Presentation short abstract

Renewable energy expansion in the Global North relies on neocolonial appropriation of resources from the Global South. Using environmentally extended input-output analysis (1990–2024), the study examines North-South offshored footprints in the context of electricity generation and critical minerals.

Presentation long abstract

Under the energy transition banner, renewable energy expansion is framed as a response to the climate crisis. This expansion, however, boosts the demand for critical minerals and electricity. Especially in countries of the Global South, the intensification of extraction and export of minerals related to renewable energy technologies has been described as ‘green colonialism’ or ‘green extractivism’. Combining socio-metabolic research and political economy, our work examines how renewable energy expansion in the Global North relies on neocolonial appropriation of resources from the Global South. Based on an environmentally extended input-output approach, we analyse ‘footprints’ of electricity and consumer goods demand between 1990-2024, considering material resource extraction, energy use, emissions, and labour, besides disparities in value added. We find that, all the footprints associated with final demand for electricity generation in the Global North sourced from the Global South exceeded those of the South sourced from the North. Also, for most of the energy transitions minerals, the resource footprint of the North is increasingly offshored to the South. We conclude that the green global division of labour reproduces patterns of ecologically unequal exchange, therefore efforts to address climate change and create globally just energy systems, must confront these structural inequities.

Presentation short abstract

An artistic research project exploring shared geology as basis for international solidarity, mapping North-South connections (e.g. copper deposits in Sweden and the Congo both formed via the Grenville orogeny) and their implications for place-based resistance and the politics of transition.

Presentation long abstract

This artistic research project seeks solidarities between sites of extractivism through investigation into shared geological strata, mapping connections between Global North and South to explore implications for the theory and practice of place-based resistance and the politics of transition.

Technologies of geological knowledge are unevenly distributed. In pursuit of speculative investment, purveyors of globalized extractivism deploy methods of geological exploration capable of rendering spatial data across physical strata, linking analogous deposits worldwide. What connections between disparate artistic practices, community-based projects, and sites of resistance might become legible if mapped along comparable geological layers? Can extractivist methodologies and technologies inform a counter-cartography that traces alternative networks of solidarity—material, chemical, biological—that already exist beneath the surface of disparate struggles and infrastructures?

Taking as a speculative case study the Hennes Bay copper mining project in the Swedish region of Dalsland, which the company Arctic Minerals reports shares pedigree with existing deposits at Kamoa-Kakula and Tenke-Fungurumi (Congo) and other sites associated with the Grenville orogeny, we ask how international solidarities informed by similar geological connections might affect the politics of extraction and resistance in diverse contexts.

Across multiple scales of regulatory process, imbalances in information about land use, energy use, and the broader economics of infrastructure mirror uneven access to geospatial data. Moving from ground to cloud, the question “Where do critical minerals come from?” prompts a further question—“Where are they going to?”—which suggests a fundamental incompatibility between ‘decarbonisation-transition’ and ‘military-security’ justifications for accelerated extractivism.

Presentation short abstract

This paper examines the processes of resource-making and criticality-making, focusing on lithium in Portugal and the EU. It analyses how lithium is defined as “critical” and the effects of criticality, highlighting the disputes, tensions, and contradictions inherent in resource-making processes.

Presentation long abstract

This paper examines the processes of resource-making and criticality-making, focusing on the politics of lithium in Portugal and the European Union. It analyses how lithium is defined as “critical” and explores the concrete effects that criticality produces, particularly during the early stages of exploration and planning of mining projects.

Drawing on 10 months of fieldwork in Portugal and Brussels, including participant observation, documentary analysis, and 40 interviews with policymakers, industry representatives, NGOs, and local communities, the paper explores the tensions, contradictions, and contestations inherent in resource-making processes. Drawing on literature on political ecology, resource-making and criticality, the paper understands criticality as a dynamic, relational, and fluid concept shaped by factors such as geopolitics, expert practices, power relations, risk perceptions, technological developments, and regulatory frameworks. Moreover, it highlights that materiality and meaning-making are deeply intertwined, with the designation of lithium as “critical” shaping policies and legitimising extractive projects, while lithium’s material characteristics simultaneously influence how its criticality is constructed and contested.

The paper argues that criticality-making and resource-making are not linear or inevitable processes but are characterised by disputes, contradictions, competing interests, and strategic delays that unfold across multiple scales, from Brussels meeting rooms to territories affected by lithium exploration and mining. It contributes to an understanding of how these processes are experienced and contested across scales, as well as how socio-political dynamics and complex materialities both shape and are shaped by the governance of raw materials in the EU.

