Poly Crisis or Organic Crisis?

An outline of key aspects of crisis and change in the world and in the United States is provided by looking at three ways in which we might think about the nature of the world crisis and the crisis of American power, namely “poly crisis,” as a kind of liberal order theorising; “organic crisis” as a Gramscian perspective; and finally another view, which is more metaphorical, which may be called a “singularity,” which derives from the field of mathematics.

Students and scholars of international relations, interested in the world and how it works, will not be surprised that when one looks around, reads any news website or watches a news programme, opens a newspaper or looks at Twitter or any other social media platform, the news reporting and discussions are awash with words like “crisis,” “disorder,” “chaos,” the end of a “rules-based order,” decline of the West, the “rise of the rest,” systemic or strategic rivalries, existential threats from China, from climate change, from pandemics, even from nuclear warfare. And people say there are existential and other threats from Russia, as well as a new Cold War and the “return of geopolitics.” That is to say, we live in what looks increasingly like, and is thought about increasingly as, an age of disorder and of crisis (Babic 2020; McKeil 2020).