Definition
Polycrisis is a term that denotes a condition where there exist simultaneous crises that are interconnected such that they reinforce one another and cause effects greater than the individual sum of the effects of the individual crises. Instead of looking at economic, geopolitical, environmental, technological, public health, or social crises as individual events, the concept brings attention to how their causes, processes, and effects are at times highly interlinked and need a holistic and a more adept multifaceted lens to successfully give a functional policy solution. This is because the understanding of interlinking implies that an analysis of the individual crisis may not give a complete picture, as any solution to one without due consideration to the rest may worsen the other.
Commentary
Origin of the term
The term polycrisis was coined by complexity theorists Edgar Morin and Anne-Brigitte Kern in their work Terre-Patrie in 1993.1 It was used to describe the complexin solidarity of problems and crises that are interconnected and mutually reinforcing. The term was later popularised by historian Adam Tooze to describe the contemporary global condition in which multiple economic, geopolitical, environmental, public health and technological crises unfold simultaneously, interacting with one another in ways that amplify their cumulative effects.2 Rather than viewing these challenges as isolated events, the concept of polycrisis recognises that interactions among distinct crises create systemic risks that are more severe and harder to manage than any single crisis.
Operation in Practice
In practice, the emergence of polycrisis is seen when multiple crises overlap and enhance each other in ways that make it difficult to understand and respond to their effects. For example, the coronavirus outbreak has negatively affected global supply chains; together with the Russia-Ukraine war, the crises have resulted in the shortage of food and energy supplies, inflation, and instability in the region’s geopolitics. In addition, the outbreak of the coronavirus forced lockdowns that helped limit the spread of diseases, but at the same time, increased poverty and worsened inequality in some developing countries.3 It is also known as Permacrisis, Overlapping Crises, Compound Crisis orMulti-Crisis
Relevance vis-a-vis Competition Law
Polycrisis assumes relevance in competition law because competition authorities are no longer dealing only with isolated cartels, abuse of dominance or anti-competitive mergers, but with interconnected market disruptions such as digital concentration, inflation, greedflation, geopolitical instability, sustainability concerns and economic inequality. In such a setting, conventional enforcement tools may often prove too slow or insufficient, especially where crises overlap with concentrated and digitalised markets. This requires a more proactive role for competition authorities through market investigations, preventive remedies, scrutiny of below-threshold mergers, assessment of exploitative conduct and use of advanced analytical tools. The concept therefore pushes competition law to reclaim its social dimension by considering resilience, innovation, fairness and wider stakeholder participation within competition assessment.
The idea of polycentric competition law shows that modern competition law can no longer remain confined to price, output and consumer welfare alone. In a complex economy, market power may also affect privacy, innovation, environmental protection, inequality and democratic participation, and thus, the competition authorities may have to assess markets not only through traditional price effects, but also through broader questions of resilience, fairness, sustainability and social welfare.
The concept is relevant to international trade and global supply chain management, financial markets, climate change and environmental governance, public health, food and energy security, digital markets, technology regulation, national security and geopolitics, etc.
Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research, “Beneath the Polycrisis Is the Singular Dilemma of Humanity Called Capitalism: The Thirty-Seventh Newsletter (2023)” (Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research, July 23, 2026).↩︎
“This Is Why ‘polycrisis’ Is a Useful Way of Looking at the World Right Now” (World Economic Forum, June 3, 2025) <https://www.weforum.org/stories/2023/03/polycrisis-adam-tooze-historian-explains/>↩︎
Kakaei H and others, “Effect of COVID-19 on Food Security, Hunger, and Food Crisis,” Elsevier eBooks (2022).↩︎
