Contribution short abstract

This paper turns polycrisis against itself, drawing on its internal tensions to expose conceptual limits and to explore how ambivalence can sharpen critique and open alternative ways of sensing and narrating systemic breakdown.

Contribution long abstract

This paper examines the polycrisis not as a stable analytical category, but as an ambivalent epistemic device that reveals as much about contemporary modes of knowing as about the “crises” it names. Drawing on Morin and Latour’s critique of the modern nature–society divide, I argue that the circulation of polycrisis operates across three interdependent registers.

First, in mainstream commentary—from Tooze to the World Economic Forum—polycrisis appears as a catch-all label for the simultaneous escalation of environmental, geopolitical, financial, and social disturbances. This reading simply multiplies crises, producing aggregation rather than explanation.

Second, read through Arrighi’s notion of systemic chaos, the term points to the erosion of global organisational capacities, the fragmentation of hegemonic direction, and the intensification of contradictions produced through the long co-production of nature and capital. This structural reading aligns with political ecology by foregrounding how crises are mutually generative across accumulation and social reproduction.

Third, following Morin, polycrisis names both the inter-solidarity of multiple “vital problems” and the crisis of the epistemological frameworks through which we apprehend them. It exposes the limits of a Western paradigm built on disjunction and reduction, ill-equipped to grasp inter-retro-actions and the relational texture of socio-ecological worlds.

Approaching polycrisis ambivalently means refusing both alarmist affirmation and technocratic dismissal. Ambivalence does not weaken critique; it sharpens it by revealing the conceptual instability, political risks, and seductions that allow polycrisis to circulate as a fashionable yet under-theorised concept, and by opening space to rethink how political ecology narrates systemic breakdown without deterministic frames.