This article was published in Geopolitics.
Demand for critical minerals for energy transitions is propelling a significant expansion of mining and an evolving formal geopolitics for critical minerals supply security. Applying a critical geopolitics methodology of discourse analysis, this article investigates the associated discourses and, in parallel, those of an Indigenous community network and relevant non-governmental organisations.
This aims at identifying whether formal geopolitics recognises Indigenous communities’ “Right to Say No” to critical minerals projects driven by relational ontologies. The research finds that governments’ belief that we need to greatly expand critical minerals mining can conflict with Indigenous peoples’ ways of understanding and relating to land and nature. Two steps for strengthening recognition of Indigenous perspectives (including catalysing ontological shifts among critical minerals stakeholders and prioritising demand reduction) are discussed as practical steps forward, and the research introduces a proposed new perspective of ‘geos-politics’ – the politics of minerals, nature and the geosphere that merges Western and Indigenous perspectives.