Working with/in crises: More questions than answers?

Abstract

This essay is the outcome of a 2025 AAG panel on crises that raised issues such as: is crisis the norm, is crisis a useful analytical frame and are we living through exceptional times? Seeking to avoid prognostication, my response provides some answers while provoking additional questions. Political economy insights are summarized for their different views on analyzing crises (from polycrisis and longwave approaches to monocausal materialism) and early/mid-2025 political developments are engaged for what at this juncture may be promising avenues for urban and economic geography (on hegemony and legitimization, economic nationalism and left politics, and deep history).

Addressing the University of Cape Town in 1966, Robert F. Kennedy claimed ‘there is a Chinese curse which says, “May he live in interesting times.” Like it or not, we live in interesting times. They are times of danger and uncertainty; but they are also the most creative of any time in the history of mankind’ (Kennedy, 1966). Fast forward six decades and we too appear to being living through ‘interesting’ times characterized by turbulence, instability, crisis and change along multiple, often dizzying, axes of political-economic development. Established trends face significant challenges as we enter the second quarter of the 21st century. While these might be considered ‘creative’ times as well with advances in artificial intelligence, the implications of machine learning are provoking profound uncertainties of their own.

Meeting at the 2025 AAG annual conference in Detroit a little over a decade after the city's bankruptcy, it is obvious that crisis can mean many things – not all of which include collapse, though most of which entail reorganization and tumult. This essay is the outcome of an AAG panel that asked questions such as: are we living through exceptional times; is crisis the norm; is ‘crisis’ a useful analytical frame? My response aims to provoke more questions than the answers it provides. First, the essay will engage political economy insights for different approaches to analyzing crises. Next, it will comment on what these literatures and recent (early/mid-2025) political developments might say about questions for political economy going forward, including new avenues for urban and economic geography. The discussion kicks off with a quick tour of different ways of understanding ‘crisis’.

Crisis as amorphic & unexpected

In a 2022 piece for the Financial Times, Adam Tooze resuscitated the term ‘polycrisis’ to capture what we have all been feeling: that the world has grown far more chaotic, and that there seem to be problems on all fronts – from pandemic era health concerns to supply chain disruptions, inflation, the existential doom of climate instability mixed with revived geopolitical aggression, a shifting global order, the rise of populism and Trump's unique approach to economic nationalism, along with myriad other multiple, compounding and destabilizing crises (Tooze, 2022). The polycrisis concept has since been picked up by scholars across multiple disciplines (e.g. Helleiner, 2024; Henig and Knight, 2023; Lawrence et al., 2024). The Financial Times was especially keen, featuring articles such as a November 2022 opinion piece on the polycrisis and corporate executive pay (Thomas, 2022), an ambiguously hopeful piece on ‘poly-innovation’ to match polycrisis (Kuper, 2023), and a New Year's Day, 2023, article arguing that ‘polycrisis’ summed up the previous ‘year in a word’ (Derbyshire, 2023). As this melange suggests, there is an exuberance for ‘polycrisis’ in the current conjuncture that could itself be subject to proper academic study.

Whereas previous eras have seen their share of crises too – World Wars, global pandemics, financial crashes, mass migration, intense weather events, changes in world order and religious politics – Tooze (2022) argues that things are different this time: ‘In the 1970s, whether you were a Eurocommunist, an ecologist or an angst-ridden conservative, you could still attribute your worries to a single cause’ [insert: capitalism] but, ‘what makes the crises of the past 15 years so disorienting is that it no longer seems plausible to point to a single cause and, by implication, a single fix’. In a rejoinder published a month later, economist Martin Wolf (2022) accepted this interpretation of crisis whilst nevertheless arguing that for policy makers, polycrisis requires systematic, not siloed, analysis.

