Abstract

Drawing inspiration from scholarship on resource affects and resource frontier making, this paper examines the ideological fantasies that surround the European Union's engagements with Central Asia’s critical raw materials. Based on an analysis of EU documents, speeches, and related policy materials, we analyze the dynamics of resource frontier (re-)making in the context of EU-Central Asia relations and critical raw materials.

We show how a set of fantasies emerges to suture what we call the critical raw materials paradox: the tension between advancing a green transition and the fact that its realization demands ever‑greater amounts of critical raw materials leading to a deepening of extractive relations and reproduction of what we refer to as the extractive symbolic order. We focus on three intertwined fantasies: "diversification", "Central Asia as a solution space", and the "chosen partnership". We show that these fantasies are riddled with paradoxes and inconsistencies, yet the EU’s affective investment sustains them, eclipsing counter‑logics and foreclosing alternative futures.

We also detail how contradictions seep in and destabilize fantasies and how such disruptions are quickly folded back into the extractivist symbolic order. This is a symbolic order consisting of a set of justificatory narratives that – while proposed as a solution to the climate crisis – continue to organize life around the extraction of natural resources: nature is imagined as a resource, the "periphery" as a supplier, and the "center" as a value adder.