Dissecting the Polycrisis, Charting the Conceptual Terrain of Enquiry 1

‘Polycrisis’ is generally defined as a cluster of distinct, yet interrelated crises which reinforce each other. There is, however, little consensus on its constituent parts. Helleiner, when assessing economic globalization’s polycrisis, includes the US-Chinese trade war, a global health crisis around Covid-19, an international security crisis due to the Ukraine war, an environmental crisis and a crisis of democracy. Re the EU, Nicoli and Zeitlin identify a first polycrisis around the sovereign debt crisis (2009–2016) and the migration crisis (2015–2016) and a second polycrisis brought about by the Covid-19 pandemic (2020–2021) and the Ukraine war (since 2022). They say little, however, about the importance of either or their interrelations.In this paper, I explore how we can distinguish between fundamental crises on one hand, and crises, which are simply the concrete manifestations of those deeper, structural crises on the other. Through a Marxist focus on the historical specificity of capitalism and its interrelations with patriarchy, racism and the relentless expansion into nature, I argue that we can identify four structural crises, i.e., the crises of global capitalism, global gender relations, global race relations and global ecology, all internally related and reinforcing each other

Conceptual model · Field (mathematics) · Terrain · Critical Realism in Sociology · Study and Philosophy of Religion · Theological Perspectives and Practices

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