By brushing aside structural connections, the polycrisis concept runs the risk of being less an approach to understanding crisis than it is a depoliticizing catchall. Polycrisis shares with neoclassical economics a sense that crises are exogenous, random and unpredictable. We ignore structural connections to capitalism at our peril, mystifying the crises that beset us today, with confusion leveraged as opportunity. In Capitalism and Freedom, Milton Friedman (2002, xiv) famously wrote, ‘Only a crisis – actual or perceived – produces real change. When that crisis occurs, the actions that are taken depend on the ideas that are lying around. That, I believe, is our basic function: to develop alternatives to existing policies, to keep them alive and available until the politically impossible becomes politically inevitable’. By framing crises as unexpected, chaotic, unpredictable and amorphic it is only a short leap to the depoliticization that excuses deleterious policies (like those advocated by Friedman), which might otherwise face more focused resistance.

That said, Helleiner (2025: 232–233) indicates fruitful scholarly ways of working with a multi-dimensional concept of crisis given that ‘international finance has been mobilised for very different purposes in [distinct] crisis’ periods, challenging any ‘monocausal explanatory framework’. Such an assessment indicates concerns that could be tracked by financial geographers regarding the prospects of a looming financial crisis through a number of routes: the 2025 Trump administration activities that are undermining confidence in US Treasuries, attacking the independence of the US Federal Reserve, encouraging lax regulation of crypto currencies, inciting tariff chaos leading to an erosion of investor confidence, and heightening the risk of war.

Crisis as regular & predictable

In contrast to the open array offered by the polycrisis approach, another leading view on crisis is to be found in the well-known aphorism that Marxists have predicted 19 of the past 3 crises. For Marxists, crisis is inherent to capitalism because capitalism is beset by contradictions to its very core. David Harvey (2001: 79–80) describes three central contradictions within the capitalist mode of production that can be expected to produce periodic crises: the capitalist class is locked into competitive profit-seeking behaviour; labour-capital antagonisms manifest as class struggle; and conflicts arise from the impact of capitalist production on non-capitalist sectors. For these historical materialists, the underlying cause of crisis is located squarely in overaccumulation, the very same ‘monocausal’ understanding chided by the polycrisis approach. Perhaps ultimately this poly versus monocausal crisis dichotomy will resolve as all such social science debates tend to: synthesis, reconciliation or neglect.

Beyond Marxism, critical crisis theory takes several forms, longwave theories being perhaps best suited to distinguish patterns or regularities of crises as opposed to identifying the extraordinary unique details within each crisis. Longwave economic theories hold that capitalism routinely moves through phases of long-term development with periods of relative growth and predictability followed by instability and stagnation. These dynamics present themselves in various timeframes, with some cycles being hundreds of years long, while others last for decades or years. Examples include Regulation theory's exhaustion of regime of accumulation/mode of regulation compatibility (Boyer and Saillard, 1995); the Social Structure of Accumulation view that crisis results from the breakdown of the institutional arrangements necessary for stability and prosperity (Kotz et al., 1994); Brenner (2006) on intra-capitalist competition manifesting as a long downturn; and Arrighi (1994) on cycles of accumulation over the longue durée, influenced by Braudel's (1985) work on phases of hegemonic transition.

If polycrisis suffers from the prospects of depoliticization, the quasi-scientific predictions of longwave theories might be said to swap agency for structure in less than satisfying ways. Materialist longwave theories might have confidentially diagnosed the problems in capitalism and its associated instabilities but that still leaves a wide field of social life beyond its grasp. Marxist feminists like Nancy Fraser (2014) provide additional tools to understand capitalism through the lenses of economic production, social reproduction and polity. Yet theories of capitalist crisis nevertheless require the researcher to either ignore or delve into messy social and political life, with political economy all too often eliding the intricacies and historically and spatially specific nature of how crises are experienced. Urban and human geography are well positioned to build out the longwave narrative through attention to the lived environment. The vicissitudes of wandering polycrisis or crushing inevitabilities of cyclical structural forces are somewhat academic when ‘crisis’ is experienced viscerally as a way of life.

