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Paper short abstract

The paper traces how Chinese-led extractive infrastructures in Chile’s lithium sector spark socio-environmental tensions and racialised contestations over value, risk, and the future of battery-powered energy transitions.

Paper long abstract

This presentation offers an anthropological reflection on the geopolitical transitions unfolding around lithium, a critical mineral at the centre of contemporary battery infrastructures. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork with a battery producer in China, combined with analyses of lithium‑extraction studies in Chile (Bonelli and Dorador 2021; Weinberg 2023; Soto-Hernández 2026), as well as data from the Regional Repository of Chinese Investments in Latin America (ICLAC 2025), the paper examines how infrastructural polarizations emerge through cross‑border extractive projects. I argue that the energy transition generates a “double bind” (Köppel and Scoville-Simonds 2024): lithium is simultaneously framed as indispensable for decarbonised futures and as a source of profound socio‑environmental risk. In Chile, this bind materialises in the tensions between the profitability imperatives guiding extractive infrastructures and the uneven consequences borne by local communities (Soto-Hernández 2026).

Yet the Chilean case also exposes an additional layer of contestation: the racialisation of Chinese capital, especially in its financial and extractive infrastructures. These racialised narratives shape how risks, values, and acceptable futures are negotiated across state agencies, Indigenous territories, and transnational corporate actors. By tracing how these frictions coalesce around Chinese-led lithium projects, the paper shows how infrastructures become arenas where geopolitical imaginaries, developmental promises, and competing regimes of valuation are staged, challenged, and selectively legitimised. In doing so, it highlights the productive lens that infrastructural polarisations offer for understanding the contested futures of global energy transitions.