PolyCIVIS: Confronting the Polycrisis in Europe and Africa

2026-07-22

PolyCIVIS proposes to jostle against 4 factors impeding our capacity to resolve the polycrisis (the combination of several concurrent major societal crises that we currently face) by actively working through and across 4 groups of boundaries: - across the different crises (contemplating holistically how they interact), - across time (combining the latest science with overlooked lessons of the past), - across disciplinary clusters (the complexity of the polycrisis requires a fully integrated multidisciplinary response), and - across territories and languages (at the local, the national, the regional, the continental, and the global levels, and across language barriers). These 4 approaches will be applied to 3 fundamental dimensions: research, policy, and teaching. The proposed network offers to bring down the walls between the crises, between the scientific disciplines trying to understand them, and between the levels of policy response across nations and continents. PolyCIVIS offers to take the polycrisis out of the various silos which prevent a compelling systemic understanding of its overall complexity and the deployment of the most adequate policy response in Europe and in Africa. PolyCIVIS will be deeply embedded across the Euro-African interregional relationship, both locally and inter-regionally, and as such would be particularly well positioned to ensure the creation of durable instruments with a sustainable impact beyond the confines of both the consortium and the lifespan of the project. The ULB-led PolyCIVIS Jean Monnet Network will be coordinated by a well-established actor in European studies and European scientifically informed policymaking located near the major EU institutions in Brussels. It foresees the creation of a set of outcomes tied to some of the lasting pan-European structures of CIVIS, a European University Alliance that established strong ties with African universities from the onset.

Belgium

2025-10-15