Globalisation has changed the world. Markets, states and people are more closely interconnected than ever before in history. Financial transactions, trade, migrants and refugees, environmental pollution, global warming and virus pandemics do not know borders. The high interdependency of markets, states and people, as well as the prevalence of pollution, make societies and political regimes more vulnerable. During the first twenty years of the twenty-first century we have seen new types of crises. These crises are: The financial and Euro crises after 2008, the migration crisis after 2015 (in Europe), the COVID-19 pandemic and the continuation of global warming (climate crisis).
What makes these crises new? They show the global vulnerability of markets, societies and states, they have become moralised, they divide the people and polarise societies. Governments are oscillating between renationalised and transnational responses. The course tries to define a working concept of crisis which enables us to look deeper into those four different crises to find out about their driving causes, their internal mechanisms and their impact on the cohesion of societies, as well as the response of governments and international organisations.