At the start of the 21st century, the international system underwent at least three major critical junctures: the 9/11 terror attacks that paved the way for the US-led global war on terror and its consequent human rights abuses (Acharya 2007; Christie 2008; Foot 2008; Herman 2011; Shafiq 2013; Sanders 2017; Regilme 2018a, 2018b, 2021a); the 2007/2008 global financial crisis (Aydın 2011; Helleiner 2011; Drezner 2013; Kiely 2018; Ansell and Bartenberger 2019); and the COVID-19 pandemic (May and Daly 2020; Regilme 2020; Theidon 2020; Greer et al 2021). The most recent critical juncture—the COVID-19 pandemic—killed at least 6.6 million people since 2020 until October 2022. That pandemic, however, is not merely a global health crisis. Rather, it emerged as a powerful vector of other transnational challenges of catastrophic proportions, whereas some of these challenges may not be directly attributable to the pandemic itself, while others may have been reinforced after the start of the pandemic: the widespread inflation crisis in many parts of the globe (Aharon and Qadan 2022); democratic backsliding and widespread human rights abuses (Greer et al 2020; Pleyers 2020; Thomson and Ip 2020; Lundgren et al 2021; Passos and Acácio 2021; Regilme 2021b); climate catastrophes and extreme weather conditions (Bergquist et al 2022; Ford et al 2022); food insecurity (Kumar and Ayedee 2021; Sacks et al 2021; Bergquist et al 2022); energy insecurity (Ghilès 2022); and, the looming probability that Russian militarized aggression in Ukraine could spill over to other Central and Western European countries, which in turn, could trigger intensified military conflict elsewhere (deLisle 2022; Wu 2022).

Consequently, an apparent consensus seems to be emerging, perhaps regardless of one’s political ideologies: the world is in deep, multidimensional crisis (Ndlovu-Gatsheni 2020; Regilme 2020; Steger 2021). What this crisis means could differ depending on your positionality in this deeply hierarchical and differentiated world-system (Anthias 2008; Sakai 2012; Koinova 2017; McIntosh 2020; Soedirgo and Glas 2020). For a white, super-rich man living in the affluent quarters of New York, London, or Zurich, the crisis is likely triggered by a growing popular resistance against capitalism and extreme socioeconomic inequalities, while invoking that their private property rights are violated by state policy actions that redirect wealth to the most marginalized (Hammond 2016; Regilme 2019a; Whyte 2019).