Polycrisis Observatory
Polycrisis pathway

Strand 3 · Philological genealogy

Words travel, and their histories intersect

Languages bring different aspects of crises into view. Translation brings terms together, while philological inquiry restores earlier uses and their contexts.

Krisis: judging, separating, discerning

Mikael Mesnil Duprat’s genealogy follows the field of judgment and separation associated with Greek krisis. A sieve offers an image: before diagnosis comes sorting, distinguishing, and examining. In “Pour une crisologie,” Morin recalls the sense of decision and the moment of diagnosis, then shows how modern use has accumulated uncertainty. Texts and usages should remain tied to their philological context.

This word history sheds light on Morin’s reflection on crisis and diagnosis. It also raises a question: how can a diagnosis be made when the available categories are themselves under scrutiny?

Follow this development in Morin’s texts on the genealogy page.

Japan: Fukugō kiki (複合危機)

Fukugō kiki is a Japanese expression for “composite crisis.” It offers a way to examine how crises of different kinds combine. As “polycrisis” circulates internationally, Japanese institutions and media also use the phonetic katakana form porikuraishisu (ポリクライシス).

The coexistence of these terms invites attention to their uses and contexts. A contemporary institutional translation does not, by itself, summarize the earlier history of Japanese vocabulary.

China: several linguistic framings

Xìtǒngxìng wēijī (系统性危机)
Systemic crisis, used in particular to consider market contagion and risks associated with systems.
Fùhé wēijī (复合危机)
Composite crisis, used to describe the entanglement of crises of different kinds, including in pandemic contexts.
Duōchóng wēijī (多重危机)
Multiple crises or polycrisis in contemporary discussions of changes in the world order.

These expressions are not interchangeable by default. Their translation calls for attention to who uses them, in which field, and at what time.

Wēijī (危机): latent risk and the trigger

In this pathway, the crossbow serves as a metaphor: tension accumulates, then a trigger releases some of the stored energy. It helps describe how a brief hazard can activate a latent crisis or intensify another one.

This image is an analytical tool for thinking about risk. It is not a literal translation of wēijī and does not summarize the term’s Chinese uses. To connect it with timescales and hazards, see Timescales, triggers, and latent crises.

Three philological questions

  1. Which form is attested? Distinguish the original term, its transcription, and its editorial translation.
  2. When and in which domain? A use in journalism, scholarly work, and institutional translation do not establish the same thing.
  3. What relation is being claimed? Lexical equivalence alone does not establish historical lineage or conceptual identity.

For krisis, the sieve makes visible a prior act of sorting before diagnosis. For fukugō kiki, the history of the Japanese compound and its contemporary adoption as a translation of polycrisis should be dated separately. For Chinese terms, distinguishing systemic crisis, composite crisis, and multiple crises helps avoid projecting a single category onto different contexts.

On wēijī: the crossbow metaphor describes a risk structure here: accumulated tension followed by a trigger. It connects word history with timescale analysis while remaining explicitly an analytical metaphor.

Markers in Japanese and Chinese usage

Mikael Mesnil Duprat’s genealogy traces several histories in parallel. These markers show shifts in usage; they do not establish a single origin for the concept.

  1. Japan · 複合危機

    Fukugō kiki is a natural Japanese construction attested before its recent institutional adoption as a translation of “polycrisis.” The katakana form ポリクライシス (porikuraishisu) also circulates as the term internationalizes.

  2. China · 系统性危机

    Following the financial crises of 1997 and 2008, the systemic-crisis lens focuses especially on economic and financial contagion.

  3. China · 复合危机

    The pandemic, supply-chain disruptions, and logistics shocks bring a vocabulary of composite crisis into clearer view across health, economic, and social phenomena.

  4. China · 多重危机

    “Multiple crises” or “polycrisis” appears in discourse on the reordering of the world, often linked with the “unprecedented changes in a century” formulation.

This timeline summarizes the corpora examined in the preprint. For a specific occurrence, consult its cited reference and linguistic context.

Sources and further reading

Japanese and Chinese forms are presented as historical and contemporary usages documented in the genealogical research. Each occurrence should be tied to its source, date, and domain.