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.