Lithium, cobalt, nickel, rare earth elements—we need them all for batteries, wind turbines, electric vehicles, and even weapons. At the same time, access to these resources is reshaping the balance between security, competitiveness, and sustainability.
A new policy paper by Nina Djukanović, Material Dependencies: Competitiveness, Security and Socio-Environmental Issues of Critical Raw Materials, illustrates why “security” is not just about military budgets. It’s also about how and where we mine, who bears the costs, and what that means for public trust in the transition itself. In other words, governments in the Global North face a dilemma: how to reduce emissions without increasing the environmental and social burden of extraction—both at home and globally.
Current strategies rely on levels of mining that are not only unsustainable, but geopolitically risky. They fuel militarization, local resistance, and political backlash—often empowering the far right.
Europe wants to be strong. But if it falls for extractivist shortcuts, it risks ending up in a trap: expanding its lithium extraction and processing capacities, but losing public support and damaging fragile ecosystems in the process.
Instead of a raw-materials rush, Nina Djukanović calls for a systemic shift: a focus on reducing material consumption, fairly distributing the benefits of the transition, and adopting a “politics of sufficiency”—wellbeing within planetary boundaries. True security begins not with control over resources, but with the ability to rethink our growth model—and what we mean by security in the first place.
