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.