World
October 30, 2025
AnalysisStabilization and Speculation
Struggles over New York City’s housing policy
New York’s housing crisis—characterized by sky-high rents, extraordinary waitlists for affordable housing, and low-quality housing stock—is undeniable, and solving it calls for new policy interventions. Tenant organizations generally argue that the solution is stronger rent regulations, increased enforcement of housing maintenance codes, the right to organize, and, increasingly, public-sector ownership. Real-estate associations, on the other…
Longform
October 30, 2025
AnalysisMexico’s Big Green State
Claudia Sheinbaum plans to repurpose the country’s state-owned enterprises towards decarbonization
AMLO’s government emphasized the importance of state-owned enterprises for reviving Mexico’s energy sector. With her announced regulatory reforms, President Claudia Sheinbaum is reorienting these enterprises towards an even more ambitious purpose: decarbonization. Sheinbaum’s proposals not only have the potential to…
October 30, 2025
AnalysisA State-led Financial Empire
The rise and expansion of China’s global financial architecture
Since the 2008 Global Financial Crisis, China has steadily expanded its role in the global financial system. Through cross-border settlement networks, controlled conduits for foreign portfolio flows, and RMB-denominated funding markets, it is incrementally wiring trade, credit, and liquidity provision…
October 29, 2025
AnalysisPolicy-Constrained Growth
Government spending and economic recovery in Brazil during Lula’s third term
Despite headwinds from higher interest rates in the US and at home, the Brazilian economy is nevertheless emerging from a period of prolonged stagnation. After growing an average of 0.2 percent a year between 2015 and 2022, national growth averaged…
October 24, 2025
AnalysisSyrian Continuity
The emerging picture of Syria’s political economy
A general finding in the study of rebel politics is that groups that come to power without a clear hegemonic position within the rebel movement are vulnerable to spoilers or coups d’etat that push the country back into civil war.
October 23, 2025
AnalysisSteel Politics
Lessons from China’s rise to the forefront of global steel production
Since the 1970s, steel production across the Global North has dramatically declined. But steel remains essential to industrial development—and the Green Transition. The history of steel production in Europe and the US, as well as its contemporary rise in China,…
October 17, 2025
AnalysisState of Emergency
The consolidation of an oligarchic-neoliberal model in Ecuador
The dominance of major business groups in the Ecuador’s national politics has formed an oligarchic neoliberal model, characterized by extreme political polarization, weakened constitutional protections, and a return to indebtedness.
October 16, 2025
AnalysisGreat Power Antinomies
The AI Action Plan and the changing national-security logic
In recent months, the gradual reversal of US semi-conductor controls has triggered alarm across the national security establishment. But far from a sign of reconciliation, the move signals a transforming imperial logic: one in which American technology becomes indispensible to…
October 16, 2025
AnalysisThe State and Software Capital
Digital public infrastructure and the promise of India’s online consumer market
The Aadhaar digital identification project was launched in 2009 with the promise of eradicating corruption. Over 1.3 billion Indians today hold Aadhaar numbers, making it the world’s largest biometric ID program. Aadhaar has transformed not only state-citizen relations, but also…
India in the New Global Order
Between hydrocarbon coalitions and the green electro-state
At the Polycrisis, we’ve taken a special interest in the question of how India has been positioning itself in the new world order that has been emerging since 2022. Our inaugural essay featured India’s nonalignment in the Ukraine war as…
October 2, 2025
AnalysisBitcoin under Bukele
Remittances and the failures of El Salvador’s techno-utopian economy
Earlier this year, El Salvador quietly put an end to its infamous “Bitcoin experiment.” In an economy dependent on remittances from the US, the project promoted the adoption of crytocurrencies under a financial inclusion framework. But it was ultimately unable…
Shortform
November 7, 2025
AnalysisNew Dilemmas
Agriculture, inflation, and dependence in Brazil
With food prices sparking unrest in the so-called “breadbasket of the world,” what are the structural trends behind their perpetual rise?
October 24, 2025
AnalysisEconomic Resilience
Iran’s economy in the aftermath of the June bombing
Years of international isolation and sanctions have prompted Iran to structure its economy to survive various kinds of onslaught. Though it remains exposed to further interruption, Iran’s economy has proven itself resilient in the face of Israel’s campaign. What explains…
September 19, 2025
InterviewsThe Belt and Road 2.0
An interview with Mathias Larsen on China’s overseas clean-tech manufacturing investments
Chinese firms are going out. As the US withdraws from green tech industries and pressures its allies to follow suit, Chinese companies are stepping in to power the developing world’s green transition—at a staggering scale.
