Five years ago, few people outside of narrow academic circles had heard the term “polycrisis.” Thanks to Russia’s war in Ukraine, global food shortages, deepening economic and debt crises in emerging markets, record numbers of refugees and asylum seekers, and the ever-present threat of climate change, the term is now practically impossible to avoid. Coined by the French social analyst Edgar Morin, it was popularized by former European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker and, more recently, by the Columbia historian Adam Tooze, who has written extensively on how disparate global crises interact to create a seeming loop of doom.
A polycrisis isn’t just a glut of simultaneous emergencies; it is a series of crises that compound and augment one another in ways that make them harder to solve. As Tooze has put it: “the shocks are disparate, but they interact so that the whole is even more overwhelming than the sum of the parts.” A polycrisis, then, is a Gordian knot of global crises.
