On January 27th, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists revealed the 2026 setting of the Doomsday Clock, its long-standing attempt to communicate how close humanity stands to self-inflicted catastrophe. Designed to synthesize risks ranging from nuclear weapons and climate disruption to biosecurity threats and destabilizing technologies, the Clock distils a year of accelerating global dangers into a single, unsettling image: the shrinking distance between the present and midnight. Since 2010, when it was set at “six minutes to midnight”, the trajectory has been unambiguously downward. Cooperative frameworks have eroded, unresolved systemic pressures have accumulated, and the Clock has advanced steadily from minutes to seconds. For comparison, the Clock stood at “two minutes to midnight” in 1953 amid nuclear fears from the Cold War. That threshold has now been surpassed since 2020.
Considering the present, given the accumulation of disruptive developments since the start of this year, layered upon unresolved risks identified in previous reports, it should not come as a surprise that yet another “tick” of the Clock toward midnight. Recently, the Bulletin moved the Clock to 85 seconds before midnight, the most perilous setting in its 79-year history (Mecklin, 2026). This shift reflects not only the proliferation of discrete threats, but a widening gap between humanity’s capacity to generate disruption and its ability to govern that disruption responsibly. Considering the present moment, marked by the accumulation of destabilizing developments since the start of the year, layered upon unresolved risks identified in previous reports, it should come as little surprise that the Clock has advanced yet another “tick” toward midnight.
Indifference is scarcely possible. Whether through urgency or resignation, a shared question emerges: what are we to do? This article argues that answering this question requires more than improved crisis management or updated security doctrines. In an international context shaped by what is increasingly conceptualized as a polycrisis – concept that captures the Doomsday Clock’s warning not as the sum of multiple threats, but as the systemic interaction of overlapping crises that erode humanity’s capacity to govern itself away from catastrophe – the relevance of International Relations depends on its ability to re-center a foundational concern that has been progressively marginalized: peace.
Here, I argue that re-centering peace within International Relations is not an exercise in idealism, but a necessary condition for grappling seriously with the political, ethical, and structural dimensions of contemporary global crisis. If the polycrisis is defined by the interaction of ecological, economic, social, and security breakdowns, then a focus on peace can serve as a compass through these difficult times. Through a dialogue between polycrisis scholarship, International Relations, and Peace Studies, this article contends that peace-oriented analysis is indispensable for understanding and transforming the systemic conditions that the Doomsday Clock now so starkly renders visible.
Here and Back Again: From Crises to Polycrisis
To describe our present conjuncture as a set of “structural international changes” unfolding in due course may sound reasonable, yet such a framing risks understatement. Not because it is inaccurate, but because it remains incomplete. In a world defined by unprecedented levels of interconnectedness and interdependence, systemic disruption no longer appears solely as a singular, catastrophic rupture, but increasingly as a cumulative and potentially unravelling process. Humanity now possesses the capacity to generate existential disruption on a planetary scale without having developed commensurate political or ethical mechanisms to govern it responsibly (Ord, 2020).
Under such present conditions, challenges rarely unfold in isolation. Instead, they interact in ways that amplify risk and uncertainty across domains. This growing entanglement has led scholars and practitioners alike to question whether traditional frameworks of social and political management remain adequate for making sense of contemporary insecurity.
It is in moments such as these that Gramsci’s well-known words (from almost a century ago) strike with a particular force: “the crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum, morbid phenomena of the most varied kind come to pass” (Gramsci, 2011). What emerges, then, is unmistakably a transitional period – a time between times – marked by symptoms of catastrophic imminence and disruptions unfolding faster than our capacity to account for them. Indeed, a crisis.
The language of crisis has long been used to capture moments of heightened instability experienced as exceptional, urgent, and disruptive (Koselleck and Richter, 2006). Analytically, however, a crisis must be distinguished from structural international change. While crises may serve as catalysts or moments of heightened visibility, they neither guarantee nor necessarily coincide with deeper transformations in the underlying relations, norms, and power structures that constitute the international system. Many crises are absorbed through adaptive governance mechanisms that stabilize existing arrangements without altering their foundations, just as significant structural changes may unfold gradually without being recognized as crises at the time.
