I will discuss three-dimensional QCD with gauge group SU(N), and Nf fundamental quark flavors. I will show that at leading order in large-N there are Nf +1 , exactly degenerate, vacuum superselection sectors with different patterns of flavor-symmetry breaking. The associated massless Nambu-Goldstone bosons are accompanied by topological Chern-Simons theories. This set of vacua contains many candidate phases previously proposed for QCD3. At subleading order in the large-N expansion, the exact degeneracy between the different superselection sectors is lifted, giving rise to a multitude of metastable vacua. Dialing the quark masses, different metastable vacua become the true vacuum of the theory, leading to a sequence of first-order phase transitions. This intricate large-N dynamics is captured by previously proposed bosonic dual theories for QCD3, provided that they have a suitable scalar potential. Interestingly, this potential must include terms beyond quartic order in the scalar fields.
