Presentation short abstract

Combining archival, media and secondary sources, this study traces the European becoming of strategic resources after the World War era by studying security as a material formation and ideological-fix in the management of the ecological contradiction of capital accumulation.

Presentation long abstract

The paradigm of Green Transition has rendered subterranean minerals to the center stage of Europe's economic, security and sustainability efforts. As the criticism of social and ecological consequences and technical feasibility of the extractive regime transition abound, the becoming of the critical minerals as such has thus far escaped sustained attention. Albeit the social construction of 'criticality' is questioned and histories of strategic resources in the United States attempted, the broader historically overdetermined socio-material specification, within which a notion of critical minerals emerges in its particular European intelligibilities, has not been scrutinized. This paper attempts to trace the emergence of strategic resources in Europe by studying security as an ideological formation that manages ecological and economic contradictions by claiming privilege on the future. Here, security is understood as an ideological-fix in managing the internal contradiction between capital accumulation and sustained socio-ecological metabolisms. Combining archival material, newspaper articles and secondary literature, the proposed research attempts to investigate the historically specific material situation in the direct aftermath of World War era by focusing on the ideological formation that inscribes some ecological affordances as resources while rejecting others. In so doing, the study presents one of the four episodes of my broader PhD monograph thesis on the resourcifying logic of security. In sum, the paper argues that as a material formation, security apparatus, apart from its intended economic, political and social outcomes, must attend to the reproduction of its own material basis, which simultaneously discloses alternative ecological futures in the name of security.