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.”

- Yuen Yuen Ang

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 observed after the 2024 World Economic Forum in Davos.

Crises, however, are not necessarily followed by collapse. In fact, disruption has often paved the way for renewal - but only for those who were willing to let go of the old order.

With that in mind, I see the same moment through a different lens ~as polytunity, a term I coined in a November 2024 Project Syndicate commentary and then later elaborated at the United Nations Development Program. The idea is simple: Simultaneous disruptions offer a once-in-a-generation opportunity for the deep transformation of global institutions and ideas. When everything seems to crumble at once, we are forced to go beyond patchwork solutions and redesign systems from the ground up.

For starters, we should recognise that the polycrisis is a Western-centric narrative masquerading as global. Two European theorists coined the word in 1993, while another European expert popularised it recently. A Western-based summit of elites gave the term a prominent platform, prompting its viral amplification by Western media, think tanks, and academics.