Presentation short abstract

This presentation takes up the 'Knocker', a mythical figure common to the underground spaces of Southeast England, to think about contested subterranean histories of Cornwall and the way the region’s mining heritage is being repurposed to bolster the UK’s Vision 35: Critical Minerals Strategy.

Presentation long abstract

Only 2ft tall, dressed like a turn-of-the-century miner, and deriving from similar origins as leprechauns, the Knocker (sometimes referred to as Bucca or Bwca) is still said to inhabit the underground spaces of Southeast England, guarding the tin-mine littered subterranean against unwanted intrusion. Within Cornish folklore, Knockers appear frequently as ambivalent figures, sometimes choosing to knock against the supports of a mine ceiling to bring it down, other times ‘knocking’ to warn of an impending cave-in. They are fairy-folk, trapped spirits, dead miners, guides, harbingers, and troublemakers.

Using the multivalent figure of the Knocker and presenting an interactive web-hosted mine tour, I will reflect on the contested subterranean histories of Cornwall and the way the region’s mining heritage is being exhumed and repurposed to bolster the UK’s Vision 35: Critical Minerals Strategy. I will think about the fraught implications of Cornwall’s emergent role as the ‘engine room’ or cornerstone of the country's future critical mineral capability – promising a major rebirth and industrial revival for the region, whilst also threatening community and environmental wellbeing. Through anecdotes from a range of Cornish stakeholders, I will argue that critical minerals are being actively integrated into local folklore and discourse, bringing the geopolitical into contact with the vernacular, and the speculative with industrial legacies/memories. Additionally, I will highlight how the dual-use nature of the minerals has prompted politically charged conversations regarding sovereignty, complicity, and regional identity, with the Cornish case forging new links between anti-military and anti-mining activism in the wider UK context.

Presentation short abstract

As Europe onshores critical mineral extraction, Andalusia’s copper boom reveals how decarbonisation agendas rely on intensified groundwater control. The CLC case shows how institutionalised dewatering reshapes hydrosocial relations and fuels scalar conflicts over resource security and justice.

Presentation long abstract

This paper examines the hydrosocial and political-ecological dynamics underpinning the EU’s push to onshore “critical” and “strategic” minerals through a case study of Andalusia, today one of Europe’s most actively promoted extractive frontiers. While framed as essential for decarbonisation, competitiveness and geopolitical security, the expansion of copper mining in the Iberian Pyrite Belt reveals how mineral supply strategies depend on the reorganisation of groundwater access and control.

Drawing on quantitative data and regulatory analysis of the Cobre Las Cruces (CLC) mine, we show how institutionalised dewatering, escalating groundwater abstraction and evolving licensing regimes materially reshape aquifers while redefining territorial water rights. These hydrosocial transformations illuminate the scalar contradictions at the heart of Europe’s mineral transition: EU-level ambitions to secure copper intersect with localised experiences of aquifer decline, environmental risk and social conflict.

By situating Andalusia’s mining boom within broader debates on externalisation and onshoring, the paper highlights how Europe increasingly internalises extractive pressures previously displaced to the Global South. Yet “green” onshoring does not resolve long-standing inequalities; instead, it reconfigures them through new forms of hydrological control, contested science, and the uneven distribution of water scarcity.

This contribution aims to unpack the socio-materiality and politics of critical minerals. It demonstrates how the making of Europe’s mineral future hinges not only on metal supply but on the governance of groundwater—a strategic resource whose depletion fuels local resistance and exposes the contradictions of mineral modernity.

Presentation short abstract

In order to map security risks and just-transition governance, this project carries out a multiscalar analysis of the green transition’s mineral rush. It links Brazil’s local mining conflicts, the DRC’s cross-border war economies, and Ukraine’s war and US “minerals/peace”.

Presentation long abstract

This paper interrogates the multiscalar security politics of the green transition's demand for lithium, cobalt, and rare earths. Building on a mixed-methods project, I theorize "mineral conditions" as co-produced across scales: local extraction frontiers, regional conflict ecologies, and great-power competition. at the local scale, Brazil's lithium reserves reveals how concessions, land titling, and water use reshape Indigenous territories, intensify distributional conflcits, and reproduce climate injustice (even as companies and states invoke sustainability gains). At the regional scale, the DRC's cobalt economy demonstrates how armed actors, cross-border trading networks, and security interventions entangle supply chains with civil war legacies, generating spillovers into neighboring states. At the global scale, Ukraine's wartime political economy, and debates over the US peace/minerals deal, exposes how reconstruction, alliance politics, and critical-mineral securitization fold resource governance into a wider geopolitical power game over the future of green energy transition.

