Polyconflict is my replacement for polycrisis. It names conflicts that are intertwined, structural and open-ended, with real parties and real stakes, which you can't manage back to equilibrium. You have to trace them commodity by commodity.
How the word moved
In Feb 2025 I made the case in a sidebar: conflicts are ongoing power struggles, while the word crisis assumes we'll return to stability. In Jun 2025 I applied it to the Israel-Iran war, where nuclear risk, climate and authoritarianism came tangled together.
By Mar 2026 it had become a case method. I traced helium, metformin and firewood node by node and stole from Tolstoy: every unhappy dispute is unhappy in its own way. In Apr 2026 I went further and called AI the mother of all polyconflicts.
In my words
"Unlike crises, conflicts are not disruptions that demand resolution but ongoing power struggles that shape the world order."
from Bhumics Sidebar: From Polycrisis to Polyconflict, 25 Feb 2025
"The faster India tries to escape the first conflict, the deeper it wades into the second."
from The Pauper: Polyconflicts are back., 20 Mar 2026
"AI is the mother of all polyconflicts."
from Cognitive Sovereignty, 7 May 2026
Related
- Depends on Interregnum - polyconflict is the condition of the interregnum.
- Contradicts Polycrisis - I defined it against polycrisis.
- Related Bad Intersectionality - polyconflicts seek out a society's deepest fault lines.
- Related Three Metabolisms - the India essay reads polyconflict through three coupled metabolisms.
- Related Cognitive Sovereignty - the AI polyconflict got recast as cognitive sovereignty.
- Related Pauper - the frame lends the Pauper urgency.
- Related Earthworm View - you need an embedded view to see a polyconflict at all.
Still open
I don't think there's an overarching frame that explains all polyconflicts. At least not yet.