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Dr Brian Milstein (Politics & Public Administration) presented a new working paper on “polycrisis” at two of the world’s largest political science gatherings—the European Consortium of Political Research (ECPR) General Conference in Thessaloniki, Greece, and the Annual Meeting of the American Political Science Association (APSA) in Vancouver, Canada. Titled “‘Polycrisis’ as Ideology,” the paper looks at how the concept of “polycrisis” has spiked in recent years. 

Referencing a state of affairs in which multiple crises interact and combine in such a way as to produce “emergent properties” in its own right, this concept has been embraced as an apt description of the present global situation by public intellectuals such as Adam Tooze and major organizations such as the World Economic Forum. 

Milstein undertakes a critique of the concept of polycrisis, situating it in the larger history of crisis-thinking. Despite the ancient Greek origins of the word, “crisis” as we know it is a relatively modern one, and it is bound up with a number of presuppositions about modern society and the capacities of modern citizens to collectively interpret and steer their form of life. As such, “crisis” and crisis-thinking presuppose a kind of democratic worldview. 

Milstein argues that, while polycrisis in positions itself in certain ways as a further iteration of crisis, it is formulated in such a way that denies these capacities and presuppositions. Its claim to exhibit “emergent properties” comes with a denial of citizens’ capacities to correctly interpret or effectively steer their own collective life. Instead, polycrisis demands a theoretical framework that is essentially technocratic in outlook and thus at odds with democratic governance. Milstein argues that there are better alternatives for understanding global problems aside from polycrisis, and these should be explored instead.