Empirically, this project identifies emerging conflict hotspots by linking extraction and trade data with violence and governance indicators; trace mechanisms connecting mine-site disputes to regional instability; and analyze how supply-chain and security policies reconfigure sovereignty and agency in resource-rich territories. Conceptually, this project contributes to the genealogy of "critical" minerals by showing how green extractivism and security logics travel across scales. Practically, it outlines policy pathways that can align climate action with conflict prevention and a just green transition.

Presentation short abstract

Tranformation plants are new sites of geopolitical competition. We introduce the concept of midstream geopolitics to move beyond static, extraction-centered resources geopolitics and account for the infrastructure, materials, and technologies that allow for the transformation of minerals.

Presentation long abstract

The emerging geopolitics of critical minerals hinges not only on their extraction but also on their transformation. Smelter, refiners, magnet factories, and other processing facilities are new sites of geopolitical competition and dependencies, linking countries that increasingly view one another as strategic rivals.This article introduces the concept of midstream geopolitics to move beyond static, extraction-centered notions of resources geopolitics and account for the infrastructure, materials, and technologies that allow for the transformation of cobalt, lithium, rare earths elements, or any other minerals into industrially usable forms. These midstream capacities are now central to competition between the U.S., the EU, and China as each seeks to secure or control chokepoints in supply chains. China’s longstanding investment in processing, enabled in part by Western divestment from industries deemed too polluting in the post-Cold War era, shaped the contemporary strategic landscape. We develop a framework that identifies the multidirectional influences—between the downstream, midstream, and upstream—structuring midstream geopolitics and detail nine policies through which states exert geopolitical and geoeconomic power over processing. Our analysis underscores the need for attention to the midstream and highlights its growing political significance, particularly in relation to onshoring, reshoring, and friendshoring of critical minerals.

Presentation short abstract

How does the EU's Critical Raw Materials Act reproduce colonial dimensions? A discursive world-making analysis on the geopolitics of the energy transition, the “EU first” agenda, and the convergence of intensifying military interests.

Presentation long abstract

In May 2024 the Critical Raw Materials Act (CRMA) came into force in the European Union, ensuring future access to a secure and sustainable supply of critical raw materials. While nominally predicated on just transition and climate mitigation narratives from the European Green Deal, this study reveals the EU’s CRMA move towards a competitive and increasingly explicit geopolitical agenda. This paper employs discourse analysis based on desk research and semi-structured interviews to analyze the CRMA through a world-making lens. Our analysis reveals how problemsolution framings become legitimized by assumptions rooted in coloniality. Our analysis suggests that the CRMA is not just an EU flagship regulation but can be seen as a world-making tool creating specifically EU-centered realities securing CRM

supplies from resource-rich peripheries. The article finds that the CRMA includes relatively few concrete clauses to avoid producing externalities, such as increasing environmental degradation, forced displacement of communities and severe human rights violations It also shows how meanings change over time, depending on how the CRMA is staged – making space for industries like defense to leverage the CRMA. As such, this study provides empirical grounding to the emerging coloniality of transitions literature. It emphasizes the need to scrutinize the discursive practices of policies and legal tools like the CRMA and identify the capacity of these practices to shape their own socio-political realities in potentially colonial and extractive ways.

Presentation short abstract

This paper explores how the EU’s push to onshore lithium value chains revives cultural imaginaries that cast it as a remedy for excess. Using ethnography in Germany’s Ore Mountains, we trace how these imaginaries articulate notions of “enoughness” and drive political action in energy transitions.

Presentation long abstract

Lithium has emerged as a central element in the global political, economic, and cultural imaginaries of energy transitions—promising both environmental sustainability and economic growth. In Europe, discourses around the need to onshore lithium value chains continue to shape political agendas, even as their material dimensions remain elusive amid economic speculation and shifting demands for battery materials. By studying lithium from historical, cultural and political perspectives, this paper explores the relationship between the discursive and the real with an emphasis on how the concept of enoughness is articulated within these orders. While historic and contemporary imaginaries point to lithium as a remedy for excess (e.g. against psychological disorders and for combatting climate change), lithium projects ‘in the making’ reveal how hegemonic imaginaries become articulated and expressed through unequal power relations in targeted sites of extraction. Ethnographic research on a planned lithium project in Germany’s Ore Mountains illustrates how imaginaries shape socio-ecological relations, even when they may never materialize as “real.” In this context, enoughness is understood either as a shift away from fossil fuels and geopolitical dependency or as an ethical-political stance against environmental destruction and the relentless expansion of energy and economic systems. We thereby situate lithium onshoring as a pillar of the symbolic and material orders underpinning energy transitions, challenging taken-for-granted assumptions of techno-centric solutionism.

