Polykrise als globales Phänomen?: Perspektiven aus der Vergleichenden Politikwissenschaft

In recent years, the notion of “polycrisis” has become a key concept in debates about contemporary global transformations. It refers to the simultaneous occurrence and mutual reinforcement of multiple crises, including the COVID-19 pandemic, geopolitical conflicts, economic disruptions, and climate change. Yet to what extent is this constellation actually perceived worldwide as a coherent phenomenon? This debate article addresses this question from a comparative political science perspective by bringing together regional analyses of Africa, Latin America, East and Southeast Asia, Eastern Europe, the Middle East, and the Global North. The contributions examine, first, how crises are perceived and framed in the respective regions and whether the narrative of polycrisis is present at all. Second, they analyze how political systems and actors respond to multiple crises and what implications this has for democracy, authoritarianism, political stability, and international positioning. The comparative perspective reveals that the idea of a single global polycrisis only partially reflects empirical realities. While in the Global North the entanglement of multiple crises is often interpreted as an epochal rupture, many regions of the Global South emphasize experiences of structural vulnerability, long-standing crises, or external shocks. The concept of polycrisis thus appears less as a universal condition than as a contested interpretive framework whose relevance and consequences vary across regional contexts, institutional arrangements, and political narratives.