Polycrisis

Useful when it captures the interconnection between crises; less useful when it becomes a catch-all that makes everything sound equally urgent and intractable. The risk is that it sounds grandiose and paralyses rather than clarifies. Worth asking: which crises, connected how, and for whom? Movements for justice use it to insist that crises are not independent bad luck but products of the same extractive systems. The word's political charge depends entirely on whether it is used to connect root causes or to obscure them.

Can function as a leveller -- placing climate breakdown, debt distress, and democratic erosion on the same page. But it can equally be deployed to overwhelm: if everything is a crisis, nothing gets prioritised, and the status quo survives by default. Powerful actors can invoke it to justify emergency measures that concentrate authority, while arguing that complexity makes reform impossible.

Many crises tangled together and making each other worse.