Crisis as existential & catastrophic

The Luddite Club is not what you think. If The New York Times (Garcia-Navarro et al., 2023) were one's only source of information, the Luddite movement would look like teenagers ready to throw caution to the wind by trading their 2020s era smart phones for vintage 2000s era flip phones. The Luddite Club should instead resonate with activists and protestors putting their freedom and lives on the line through acts of violent protest. The original Luddites were members of a 19th century movement of English textile workers who wrecked the specific types of industrial machinery that posed a terminal threat to ways of life in particular regions. In the Midlands, it was the knitting frames used to make cheap lace. In the North West, weavers opposed the steam-powered looms threatening wages in the cotton trade. In Yorkshire, it was the shearing frames used to finish wool cloth.

The Luddite movement teaches that resistance to catastrophe is just one side of the coin, ‘crises’ are often the overt product of repression. Twelve thousand government troops were called on to suppress Luddite activity. Historian Eric Hobsbawm (1952) calculates that this is a larger number than the British army led by Wellington during the Peninsular War. Two centuries later, in May 2025, roughly 8000 US active duty troops had been deployed to the Mexican border to quash migrant mobility once and for all (Robertson, 2025). In June, 2025, 6000 National Guard and active duty Maines were deployed to bolster Immigration and Customs Enforcement raids in Los Angeles (BBC, 2025). One could look for polycrisis multiplicity in assessing the existential threat posed by catastrophic change; one could equally trace these developments to sputtering American capital accumulation. For urban and political geography, the insights of theory and episodes of crisis suggest questions for future research, including: whither hegemony and left politics, and what of history as a guide?

How to understand crises without reference to hegemony or legitimization?

Beyond the approaches already mentioned, studies of international politics and the state offer multiple crisis theories, ranging from neorealist stability theory to liberal compromise, ascribing importance to ‘hegemony’ (variously defined) as key to a stable order, and ‘legitimation’ as a core function of the capitalist state. Whether traced through Antonio Gramsci (1971), John Ruggie (1982) or Charles Kindleberger (1986), expressed as Pax Americana, the Keynesian welfare state, or the Bretton Woods agreement, stability in production, finance, trade, international organizations and the military order, are to some degree the outcome of political norms, rules and concessions. In Marxian state theory, the political apparatus is said to not only support capital accumulation, it also crucially provides legitimation to avoid crisis, contention, and, ultimately, a rupture in capitalism (Jessop, 1977; O’Connor, 1973; Panitch, 1977; Whiteside and McBride, 2025). Even archliberals like Adam Smith and Friedrich Hayek laid out foundational roles for the state in capitalism. Whatever the ideological significance ascribed to the political system, the state in some measure negotiates the antagonisms and class conflicts inherent to a capitalist political economy.

To the extent that ‘crisis’ now involves greater coercive repression, and the range of concessions or public goods on offer is dwindling, political geographies start looking a lot less Lockean and a lot more Hobbesian through the suppression of dissent and infringements on even narrow forms of bourgeois democracy. If the crises wrought by the Trump administration faced an initial, if short lived, hostile reception by defenders of the rules based international order in early 2025 (de Guzman, 2025; Lopez Steven 2025), flattery and appeasement soon followed as the leading mid-2025 strategy to contain the ever-looming possibility of chaos in international relations (Este, 2025; Gawthorpe, 2025). For those of us not already doing so, a post-hegemonic phase calls for thinking way beyond liberal-capitalist categories by connecting to insights from sociologists or anthropologists studying mafia crime networks and irregular warfare, or the birth of psychology amid Victorian anxieties.

Left politics and the national question?

US global tariffs and the retaliatory measures witnessed by countries around the world in 2025 have added new national-local scale political dynamics to an urban geography research agenda. When Trump writes on Truth Social that he aims to crush the Canadian auto sector (Atkins and Rendell, 2025), the implications are not limited to Windsor and Hamilton, they clearly stretch to Detroit and Dearborn. The Canada-US Big 3 auto sector has been integrated for almost 100 years, not only over the neoliberal period or through NAFTA. Tariffs started coming down in the 1930s, crystallized in the Canada-US AutoPact of 1965. And when the Trump administration threatens the annexation of Canada, Greenland and the Panama Canal, and the Democracy Report (Angiolillo et al., 2025) puts America on its autocratic watch list, nationalisms of all stripes come to light.

