On January 27th, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists revealed the 2026 setting of the Doomsday Clock, its long-standing attempt to communicate how close humanity stands to self-inflicted catastrophe. Designed to synthesize risks ranging from nuclear weapons and climate disruption to biosecurity threats and destabilizing technologies, the Clock distils a year of accelerating global dangers into a single, unsettling image: the shrinking distance between the present and midnight. Since 2010, when it was set at “six minutes to midnight”, the trajectory has been unambiguously downward. Cooperative frameworks have eroded, unresolved systemic pressures have accumulated, and the Clock has advanced steadily from minutes to seconds. For comparison, the Clock stood at “two minutes to midnight” in 1953 amid nuclear fears from the Cold War. That threshold has now been surpassed since 2020. 

Considering the present, given the accumulation of disruptive developments since the start of this year, layered upon unresolved risks identified in previous reports, it should not come as a surprise that yet another “tick” of the Clock toward midnight. Recently, the Bulletin moved the Clock to 85 seconds before midnight, the most perilous setting in its 79-year history (Mecklin, 2026). This shift reflects not only the proliferation of discrete threats, but a widening gap between humanity’s capacity to generate disruption and its ability to govern that disruption responsibly. Considering the present moment, marked by the accumulation of destabilizing developments since the start of the year, layered upon unresolved risks identified in previous reports, it should come as little surprise that the Clock has advanced yet another “tick” toward midnight.

Indifference is scarcely possible. Whether through urgency or resignation, a shared question emerges: what are we to do? This article argues that answering this question requires more than improved crisis management or updated security doctrines. In an international context shaped by what is increasingly conceptualized as a polycrisis – concept that captures the Doomsday Clock’s warning not as the sum of multiple threats, but as the systemic interaction of overlapping crises that erode humanity’s capacity to govern itself away from catastrophe – the relevance of International Relations depends on its ability to re-center a foundational concern that has been progressively marginalized: peace.

Here, I argue that re-centering peace within International Relations is not an exercise in idealism, but a necessary condition for grappling seriously with the political, ethical, and structural dimensions of contemporary global crisis. If the polycrisis is defined by the interaction of ecological, economic, social, and security breakdowns, then a focus on peace can serve as a compass through these difficult times. Through a dialogue between polycrisis scholarship, International Relations, and Peace Studies, this article contends that peace-oriented analysis is indispensable for understanding and transforming the systemic conditions that the Doomsday Clock now so starkly renders visible.

Here and Back Again: From Crises to Polycrisis

To describe our present conjuncture as a set of “structural international changes” unfolding in due course may sound reasonable, yet such a framing risks understatement. Not because it is inaccurate, but because it remains incomplete. In a world defined by unprecedented levels of interconnectedness and interdependence, systemic disruption no longer appears solely as a singular, catastrophic rupture, but increasingly as a cumulative and potentially unravelling process. Humanity now possesses the capacity to generate existential disruption on a planetary scale without having developed commensurate political or ethical mechanisms to govern it responsibly (Ord, 2020). 

Under such present conditions, challenges rarely unfold in isolation. Instead, they interact in ways that amplify risk and uncertainty across domains. This growing entanglement has led scholars and practitioners alike to question whether traditional frameworks of social and political management remain adequate for making sense of contemporary insecurity. 

It is in moments such as these that Gramsci’s well-known words (from almost a century ago) strike with a particular force: “the crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum, morbid phenomena of the most varied kind come to pass” (Gramsci, 2011). What emerges, then, is unmistakably a transitional period – a time between times – marked by symptoms of catastrophic imminence and disruptions unfolding faster than our capacity to account for them. Indeed, a crisis.

The language of crisis has long been used to capture moments of heightened instability experienced as exceptional, urgent, and disruptive (Koselleck and Richter, 2006). Analytically, however, a crisis must be distinguished from structural international change. While crises may serve as catalysts or moments of heightened visibility, they neither guarantee nor necessarily coincide with deeper transformations in the underlying relations, norms, and power structures that constitute the international system. Many crises are absorbed through adaptive governance mechanisms that stabilize existing arrangements without altering their foundations, just as significant structural changes may unfold gradually without being recognized as crises at the time.

This distinction helps explain why the term crisis has gained such prominence in recent decades. Revealing both the instability of our era and a persistent search for meaning and transformation, crisis has come to function as a signature concept of modernity (Koselleck and Richter, 2006). As Fassin and Honneth (2022, p. 1) observe, “we live in a time of crises. Or rather, we live in a time in which our dominant representation of the world is one of crises.” 

For historically attuned readers, crises may not seem surprising. As Mark Twain noted, history often “rhymes” rather than repeats. Even research in cliodynamics, which integrates transdisciplinary mathematical modeling to analyze historical processes, shows that periods of unrest, famine, disease, civil war, and institutional breakdown are not anomalies, but recurring patterns shaped by structural pressures such as inequality, elite competition, and institutional strain. Crises thus emerge as intrinsic rhythms in long-term social dynamics, reflecting how societies negotiate continuity and transformation (Hoyer, 2024; Koselleck and Richter, 2006).

What increasingly distinguishes the present moment, however, is not the recurrence of crisis as such, but the configuration through which crises now emerge and interact. The concept of polycrisis has gained traction precisely to capture this qualitative shift. As defined by Lawrence et al. (2022; 2024), a polycrisis refers to the causal entanglement of crises across multiple global systems in ways that generate emergent harms exceeding the cumulative effects of individual crises considered in isolation. Unlike situations in which several crises unfold .0simultaneously yet remain largely independent, a polycrisis is characterized by feedback loops, cross-domain amplification, and systemic spillovers “that significantly impact human well-being in a short period” (Kwamie et al., 2024; Lawrence et al., 2024).

Climate heating and ecological overshoot intersect with global health vulnerabilities, economic inequality, financial instability, geopolitical escalation, renewed nuclear rhetoric, and disruptive technological change – precisely the constellation of threats underscored by the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists through the Doomsday Clock metaphor. What marks the present conjuncture as distinctive, then, is not the existence of multiple crises, but the density of interdependence through which they now reinforce one another, placing existing analytical frameworks and governance capacities under sustained strain (Lähde, 2023).

The concept of polycrisis is not without contestation (Kaufman and Scott, 2003; Zaidi, 2022). Critics argue that cascading crises are not historically novel, that such framings risk obscuring long-standing vulnerabilities (particularly in the Global South) or that emphasizing complexity may inadvertently legitimize inaction (Sial, 2023; Subramanian, 2022). Others caution against what they see as apocalyptic neologisms, calling instead for simpler language and more targeted solutions (Kluth, 2023). These critiques are important........

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