September 11, 2025
AnalysisLoosening the Markets
Los Angeles housing in the age of incentive-driven development
Rather than new housing driving down market rents, development in the “affordable housing” market replaces below-market units with market-rate rentals. With market rents unchanged, “filtering” tenants by price most reliably excludes them from the city altogether.
Insurance in the Polycrisis
The future is triage on an uninsurable earth
In April, a senior European insurance executive warned in a viral LinkedIn post that climate change threatened his industry’s existence and, in turn, capitalism itself. “Flooded homes lose value. Overheated cities become uninhabitable. Entire asset classes are degrading in real…
August 14, 2025
AnalysisCoordinating Tamil Nadu
How India’s southernmost state transformed into a global manufacturing hub
Amid India’s grand ambitions for manufacturing growth, Tamil Nadu stands out as an outlier. The state ranks first in the number of factories in the country and accounts for one out of every seven manufacturing jobs in the country. Tamil…
After Seville
COP30 in Belém
The fourth UN Financing for Development conference, which concluded in Seville earlier this month, was a high-stakes event. The climate crisis is accelerating while climate commitments are weakening; official development assistance is shrinking while debt service is eviscerating poor countries’…
Beyond Neoliberalism?
In search of programs, strategies, and coalitions for a new world order
The globalization that defined the neoliberal period was imagined at a remove from the material world: weightless supply chains composed of transparent logistics networks, just-in-time production and delivery amounting to a seamless world of efficiency and complexity. Neoliberalism’s crisis of…
July 10, 2025
InterviewsCommon Characteristics
An interview with Xiaoyang Tang on China and the global South
As Sino-African economic cooperation reached global attention at the beginning of the twenty-first century, Xiaoyang Tang was among the first to do field work in the region. In an interview with PW’s Maria Sikorski, he talks about China’s approach to…
BRICS in 2025
Two energy systems and development models compete for primacy within the group
Within the BRICS group, two competing global models of energy, growth, and influence. The future of the world’s majority will be decided by the pace of the contest between green technologies and fossil fuels.
Read all articles
The Trump administration’s drastic shift on the US’s approach to the war in Ukraine has unleashed a reckoning about European power—its internal fissures and path dependencies, its security guarantee from the United States, and its freedom of movement on the world diplomatic stage. Three pieces from the archive mine enduring political fractures regarding Europe and its place in the twenty-first century.
An interview with Marta Castilho on the EU–Mercosur trade agreement
Editor’s Note: Amidst talk of a new protectionism, trade volumes and their regulation continue to expand and shape new political configurations. In December 2024, the EU and Mercosur concluded a decades-long negotiation process on a bi-regional trade agreement. In an interview, Marta Castilho discusses the agreement’s potential consequences for European markets and South American industry.
On Fritz Bartel’s The Triumph of Broken Promises
Editor’s Note: Historian Fritz Bartel argues that the success of the North Atlantic capitalist world in the ending of the Cold War was contingent on their superior ability to break democratic promises and rewrite their social contracts. Reviewing Bartel’s book, Max Krahe asks: what kind of politics will emerge as the era of broken promises enters its own period of disintegration?
What’s at stake in the fiscal rules debate?
Editor’s Note: Any shift in Europe’s coordination and military expenditures would mark a sea change from the unequal and austere status quo of the continent’s fiscal politics. Kate Mackenzie and Tim Sahay explain the persistent paralysis from the point of view of climate coordination.
Series
Series are collections of works published by Phenomenal World on a single subject or area of research. Series are commissioned to analyze particular issues or historical moments, and are either ongoing projects or collected as one-time volumes.
The Polycrisis is a monthly newsletter on geopolitics and climate, by Tim Sahay and Kate Mackenzie. Follow us on Bluesky, LinkedIn, and Twitter.
India in the New Global Order
Between hydrocarbon coalitions and the green electro-state
At the Polycrisis, we’ve taken a special interest in the question of how India has been positioning itself in the new world order that has been emerging since 2022. Our inaugural essay featured India’s nonalignment in the Ukraine war as…
Insurance in the Polycrisis
The future is triage on an uninsurable earth
In April, a senior European insurance executive warned in a viral LinkedIn post that climate change threatened his industry’s existence and, in turn, capitalism itself. “Flooded homes lose value. Overheated cities become uninhabitable. Entire asset classes are degrading in real…