The Polytunity Project

WHAT NEW WAYS OF THINKING DO WE NEED IN A DISRUPTED, MULTIPOLAR WORLD?

Global discourse has been dominated by the “polycrisis”—a label for the convergence of climate shocks, geopolitical tensions, inequality, democratic erosion, and other global challenges. Yet polycrisis names fear without diagnosing the structural roots of crises or empowering new solutions. Although presented as global, the agenda has been overwhelmingly shaped by Western-centered voices and priorities, even as the 21st century clearly shifts in a multipolar direction. 

Founded and directed by Yuen Yuen Ang as a faculty lab at the SNF Agora Institute at Johns Hopkins University—whose mission is to strengthen global democracy—The Polytunity Project begins with a simple but urgent reframing: disruption can be renewal. 

Ang calls this moment polytunity—a period in which crisis and possibility coexist.  

Rather than treating disruption as paralysis, polytunity recognizes the breakdown of the post-1945 order as a once-in-eighty-years opening for deep transformation, not only of global institutions, but of global thought itself: the “operating system” through which modern societies understand progress and pluralism. 

Responding to the need for a new intellectual foundation, Ang advances AIM: Adaptive, Inclusive, Moral Political Economy, a paradigm that formalizes and extends the system of ideas she has cultivated across her scholarship and continues to expand today. 

Beyond a counter-narrative, polytunity is a call to action. Connecting new research agendas, courses, and public engagement—integrated with creative and responsible uses of AI—it invites changemakers worldwide to harness disruption to drive systemic change. 

If polycrisis names the breakdown of the old order, polytunity names the opening it creates.