Whether driven by conflict, climate change or natural disasters, the global crisis is more severe and widespread than ever before. Millions of people are forcibly displaced each year and living lives blighted by unsustainable, vulnerable situations. And as the world becomes more interconnected, these problems tend to converge and compound each other.
The first decade of the twenty-first century saw a number of shocks that could be characterized as global crises: the U.S. mortgage crisis, ISIS terrorist attacks, the refugee crisis following the Syrian Civil War, environmental disasters caused by climate change (e.g., Australian wildfires and South Asia floods), the COVID-19 pandemic and so on. In addition, there is increasing evidence that the frequency and severity of global crises has increased and that they cannot be resolved in isolation.
Global crises often arise from a combination of factors: incentives to take too much risk, failures to properly manage risks and regulatory weaknesses that lead to systemic vulnerabilities. Such vulnerabilities are exacerbated by a lack of cooperation and coordination between governments, financial institutions and households. Finally, a lack of effective crisis communication leads to market panic, exacerbated by rumours and heightened public anxiety over the impact of the crisis on their future financial well-being.
The societal implications of global crisis are profound. Sociopolitical trust theory suggests that individuals assign causal attributions of blame or trust to international institutions in proportion to their belief that those institutions have both the obligation and capability to respond to global crises. This is because global crises are events with a deterritorialized reach and a non-locally specified origin, and they can only be addressed by those who have both the authority and ability to act.