author argues that these crises are not separate but internally related, arising from the structural dynamics of capitalist accumulation, which

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Towards One Health Action for Addressing Antimicrobial Resistance in the Age of Polycrisis

The authors argue that antimicrobial resistance (AMR) represents a major One Health issue, driven by a range of accelerators, including emerging climate and social challenges. In the context of a worsening polycrisis, they call for an ecosystem-centered governance agenda based on four pillars: identifying local environmental drivers, mapping transmission pathways, reducing AMR stability and selection

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Illuminating Limits: Educating for Postgrowth Futures in a Time of Polycrisis

The authors examine how environmental education is being reconfigured in an era of polycrisis, urging a move beyond reductive, growth-driven and technocratic paradigms. They advocate for a postgrowth educational approach that embraces ecological overshoot, social unravelling, and the systemic limits of industrial modernity. Drawing on heuristics rooted in complexity science, disaster studies, land economics, and

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Funding Community Resilience in a Polycrisis: Exploring a Human Learning Systems (+)-Based Approach

The authors explore how the polycrisis requires a rethinking of funding mechanisms to build community resilience. They argue that traditional, risk-averse, outcome-based models are ill-suited to address interconnected crises, and propose the Human Learning Systems (+) model—an approach that enables funders and grantees to consider system-scale elements such as local economic drivers and political conditions,

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Big AI is accelerating the metacrisis: What can we do?

The author argues that large-scale corporate artificial intelligence, or “Big AI,” is accelerating a converging set of ecological, cultural, and linguistic crises that together constitute a global metacrisis. Focusing on large language models, the article examines how these technologies intensify environmental pressures, undermine meaning-making and democratic processes, and contribute to the marginalization and loss of

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More Than a Buzzword? Mapping Interpretations of the ‘Polycrisis’

This article critically examines the concept of polycrisis, tracing its evolution from rhetorical buzzword to an emerging analytical lens in sustainability and crisis research. Based on a Q-methodology study involving 50 experts, the authors identify four distinct framings of polycrisis: as analytically tractable, as networked shocks, as a global governance challenge, and as requiring conceptual

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All Crises are Unhappy in Their Own Way: The Role of Societal Instability in Shaping the Past

This article introduces the Crisis Database, a comprehensive resource that systematically documents 168 historical societal crises across different time periods, regions, and levels of complexity. Aiming to overcome small-sample bias in previous studies, the database captures a wide range of political, economic, cultural, and institutional factors associated with crises, as well as their consequences—such as

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Systemic Risk: Opportunities for Inter- and Transdisciplinary Science to Improve Societal Resilience

This article introduces a focus collection on systemic risk science, arguing that systemic risks, are increasingly amplified by global warming yet remain poorly understood. It summarizes six contributing papers that highlight methodological advances in flood risk monitoring, critical infrastructure modelling, agent-based modelling, and the use of artificial intelligence in climate adaptation, while noting that current

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