America's neighbour to the north quickly took up a ‘Buy Canadian’ response to American tariffs in early 2025. Patriotic nationalism expressed through ‘elbows up’ style discourse equally revived the prospects for more localized forms of global production that first emerged during the 2020 pandemic border closures and were extended through Biden era ‘friendshoring’ discourse. For the labour movement, in an egregious violation of international labour solidarity, the United Auto Workers came out in support of Trump's 2025 tariff strategy (Charniga, 2025). In Canada, several leading socialist commentators have raised concern that mainstream political parties are taking advantage of insurgent patriotism by positioning themselves as the rightful leaders in the fight against Trump, but left resistance remains divided on questions of internationalism versus local-national socialist alternatives (e.g. Glasbeek, 2025; Gordon, 2025; see also McBride, 2022).

Not only should economic nationalism be part of an urban geography research agenda, so too has the tariff issue raised once more the ‘national question’ for left politics, particularly in the context of Indigenous reconciliation where annexation and dispossession are closer than distant memories (Whiteside, 2025). For those of us not already doing so, settler colonial and imperialist literatures could be more directly applied to studies of urban geography in the context of (resistance to) economic nationalism. Likewise, even within moments of crisis or tumult there is a continuity at play, a long arc of history to contemplate. The people and institutions currently tasked with resolving crises in 2025 are largely those responsible for creating the underlying problems across the neoliberal era – weak legitimation, diminished hegemony, naked coercion, perpetual dispossession and now winner-take-all economic nationalism.

‘Twas ever thus?

In War and Peace, Tolstoy (2007: 382) has Pierre say to Prince Andrei, ‘I can’t tell you how much I’ve lived through in this time. I wouldn’t recognize myself’. To which Prince Andrei replies, ‘Yes, we’ve changed very much, very much, since then’. To conclude this essay, it is worth adding to the list of animating questions on crisis: how altered are we as academics, or is the academy, by recurrent crises?

I opened the essay with a quote from Robert F. Kennedy in 1966 and it seems fitting to close the essay with one from his son, 2025 Secretary of Health and Human Services, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. who might have best captured the ‘interesting times’ facing the contemporary political news cycle by claiming, ‘A worm … got into my brain and ate a portion of it and then died’ (Craig, 2024). Beyond that stunner, RFK Jr. has famously challenged several aspects of settled science, centring on the efficacy of vaccines, the consequences of fluoride, the nature of airplane vapour and racialized immune systems. As provocative and destabilizing as conspiracy theories may be, especially when promulgated by those in positions of power, we should nevertheless remember that the scientific method itself created a crisis of doubt. Shaking a millennium of Christian norms was the heretical notion that received wisdom is not immutable. And scientific study itself was once the bastion of subversives, from Galileo to Newton and Darwin, all contributing to crises that ruptured the West's Middle Ages.

In geological science, the Earth's Middle Ages are also known as the Boring Billion. An informal time period that began roughly 1.8 billion years ago, life on this planet saw little evolutionary advancement, few climatic shifts and relative tectonic slumber. If ever one could make the argument that crisis is not the norm, it would require casting an eye to those billion years of history. The trick for political economists at this juncture is to figure out whether we are at the beginning or the end of a chaotic period. Answering that large question will turn at least in part on politics – those in power, those seeking power, those upending power. Whether regular and predictable or amorphic and unexpected, crises are also opportunities favouring some epistemic communities, seized by saviours and grifters alike. As Tucker Carlson said, ‘Happy countries don't elect Donald Trump president. Desperate ones do’ (Panetta, 2025).

Author biography

Heather Whiteside is an Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of Waterloo and a Fellow at the Balsillie School of International Affairs, Canada. She is a political economist with expertise on a wide range of interdisciplinary topics such as austerity, financialization, privatization, settler-capitalist property relations, and state capitalism.