Critical Political Economy of the European Polycrisis

Over the last two decades, the European Union (EU) has faced a series of intertwined crises, including the Global Financial Crisis in 2008 and the structural adjustment programmes imposed by the EU and the IMF on several member states; the increase of flows of refugees triggered by war and famines and the humanitarian disaster caused by Fortress Europe; Brexit and the rise of Euroscepticism. In turn, new crises have emerged and further intensified the previous ones: the Covid-19 pandemic, the war in Ukraine and the impending climate catastrophe. To capture the multiple, interrelated, and self-reinforcing characters of the crises affecting global capitalism and European integration, the term ‘polycrisis’ – originally coined by the French complex theorists Edgar Morin and Anne Brigitte Kern – has become increasingly popular, both among scholars and European elites alike (Tooze, 2022). As we argue in our recently published co-edited volume, Critical Political Economy of the European Polycrisis (Edward Elgar, 2025), Critical Political Economy (CPE) is well placed to contribute to this debate. In this blog post, we will outline the purpose underpinning this volume and present some of the key findings.

Social and Environmental Upgrading through Global Value Chains? A review of the book by Selwyn and Bernhold.

In Capitalist Value Chains: Labour Exploitation, Nature Destruction, Geopolitics (Oxford University Press, 2025), Benjamin Selwyn and Christin Bernhold provide a powerful critique of the mainstream global value chain (GVC) literature in its various versions. In particular, they criticise their emphasis on the possibilities of social and environmental upgrading through an expansion of GVCs. Instead, they convincingly argue that capitalist value chains (CVCs) intensify the exploitation of workers and the environment alike.  In this review, I will highlight some key contributions of the volume while raising a couple of conceptual and empirical concerns.

 

Dissecting the Polycrisis, Charting the Conceptual Terrain of Enquiry

Polycrisis has become a widely used concept. Politicians, public intellectuals and academics alike are drawing on it when describing our current global situation. In my article ‘Dissecting the Polycrisis, Charting the Conceptual Terrain of Enquiry’, recently published in the Journal of Balkan and Near Eastern Studies, I explore how we can distinguish between fundamental crises on one hand, and crises, which are simply the concrete manifestations of those deeper, structural crises on the other. In this blog post, I summarise the main conceptual and empirical findings of the article.