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Paper short abstract

Capitalist cycles lead to shifts in demand and geopolitical competition for resources, offering potential developmental switching points for exporters. Today's race for critical minerals is examined via this lens. Prospects for systemic shifts in global capitalist hierarchies are currently limited.

Paper long abstract

Previous cycles of global capitalist expansion have tended to begin with a reconfiguration of the geographies and modalities of production and trade. As part of this, shifts in quantity and type of raw material demand have driven rounds of great power struggle to establish and control new resource peripheries, supply lines, and associated infrastructure. Some authors have suggested that such world-historical moments provide switching points, in which peripheral resource exporters may be able to take advantage of these shifts in order to negotiate a favourable rearticulation of their positioning within global circuits of production and trade. This paper considers the contemporary energy transition from this perspective, in order to understand the developmental opportunities and constraints for peripheral states presented by the current race for supplies of critical minerals on the part of the US, China, EU and others. Historical comparison with 20th century resource cycles suggests that individual states may be able to obtain some beneficial concessions from competing great powers, though this will vary, depending upon the materiality and geography of particular minerals. Drawing on contemporary examples in the lithium, nickel and cobalt sectors, the paper concludes that there will be few prospects for exporters to systematically upgrade their positioning within global capitalist hierarchies without concerted collective action, of a kind which currently appears a distant prospect.