Presentation short abstract

Focusing on french critical minerals policy, this communication explores the emergence of new financial instruments such as public-private funds to secure critical minerals supply chains, while highlighting the existing tensions between strategic autonomy goals and the lack of capital discipline.

Presentation long abstract

This communication explores the emergence of new financial instruments deployed by the French government to secure access to critical metals, and argues that these instruments illuminate a broader transformation toward what recent scholarship has conceptualized as the “Investor State.” (Lepont, Thiemann, 2024). Building on ongoing work about the politics of criticality and state intervention, it analyzes how France has incrementally expanded its toolkit—from public guarantees to direct equity investments—culminating in the creation of dedicated national investment vehicles such as the critical minerals fund operated by the private equity company INFRAVIA.

Drawing on documentary research and qualitative interviews with investors and public authorities, the communication shows that this fund materialize new forms of public–private intermediation. It reshapes the boundaries between industrial policy and financial regulation, redistribute responsibilities for supply-chain risk, and reorganize the State’s relationships with mining firms. The governance structure of this fund, its selection criteria and expected returns reveal the tensions inherent in state-led investment: between strategic autonomy and capital discipline, long-term supply security and short-term profitability, environmental objectives and accelerated project development.

By tracing how this national fund was designed, negotiated, and justified, the communication ultimately highlights the political and epistemic work involved in constructing “criticality” as an investment problem. It argues that studying these state-backed investment funds offers a privileged vantage point to understand contemporary public arbitrations and the evolving role of the State as a market-shaping actor in the energy transition.

Presentation short abstract

Finland’s critical mineral potential promises economic and energy security gains, but it faces local resistance and demands for legal reform. This paper examines the related multiscalar justice tensions through a conflict-transformation lens, offering insights for policy and practice.

Presentation long abstract

Finland is among the European countries identified as having the potential to meet the rising demand for critical minerals deemed essential for the energy transition and, increasingly, for European and national security. Optimism has also sparked about boosting the lagging national economy through the critical mineral sector. However, the growing pressure has intensified local resistance, which has already pushed for improvements to national mining legislation and continues to challenge the dominant European and national discourses.

This paper delves into the outcomes of a doctoral dissertation on justice tensions in Finnish critical mineral governance (Leino, 2025). A multiscalar framework is used to analyze justice experiences and claims in both local and national-level conflicts. These are viewed through a conflict transformation lens, which sees conflicts as opportunities to identify and structure the justice issues arising in the critical mineral sector (e.g., Rodriguez et al., 2024).

Combining qualitative content analysis of documents, interviews, and survey data, the paper illuminates the tensions between the macro, meso, and micro scales, from the EU to municipal levels. Based on the research, the paper presents the key issues of multiscalar tensions and discusses how a conflict-transformation approach can help address them in practice. More broadly, it responds to critiques of the narrow and superficial use of ‘just transition’ in energy and climate policy discourses.

Leino, J., 2025. Analyzing justice tensions in Finnish critical mineral governance. University of Eastern Finland, Joensuu.

Rodriguez, I., Walter, M., Temper, L. (Eds.), Just Transformations. Grassroot Struggles for Alternative Futures. Pluto Press, London.

Presentation short abstract

Focusing on the EU's criticality assessment and lithium, nickel, aluminium, and magnesite, this paper demonstrates how raw materials become critical, challenging the notion that the classification critical is merely technical and apolitical, by showing how it is shaped by polit-economic interests.

Presentation long abstract

In the public discourse Critical Raw Materials (CRM) are mostly equated with those raw materials essential for technologies aimed at decarbonisation. However, at the political-level, CRM designation appears to follow a technical, rule-based methodology: raw materials that exceed certain thresholds in supply risk and economic importance are classified as critical. This presents CRM classification as an objective, apolitical process.

This paper challenges this assumption by demonstrating how raw materials ‘become critical’. The category and the process is deeply embedded in a political context and shaped by power relations. Focusing on the EU's criticality assessment process, I examine four cases: lithium, nickel, aluminium, and magnesite. Each case represents different pathways to (or exclusion from) critical status. While lithium, nickel, and aluminium ‘became critical’ through distinct channels including industry lobbying, political decision-making, and trilog negotiations, magnesite's failure to ‘become critical’ reveals the strategic interests and actors that shape these classifications.

Drawing on interviews with policy and industry actors, document analysis, and analysis of the EU's criticality assessment, the research shows how the classification as CRM serve as vehicles for business and political interests and furthermore demonstrate that criticality is not simply generated through a neutral assessment but actively constructed through political negotiation and economic pressure. This matters because CRM designation unlocks substantial public resources, policy support, and regulatory advantages – with the potential to expand the resource-frontier and accompanying socio-ecological consequences.