This distinction helps explain why the term crisis has gained such prominence in recent decades. Revealing both the instability of our era and a persistent search for meaning and transformation, crisis has come to function as a signature concept of modernity (Koselleck and Richter, 2006). As Fassin and Honneth (2022, p. 1) observe, “we live in a time of crises. Or rather, we live in a time in which our dominant representation of the world is one of crises.”
For historically attuned readers, crises may not seem surprising. As Mark Twain noted, history often “rhymes” rather than repeats. Even research in cliodynamics, which integrates transdisciplinary mathematical modeling to analyze historical processes, shows that periods of unrest, famine, disease, civil war, and institutional breakdown are not anomalies, but recurring patterns shaped by structural pressures such as inequality, elite competition, and institutional strain. Crises thus emerge as intrinsic rhythms in long-term social dynamics, reflecting how societies negotiate continuity and transformation (Hoyer, 2024; Koselleck and Richter, 2006).
What increasingly distinguishes the present moment, however, is not the recurrence of crisis as such, but the configuration through which crises now emerge and interact. The concept of polycrisis has gained traction precisely to capture this qualitative shift. As defined by Lawrence et al. (2022; 2024), a polycrisis refers to the causal entanglement of crises across multiple global systems in ways that generate emergent harms exceeding the cumulative effects of individual crises considered in isolation. Unlike situations in which several crises unfold .0simultaneously yet remain largely independent, a polycrisis is characterized by feedback loops, cross-domain amplification, and systemic spillovers “that significantly impact human well-being in a short period” (Kwamie et al., 2024; Lawrence et al., 2024).
Climate heating and ecological overshoot intersect with global health vulnerabilities, economic inequality, financial instability, geopolitical escalation, renewed nuclear rhetoric, and disruptive technological change – precisely the constellation of threats underscored by the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists through the Doomsday Clock metaphor. What marks the present conjuncture as distinctive, then, is not the existence of multiple crises, but the density of interdependence through which they now reinforce one another, placing existing analytical frameworks and governance capacities under sustained strain (Lähde, 2023).
The concept of polycrisis is not without contestation (Kaufman and Scott, 2003; Zaidi, 2022). Critics argue that cascading crises are not historically novel, that such framings risk obscuring long-standing vulnerabilities (particularly in the Global South) or that emphasizing complexity may inadvertently legitimize inaction (Sial, 2023; Subramanian, 2022). Others caution against what they see as apocalyptic neologisms, calling instead for simpler language and more targeted solutions (Kluth, 2023). These critiques are important and expose the conceptual limits of the term, underscoring the need for reflexivity and analytical restraint.
Nevertheless, the relevance of polycrisis as an analytical framework rests on two conditions that meaningfully distinguish the contemporary moment: the extreme density of global hyperconnectivity and the extent to which human activity is transgressing planetary boundaries (Homer-Dixon, 2023; Lawrence, 2024). Together, these dynamics intensify the speed, scale, and reach of disruption, complicating efforts at containment and coordination. In this sense, polycrisis functions less as a claim to absolute novelty than as a heuristic device that foregrounds interaction, systemic architecture, and the political consequences of unmanaged complexity, fostering resilience under the pressure of a ticking clock (Lawrence, 2024; Lawrence et al., 2024; Rakowski et al., 2025).
Under such conditions, crises no longer unfold as discrete events but as mutually reinforcing processes whose scale and velocity often exceed existing mechanisms of governance. Although societies do learn from past crises and develop new forms of knowledge, regulation, and institutional capacity, such learning remains uneven, non-linear, and constrained by entrenched power relations and institutional path dependencies. The result is not an absence of progress, but a persistent asymmetry between humanity’s expanding capacity to generate disruption and its more limited ability to govern that disruption ethically and politically.
Recognizing this condition demands more than retrospective explanation or descriptive diagnosis. It calls for engagement with the present as a field of intervention. It is precisely here that International Relations – and as this article argues, scholarship oriented toward peace – assumes renewed significance: not only to interpret the dynamics of crisis and structural change, but to contest their reproduction and articulate alternative pathways through which instability might be transformed rather than merely endured.
