The term “polycrisis” has gained significant traction over the last few years. It has been used, misused, reused, and abused in relation to social and political analysis, so much so that The Times called “polycrisis” the “buzzword of 2023”.
The term first became popular amid two separate crises: the COVID-19 pandemic since 2020 and the Russian War in Ukraine since 2022.
Writing in the Financial Times in October 2022, Adam Tooze noted: “We are in an era of ‘polycrisis’”. A little before that, Tooze elaborated on the phenomenon in his newsletter Chartbook. Tooze explained: “A polycrisis is just a situation where you face multiple crises. It is a situation like that mapped in the risk matrix, where the whole is even more dangerous than the sum of the parts”.
In simpler terms, polycrisis refers to multiple crises overlapping, interacting, and compounding to produce an overarching global crisis.
The term itself was not coined by Tooze, and it has been in use for several decades in multiple forms. Take, for example, the 2022 Cascade Institute paper, in which the term “polycrisis” is traced back to the 1999 book Homeland Earth: A Manifesto for a New Millennium by French philosopher and sociologist Edgar Morin and co-author Anne Brigitte Kern. Morin and Kern describe polycrisis as “interwoven and overlapping crises” affecting human society.
Building on Morin and Kern, the South African environmental theorist Mark Swilling defined polycrisis as “a nested set of globally interactive socio-economic, ecological and cultural-institutional crises that defy reduction to a single cause”. Similarly, in 2016, the then-president of the European Commission, Jean-Claude Juncker, deployed the term to describe the eurozone-Brexit-climate-refugee crisis.
Even when the term itself lurked in the background, Tooze popularised the term to understand the global crises that encapsulate the present world. Tooze wrote:
Pandemic, drought, floods, mega storms and wildfires, threats of a third world war—how rapidly we have become inured to the list of shocks. So much so that, from time to time, it is worth standing back to consider the sheer strangeness of our situation.
For Tooze, crises such as the COVID-19 pandemic, the sovereign debt crisis, rising inflation, the worldwide food crisis, the war in Ukraine, genocide in Gaza, Trump tariffs, the US war in Iran, the crisis of the liberal international order, and the climate emergency constitute a polycrisis.
The Cascade Institute paper has highlighted: “What may appear to be separate crisis in different global systems in fact interact, exacerbate, and reshape one another to form a conjoined ‘polycrisis’ that must be understood and addressed as a whole”. “A global polycrisis”, it has argued, “occurs when crisis in multiple global systems become entangled in ways that significantly degrade humanity’s prospects. These interacting crises produce harms greater than the sum of those crises would produce in isolation, were their host systems not so deeply interconnected.”
In short, each crisis occurs less and less in isolation.
In their essay on polycrisis, Mathew Davis and Christopher Hobson argue that polycrisis is an enmeshed set of separate crises occurring simultaneously, with each interacting with the others (in both foreseeable and unexpected ways). There are no boundaries to each crisis. One crisis could easily pass over into another. Or that they could interact to produce a greater crisis effect. Or that they could affect one another to deepen the intended outcomes. As a result of such intersections and interferences among crises, there is often a breakdown of shared meaning, creating “layered social problems”. Polycrisis, as a collection of crises, is greater than the sum of its parts.