Geopolitics and International Security Archives - Page 2 of 4

Evolution of the polycrisis: Anthropocene traps that challenge global sustainability

Using expert solicitation, the authors identify 14 “evolutionary traps” (global, technological, and structural) that risk locking humanity into unfavorable (maladaptive) trajectories that seriously restrict its ability to adapt to the Anthropocene. These traps develop over four phases: initiation, scaling, masking (of harmful interactions), and trapping. The fourth phase involves one of five trapping mechanisms: constraints, […]

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AXA Future Risks Report 2023: A World in Polycrisis

This tenth edition of insurance company AXA’s Future Risks Report surveyed 3,500 experts in 50 countries and a representative sample of 20,000 members of the general population in 15 countries. It found that the top three perceived risks are: 1) climate change, which for the first time occupied the top spot for both experts and

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Mitigating Global Warming is Not Our Only Problem: Are We “Sleepwalking” Towards a Global Polycrisis?

William White argues that climate policy around the world is lacking in dimensions of “should” (clear analysis of what must be done), “could” (the power to implement solutions), and “would” (the actual use of that power to address the problem). The even greater challenge, however, is that climate change is not the only global systemic

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The Great Disruption has Begun

Paul Gilding argues that the world has reached “a multi-system tipping point” that will bring “the Great Disruption”: “a destabilisation of the global climate system at a scale that is so chaotic, unpredictable and costly, it will trigger cascading disruptive change in the global economy, national politics, investment markets and geopolitical security.” Gilding predicts that

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Global Polycrisis: The Causal Mechanisms of Crisis Entanglement

The authors translate polycrisis from a loose concept into a research agenda by providing the concept with a substantive definition, highlighting its value-added in comparison to related concepts, and developing a theoretical framework to explain the causal mechanisms currently entangling many of the world’s crises. In this framework, a global crisis arises when one or

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Can Democracy Survive the Polycrisis?

George Soros argues that there are three main sources of the polycrisis (in order of importance): artificial intelligence, climate change, and Russia’s war on Ukraine. AI poses a “mortal threat” to open societies via disinformation, and it provides closed societies new instruments of surveillance and control; climate change threatens to make large areas uninhabitable; but

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Whose Polycrisis?

Farwa Sial argues that the polycrisis neologism is a feint that allows international financial institutions to continue business as usual by obscuring their role in global problems. She critiques definitions of polycrisis for downplaying the role of capitalism and global power hierarchies in the perpetuation of contemporary crises, and for overlooking the experiences of the

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Global Risks Report 2023

This 18th edition of the World Economic Forum’s Global Risks Report is based on a risk perceptions survey of 1200 experts on the likelihood, severity, and interconnections between 37 global risks. It finds that the biggest risk in the next two years is the cost of living crisis, and the biggest risk in the next

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Top Risks 2023

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

Prospects for Children in the Polycrisis: A 2023 Global Outlook

The report highlights the distinctive harms for children and future generations of eight global trends that are part of the polycrisis: continued impacts of the pandemic, inflation, food insecurity, energy shortages, underinvestment in children, threats to democratic rights, international factionalism, and internet inequality.

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