International Relations on/of Crisis
If crises are understood as structurally significant moments rather than episodic disturbances, then International Relations (IR) becomes indispensable as the field through which such moments are rendered intelligible – be it to the academia, be it to the broader audience. IR’s distinctive contribution lies in its capacity to uncover underlying patterns, interconnections, and leverage points within global systems, transforming apparent chaos into knowledge that can be interpreted and acted upon. Early IR scholarship already recognized that inadequate political responses often originate not in ignorance, but in conceptual failure. McCormick’s (1978) insistence on definitional rigor demonstrated that crises are not self-evident events, but analytically constructed thresholds. For a situation to qualify as an international crisis, perceptual stress among decision-makers must coincide with observable shifts in international interaction, allowing IR to distinguish routine turbulence from genuinely destabilizing ruptures.
Building on this concern with identification, subsequent scholarship turned to explaining how political behavior changes once crises emerge. Phillips and Rimkunas (1978) emphasized that crises represent points of discontinuity in which political systems shift abruptly into emergency modes, foregrounding perceived threat as the key driver of escalation and highlighting the asymmetry between escalation and de-escalation. Brecher’s (1979) stress– coping–choice framework complemented this approach by showing how time pressure and value threats reshape information processing and decision-making under stress. Together, these contributions established a central IR insight: crises generate political environments governed by logics distinct from those of routine international politics.
Later scholarship then expanded this analysis by situating crises within deeper systemic transformations. Ahmed’s (2011) intervention is particularly relevant for this article. Rather than rejecting classical crisis theory, he exposed its limits when detached from the structural conditions that generate recurrent stress. By tracing the interaction of climate change, resource depletion, economic instability, and geopolitical competition within a single political–economic system, Ahmed challenged IR to move beyond event-focused analysis toward a diagnosis of systemic disequilibrium. He further warned that without such a shift, crises are likely to be securitized, producing responses that intensify violence, social polarization, and ecological degradation. This argument appears increasingly relevant amid renewed hard-security logics in 2024, with global military spending surpassing US$2.7 trillion. For Ahmed, IR’s task thus extends beyond crisis management to the interpretation of crises at the civilizational level.
Taken together, these contributions reveal IR as a connective discipline linking perception to behavior, events to structures, and short-term responses to long-term consequences. McCormick establishes the analytical threshold at which a crisis begins; Phillips, Rimkunas, and Brecher explain what happens once it is crossed; and Ahmed situates these dynamics within broader systemic trajectories. Rather than competing approaches, they form a layered architecture of analysis operating across temporal and spatial scales.
The challenge posed by the polycrisis is whether IR can extend this capacity beyond discrete crises toward conditions of sustained systemic instability. Without definitional rigor, crises dissolve into rhetorical excess; without behavioral models, decision-making under stress remains opaque; without systemic critique, responses risk reproducing the very conditions that generate instability. Lawrence’s (2024) framing of the present as a prolonged interregnum captures this shift, emphasizing not only the frequency of shocks but the interaction between slow-moving stresses and sudden triggers that generate cascading effects across borders and sectors.
Peñín (2024) deepens this diagnosis by situating the polycrisis within the logic of Complex Adaptive Systems, where instability emerges as a property of non-linearity, feedback loops, and uncertainty. This perspective challenges traditional rationalist assumptions, shifting IR’s task from prediction to identifying patterns of vulnerability and escalation. Brosig (2025), however, offers an important corrective by resisting deterministic readings of complexity. While acknowledging entanglement, he insists on bounded crises and the persistence of agency, foregrounding leadership decisions, institutional constraints, and partial self-organization. For IR, this is a crucial corrective: complexity does not negate responsibility or intervention but demands more precise accounts of where and how agency operates under conditions of constraint.
Together, these perspectives converge on a shared implication: the polycrisis does not diminish the relevance of International Relations but intensifies it. Yet this renewed centrality also exposes the limits of IR’s traditional focus. If the polycrisis is defined by the interaction of ecological, economic, social, and security breakdowns, then peace can no longer be treated narrowly as the absence of war or bare-minimum accordance. It must instead be approached as a multidimensional and normative project encompassing justice, sustainability, regeneration, and common security.
