Polycritical Law | Day 1

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Somewhere in the overlapping space where the Covid pandemic ended and the Russia-Ukraine war began, the neologism ‘polycrisis’ began to gain currency. The term represents the present as a period of multiple crises—no sooner had one significant problem been ‘managed’ than another reared forth Hydralike: finance, pandemic, war, more war, inflation—a sort of stream of crisisness. Major crises are pockmarked with lesser ones—austerity, migration, inflation, supply chain shortages, populism, tariff hikes, coups. Foreseeable future crises wait in the wings: antibiotics, microplastics, AI, Taiwan, debt default. But all are also girdled by an overarching uber-crisis: global climate change; the now yearly havoc, wildfires, hurricanes, heatwaves, droughts—all worse than before and predictably worse again in future, and all triggering their own critical knock-on effects (migration, food shortages, resource struggles over, say, rare earths, lithium, water).

The term ‘polycrisis’ might not stick, but the phenomenon to which it refers has implications for the study of law and governance. Of course the notion of permanent crisis is not in itself new. Hillary Charlesworth famously identified international law as a discipline beholden to crisis in a seminal essay of 2002. And, equally familiar, much Marxist and post-Marxian critique assumes that capitalism necessarily generates crises. But this is something else: crisis is no longer incidental or exceptional, but polymorphous and recurrent, if nevertheless unpredictable. It seems to require of the state not so much a permanent state of ‘preparedness’ (to use a policy term from the early 21^st C), but rather a diverse variety of tools and flexibility in invoking them. It seems to require of individuals their own tools and attitudes: resilience but also some resignation. The study of ‘polycritical law’, then, would be the study of specific technologies that have arisen around various iterations of crisis, of the conditions of their emergence and justification, and of their relationship to existing norms, rules and principles.

Polycritical Law Programme
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Confirmed Participants:

Wouter Werner
Sofia Stolk
Lea Ypi
David Chandler
Suzana Sawyer
Ingo Venzke
Laura Mai
Geoff Mann
Vidya Kumar
Andrew Lang
Dimitri Van Den Meerssche
Andrea Leiter
Kanad Bagchi
Kebene Wodajo
Kerry Rittich
Michelle Kelsall
Stephen Humphreys
Marie Petersmann
Ollie Hailes
Mike Wilkinson
Robert Wai

Day 1 | 1pm – 5.30pm
Day 2 | 9.30am – 4.15pm