The Race for Critical Minerals in an Era of Geopolitical Realignments

ABSTRACT

The decarbonisation of the global economy in response to the climate crisis and the fourth industrial revolution, featuring artificial intelligence (AI) and 5G networks (massively accelerated in response to the coronavirus pandemic), has triggered a race to secure uninterrupted access to critical raw minerals (CRMs) that are indispensable inputs for high-technology applications. Moreover, China’s Belt and Road Initiative, which unites Eurasia and Africa and loops in South America into a seamless space of trade, infrastructure and digital connectivity, challenges the dominance of traditional industrial powers (the United States, the European Union and Japan) and requires critical minerals. Rare earths, lithium and cobalt – among the most critical of the CRMs – are found in high geographic concentration, creating hotspots of contention, especially in unstable parts of the world. As economic transformations accelerate, securing access to these materials will both impact and help shape geopolitics in the years to come.     

Resource powers? Minerals,energy and the rise of the BRICS

The rise of new economic powers has seen increasing attention focused on the international role of the BRICS countries. Importantly, a common feature uniting the BRICS is that they are all resource-rich, and many analysts (and some BRICS governments) have argued that natural resources are one of the key factors propelling the rise of the group. This article explores the BRICS’ emerging status as ‘resource powers’, examining how resource wealth underpins their economic development and foreign policy strategies, and thus contributes to their growing influence in international affairs. It is argued that through the use of nationalistic mining and energy policies, the BRICS governments have exploited natural resources for both domestic economic and international diplomatic objectives. However, there are several challenges and emerging risks facing the BRICS’ resource strategies, which mean that resource wealth is making a positive – though inherently limited – contribution to the growing international status of the group.     

Vulnerability and resilience: critical reflexivity in gendered violence research

South Asian women are a focus area for organisations such as the UN, World Bank and WHO, where violence against women severely constrains policy instruments such as the Millennium Development Goals. The field researcher is often invisible in research space, which informs policy in practice. Through critical reflexivity we rupture the silence on researcher vulnerability, foregrounding researcher resilience as the ethical compass in the research space of gendered violence. Through narratives of researchers as development actors in the river of corrosiveness involved in acid violence research, we offer a typology for researcher resilience for consideration in research designs for policy development.     

临界:渐入佳境——于彰隐有无之间

临界是每个人都要面对的一种状态,无论是否意识到这一点,它已经融入我们的生存。临界似乎不是一种独立的状态,但是某些时候它却是唯一真实的状态。我们所有的感受都因为我们介入其中的领域以及事物的挤压或者暗示变得丰富和明晰,而也正是在这样一种状态下,我们逐渐开始,在了解世界与他物的同时,提升自己的境界。     

The insecurities of weaponised education: a critical discourse analysis of the securitised education discourse in North-West Pakistan

This article presents a critical discourse analysis of the discourse surrounding education, international development and security in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, North-West Pakistan. The article notes the dissonance between a discourse emphasising global security and the experienced insecurity faced by schools and students in North-West Pakistan, under attack from the Pakistani Taliban (the most notable attack being the shooting of Malala Yousafzai in 2012). This analysis examines the impact of securitisation on the discursive production of the political realm, exploring whether securitisation engenders security or insecurity. Three key findings emerge. First, the purpose of securitised education becomes fixed on ‘mindset transformation’ from an extremist mindset to an educated mindset. Second, students are transformed into soldiers fighting against extremism as education becomes weaponised. Third, the discourse blurs the distinction between the uneducated and extremist, and the figure of the ‘threatening, uneducated Other’ emerges. The discursive production of such oppositional subjectivities throws into question whether the international community’s intervention in education in North-West Pakistan, in order to improve security and fight extremism, is not in fact producing greater insecurity.     

On Foreign Ground: Grand Narratives,Situated Specificities,and the Praxis of Critical Theory and Law

This article is the first part of a two-part project which is critical of trends in contemporary U.S. critical and interdisciplinary legal scholarship and pedagogy. The larger project seeks to use this critique to model fruitful approaches to critical and theoretical scholarship in law “beyond 2000”.The focus of this article’s criticism is the work of two significant scholars of the second wave of what might broadly be called CLS scholarship, or more precisely critical, theoretical and interdisciplinary legal scholarship: Jack Balk in and Pierre Schlag. Looking back to the work of Duncan Kennedy and Stanley Fish, respectively progenitors of CLS and of theoretical interdisciplinary legal scholarship in the U.S., it is argued that the work of all four is marked by two significant flaws: lack of self-reflexivity and a desire for a realm of theory which unselfconsciously adopts the Cartesian split subject. The article then uses the work of Vicki Kirby and Pierre Bourdieu both to identify the tendencies it critiques, and to suggest why the work of Terry Threadgold and Peter Goodrich might provide models for a praxis of critical theory in law which is of particular use in the context of professional subject formation. This revised version was published online in July 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

The Critical Instance ‘After’ The Critique of the Subject

The central argument of this piece involves the idea that insofar as␣critique, with its two basic tropes of question and judgment, has been central to the ȁ8classical’ configuration of subjectivity, the critical instance ȁ8after’ the critique of the subject is to be found re-situated on a different philosophical terrain where the question of the question is re-thought and the logic of judgment displaced by an ethic of encounter. It is on this terrain that we can then start sketching the emergence of a different set of critical instances: critical ontologies, critical analytics and critical erotics.     

“Our biggest killer”: multimodal discourse representations of dementia in the British press

A recent (2016) Office for National Statistics report stated that dementia is now “the leading cause of death” in England and Wales. Ever fixated with the syndrome (an unfailingly newsworthy topic), the British press was quick to respond to the bulletin, consistently headlining that dementia was the nation’s “biggest killer,” while (re)formulating other aspects of the report in distorting and emotive metaphorical terms. In this paper we examine how the media, through use of a recurring set of linguistic and visual semiotic tropes, portrayed dementia as an agentive entity, a “killer,” which remorselessly attacks its “victims.” Such a broadly loaded and sensationalist representation, we argue, not only construed dementia as a direful and pernicious disease, but also, crucially, obscured the personal and social contexts in which the syndrome is understood and experienced (not least by people with dementia themselves). This intensely lurid type of representation not only fails to address the ageist misinformation and common misunderstandings that all too commonly surround dementia, but is also likely to exacerbate the stress and depression frequently experienced by people with dementia and their families.     

The sounds of silence: American history textbook representations of non-violence and the Abolition Movement

In this paper we examine how the Abolition Movement’s approach to non-violent resistance has been silenced in four American history textbooks. Despite extensive research that reveals an extensive network of groups dedicated to the peaceful abolishment of slavery little of this historical record is included in the textbooks. Instead, a skewed representation of the movement is conveyed to the reader, one that conveys an image of a movement that contributes to a climate of social violence. Through a critical discourse analytical approach to the data we carefully deconstruct how this process of misrepresentation occurs. By employing the discursive tools of narrative framing, positioning, and stance we lift up what is often hidden from the reader and demonstrate how language use communicates powerful social messaging to the reader. We argue that student readers are left with an impoverished sense of how non-violent democratic change has occurred when presented with a limited portrayal of the Abolition Movement. We therefore emphasize the importance of equipping students with the skills needed to critically interrogate both historical and contemporary sources that purports to convey the inevitability of war to resolve complex social problems; we maintain this is both an educational imperative and a civic obligation.