It is precisely here that the value – and necessity – of Peace Studies, both within and beyond International Relations, comes sharply into focus in the context of the polycrisis.
Peace (Studies) in an Age of Polycrisis
Peace Studies itself emerges as a product of crisis. As a scholarly field, it took shape after the Second World War and during the early Cold War, when industrialized violence and nuclear weapons revealed the inadequacy of state-centric approaches to international order. Like International Relations more broadly, Peace Studies was institutionalized in response to an existential rupture, yet it placed peace (not war, security, or balance of power) at the center of its analytical and normative concerns.
Early peace research confronted global annihilation by asking not how wars might be won or deterred, but how violence itself could be rendered obsolete (Pureza, 2011; Whitehead, 2013). This was not naïve idealism but a critical effort to rethink the conditions under which violence is produced and sustained. Peace Studies thus positioned itself as both a critique of mainstream International Relations and a recovery of concerns marginalized by orthodoxies of mainstream IR debates.
Its relevance within International Relations rests on reconceptualizing peace and violence. Drawing on the distinction between negative peace (the absence of direct violence) and positive peace as the presence of justice, equality, and fulfilment of basic needs, the field expands the analytical horizon of International Relations (Aji and Indrawan, 2019; Whitehead, 2013). Concepts of structural and cultural violence reveal harm embedded in institutions and social norms, highlighting drivers of instability such as environmental degradation, socioeconomic precarity, and systemic injustice, which remain peripheral in mainstream security-focused analyses.
What distinguishes Peace Studies is its explicit normative and epistemological stance. Rather than aspiring to value-neutral observation, it affirms peace as both an ethical horizon and a practical project. Guzmán’s notion of saber hacer las paces (“knowing how to build peace”) captures this shift: peace is relational, communicative, and learnable through recognition, participation, and solidarity (Guzmán, 2000). Critical genealogies decenter the state, prioritize human security, and foreground everyday harm, offering a human-centered alternative to elite-driven accounts of international order (Richmond, 2010).
Critical engagement is necessary to avoid reproducing blind spots. As Pureza and Richmond note, the field’s emancipatory vocabulary is vulnerable to co-optation within the liberal peacebuilding consensus, where peace becomes a technocratic project rather than a transformative social process (Pureza, 2011; Richmond, 2010). These tensions underscore the need to reclaim its critical edge against institutional domestication.
These limitations do not negate the insight that peace remains foundational, especially amid systemic crises. They reinforce the urgency of reclaiming peace as a plural, contested, and critical project. In an international context marked by overlapping breakdowns and chronic instability, re-centering peace is not idealism, but essential for addressing the political, ethical, and structural dimensions of global crisis.
The notion of polycrisis is particularly salient here. It denotes not merely the convergence of disruptions but the intensification of conditions systematically undermining peace. Ecological breakdown, inequality, political fragmentation, epistemic instability, and proliferating violence generate cascading effects across scales (Oxford, Perz and Schultz, 2023; Ruwanpura, Cederlöf and Ramasar, 2025). This threatens human survival, erodes coexistence, and normalizes structural and slow violence largely invisible in dominant narratives. It also exposes the limits of liberal peace architectures (Mac Ginty, 2025; Richmond, 2025).
Peace Studies offers a suitable lens for engaging the polycrisis because it rejects linear, siloed understandings of violence and order. Crises are seen as relational, historically sedimented, and structurally produced, aligning with accounts of the polycrisis as emergent from interacting systems (Oxford, Perz and Schultz, 2023). By foregrounding structural and cultural violence, it reveals how environmental degradation, dispossession, hierarchies, and exclusion are interlocking expressions of a global order that privileges some lives over others. Decolonial interventions further sharpen this analysis by demonstrating how dominant (liberal) polycrisis narratives often reproduce epistemic asymmetries, universalizing Northern experiences of instability while marginalizing Southern histories of chronic crisis (Ruwanpura, Cederlöf and Ramasar, 2025).
