Op-Ed Commentary Archives

Polycrisis and Regeneration: Latin America Facing the Opportunity to Build New Futures

This article argues that Latin America occupies a distinctive but tension-filled position in the global polycrisis, holding ecologically strategic territories such as the Amazon, the Andean systems, and major wetlands while sustaining economies heavily dependent on extractive models that pressure those same systems. The author contends that climate change, biodiversity loss, soil degradation, and pollution […]

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The Fifth Food Mega-shock in 20 Years? How to Stop these Crises for Good

This article argues that the disruption of the Strait of Hormuz is driving a fifth global food mega-shock in less than two decades by simultaneously disrupting energy supplies, fertilizer markets, food production, and humanitarian assistance. The author explains how these interconnected pressures are unfolding in cascading phases, producing rising food prices and increasing hunger over

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Can We Eat Our Way Out of Polycrisis?

The author argues that food system transformation represents one of the most connected and pliable nexus interventions available for navigating today’s polycrisis, drawing on historical research into the Black Death era — a polycrisis-like period in which climate instability, food system disruptions, conflict, and disease formed a vicious spiral — to demonstrate that ostensibly localised

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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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Sky-High Oil Prices. A Fertilizer Shortage. Now Add a “Super El Niño.”

This article argues that the war involving Iran, particularly through the closure of the Strait of Hormuz, has driven up oil and fertilizer prices, triggering supply shortages that threaten global agricultural production just as climate pressures intensify. The anticipated arrival of a strong or “super” El Niño is expected to further disrupt weather patterns, compounding

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You Can’t Have a Revolution Without Revolution: Navigating Polycrisis and Political Change in Iran

This article examines the war involving Iran through the lens of polycrisis and revolutionary theory, arguing that externally driven attempts at regime change risk deepening interconnected crises rather than producing meaningful political transformation. The article situates the conflict within a broader regional and global polycrisis, highlighting how war, energy disruptions, food insecurity, economic instability, displacement,

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The World Order After 2025

In this article, Yuen Yuen Ang argues that 2025 marks not just the end of the postwar global order but the emergence of a new one. She examines the collapse of a system built on US-led geopolitical stability, industrial progress, and globalization, highlighting internal contradictions such as concentrated authority, widening inequality, environmental degradation, and political

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