Editorial
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Date
2023
Authors
O'Driscoll, Mervyn
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Publisher
Royal Irish Academy
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Abstract
Last year’s editorial highlighted the growing impression of polycrises. The notion appeared to capture the zeitgeist as one of volatility and confusion, with numerous but poorly understood, inter-related shocks. In 2023, more unsettling phenomena fuelled the sense of ‘polycrises’. The pogrom massacre of Jews since the Holocaust set off the daily horrors of mass civilian death in the Hamas-Israeli War. Islamophobia and anti-Semitism are rising. Simultaneously, the AI ‘revolution’ beckons, and public intellectuals and commentators spar about its implications. The erosion of nuclear arms control continues apace, and states are modernising and boosting their arsenals. Until very recently, the social scientific orthodoxy held that state and non-state violence in conflicts was waning, representing a mere trifle by historical standards. But this article of faith has worn away. The outbreak of the first interstate war in Europe since World War Two (the Russo-Ukrainian War) in 2022 shocked Europeans. According to the statistics collected by the University of Uppsala Conflict Data Program (https://ucdp.uu.se/), the world has witnessed a sustained uptick in the number of conflicts and fatalities since 2010, and the process has accelerated. 2022, the latest year for which statistics were available at the time of writing, was the worst since 1993, the year of the Rwandan genocide. The trend is a disturbing indicator of the deteriorating health of the international order.
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Keywords
Polycrises , Hamas-Israeli War , AI
Citation
O'Driscoll, M. (2023) 'Editorial', Irish Studies in International Affairs, 34(1), pp. 1-7. https://doi.org/10.1353/isia.2023.a918351
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© 2023, Royal Irish Academy.