The global ‘polytunity’

CONFLICTS, trade wars, inequality and democratic decay fill today’s headlines. Each crisis appears to be feeding the next, and it can feel as though the world is coming apart. Western leaders and thinkers have embraced a single word to capture this entanglement of threats: “polycrisis”.

Adam Tooze, the Columbia University historian who helped popularise the term, summarised its appeal in 2023: “Here is your fear, here is something that fundamentally distresses you. This is what it might be called.”

But when fear becomes the central theme, the result can only be angst and paralysis, as Mark Leonard, director of the European Council on Foreign Relations, observed after the 2024 World Economic Forum in Davos.