https://arab.news/5hx98
Conflicts, trade wars, inequality and democratic decay fill today’s headlines. Each crisis appears to be feeding the next and it can feel as though the world is coming apart. Western leaders and thinkers have embraced a single word to capture this entanglement of threats: “polycrisis.”
Adam Tooze, the Columbia University historian who helped popularize the term, summarized its appeal in 2023: “Here is your fear, here is something that fundamentally distresses you. This is what it might be called.” But when fear becomes the central theme, the result can only be angst and paralysis, as Mark Leonard observed after the 2024 World Economic Forum in Davos.
Crises, however, are not necessarily followed by collapse. In fact, disruption has often paved the way for renewal — but only for those who were willing to let go of the old order.
With that in mind, I see the same moment through a different lens — as “polytunity,” a term I coined in November 2024. The idea is simple: Simultaneous disruptions offer a once-in-a-generation opportunity for the deep transformation of global institutions and ideas. When everything seems to crumble at once, we are forced to go beyond patchwork solutions and redesign systems from the ground up.
