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 among powerful actors 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 to identify whether formal geopolitics recognises Indigenous communities’ “Right to Say No” to critical minerals projects, often driven by relational ontologies. The research finds that governments, international organisations and diplomatic partnerships for critical minerals do not reconcile the proposed need to greatly expand critical minerals mining with many Indigenous Peoples’ ways of understanding and relating to land and nature. Two practical steps for strengthening recognition of Indigenous perspectives (including catalysing ontological shifts among critical minerals stakeholders and prioritising reduced demand for minerals) are discussed. A new perspective of ‘geos-politics’ is proposed – the geopolitics of minerals, nature and the geosphere that merges Western and Indigenous perspectives.