“Polycrisis” has become the new buzzword for defining our present global condition. Polycrisis conveys two core ideas. At an ontological level, it describes a state of complexity in which the multiplicity of crises facing the world are interacting and exacerbating each other, and these interactions should be treated as phenomena in their own right. At a normative level, it (along with its sibling concept, “permacrisis”) describes a world in which crisis phenomena have become so pervasive and intertwined that we must accept “crisis” as the new “normal” for transnational politics.
I argue against polycrisis as an orienting concept. At its worst, the notion of an ongoing polycrisis appears to promote the “state of exception” as permanent mode of governance (cf. Mittiga 2022). But even generously understood, polycrisis projects a normatively deflated worldview with limited prospects for change and an impoverished vision of legitimation that normalizes “politics in the emergency register” (White 2015; 2019; Kreuder-Sonnen 2019; 2023). Indeed, despite its apparent novelty and urgency, the polycrisis worldview offers few alternatives except the further embrace of already-extant trends toward technocracy and post-democracy.
At the same time, a critique of the conceptual presuppositions of polycrisis offers us a window into the legitimacy demands of a form a governance genuinely committed to navigating the multiple crises we presently face. The concept of “crisis,” as it has developed in modernity (Koselleck 2006 [1982]; Milstein 2015; Cordero 2017; cf. Roitman 2014), presupposes two connections that polycrisis denies. The first, I argue, is a connection to crisis consciousness, through which the actors affected by crisis exercise positive freedom to discursively reconsider and articulate normative aims (Habermas 1996: ch. 8). The second is a connection to a vision of the social whole, through which the sources of crisis can be excavated in light of the normative aims of crisis-conscious actors. Such a vision is—in ideal terms—the site at which citizens, experts, and policymakers come together to search for effective and just resolutions to crisis. In contrast, the concept of “polycrisis,” by positing crisis as a “new normal,” denies any place for crisis consciousness, and by taking the interaction effects of extant crises as its constituent units, it obscures conceptualization of the social whole.
An alternative and more productive framework would seek to reconstruct and harness, not undercut, the normative resources of crisis thinking. Nancy Fraser’s (2022) conception of “general crisis,” though imperfect, offers a path for pulling together a multiplicity of crisis tendencies into a coherent emancipatory vision, while Albena Azmanova’s (2020) conception of “metacrisis” looks to take head-on the question of channelling crisis consciousness into democratic energies. Governing institutions at the domestic, regional, and global level must be able to orient themselves around both a social vision and a collective sense of crisis consciousness if they are to confront present and future crises in a normatively satisfactory way.