The contribution of critically engaged Peace Studies then lies in reconnecting violence to everyday life, governance, and the global economy. Concepts such as positive peace, human security, hybridity, counter-peace and the international peace architecture (IPA) shift analysis from events to how harm is normalized through institutions, markets, and security practices (Björkdahl et al., 2025; Mac Ginty, 2025; Richmond, Pogodda and Visoka, 2023). This equips International Relations to interrogate not only the causes of polycrisis but the unintended, often violent consequences of prevailing crisis governance.
Beyond diagnosis, Peace Studies contributes normative and practical orientations essential for navigating the polycrisis without succumbing to either technocratic optimism or fatalistic realism. Central among these is the insistence on relationality: peace is not a fixed outcome, but an ongoing process of negotiating coexistence under inequality, difference, and uncertainty (Oxford, Perz and Schultz, 2023; O’Neill, 2021). This foregrounds participatory, dialogical, context-sensitive engagement while acknowledging structural and multi-scalar dynamics.
Together, these insights highlight the necessity of situating Peace Studies at the core of International Relations, especially in these present days. It does not offer a blueprint for overcoming polycrisis but proposes that peace is inseparable from justice and sustainability; that crisis governance must be scrutinized for the violence it conceals; and that political responses must be grounded in relational ethics rather than managerial control. Maintaining a peace-oriented perspective is neither sentimental nor escapist. It is a disciplined commitment to preserving coexistence, dignity, and collective survival amid increasingly fragile conditions.
Conclusion
As this article was being finalized, global leaders gathered at the 2026 World Economic Forum Annual Meeting to confront a world increasingly defined by systemic instability. In a statement that resonates closely with the diagnoses explored here, Canada’s Prime Minister Mark Carney stated bluntly: “The old order is not coming back” (World Economic Forum, 2026). What he described was not a temporary disruption, but an ongoing rupture of what once underpinned the rules-based international order.
Carney’s warning echoes the logic of the Doomsday Clock with political clarity: a world in which geopolitical interaction is increasingly unconstrained, multilateralism is fragile, and interdependence is weaponized. His insistence that “nostalgia is not a strategy” speaks directly to the condition of the polycrisis, in which ecological collapse, social inequality, political fragmentation, and epistemic instability no longer appear as separate challenges but as mutually reinforcing dynamics (Oxford, Perz and Schultz, 2023; Ruwanpura, Cederlöf and Ramasar, 2025).
Read together, the Doomsday Clock and Carney’s Davos address illuminate the same condition from different angles. One offers a scientific-symbolic diagnosis of accumulated risk; the other articulates its political meaning in real time. Both underscore the exhaustion of inherited frameworks and the inadequacy of siloed, technocratic, or purely security-oriented responses to crises that are relational, systemic, and deeply normative in nature (Björkdahl et al., 2025; Mac Ginty, 2025; O’Neill, 2021).
It is precisely here that International Relations encounters both its challenge and its responsibility. As argued throughout this article, while International Relations provides the analytical space to render the polycrisis intelligible, it is Peace Studies that offers the conceptual and normative resources necessary to navigate it. By insisting on the inseparability of peace, justice, and regeneration, and by foregrounding relationality, participation, and critical ethical responsibility, Peace Studies exposes the violences reproduced by the polycrisis while pointing toward more humane and resilient pathways forward.
In an age defined by cascading and compounding crises, peace can no longer remain a peripheral, collateral or aspirational concern. It must function as a central organizing principle for rethinking order, responsibility, and collective survival within International Relations. This commitment is neither sentimental nor symbolic. It is grounded in a profoundly human imperative: to preserve coexistence, dignity, and the capacity for ethical action when established rules no longer hold.
Again, Peace Studies does not offer a blueprint for overcoming the polycrisis. What it offers instead is a critical orientation that refuses to treat survival, justice, and sustainability as separable objectives. While the concept of the polycrisis itself must remain open to scrutiny, it retains significant value as a framework for understanding the present. If the Doomsday Clock continues to inch toward midnight, the task before International Relations is not merely to interpret the countdown, but to help imagine and enact forms of peace capable of interrupting it.
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Further Reading on E-International Relations
