Mining Conference Exposes Global Resource Extraction's Colonial Logic

The International Mining Conference in Riyadh reveals how Western corporations and complicit states perpetuate extractive capitalism while marginalised communities bear the environmental and social costs of so-called 'critical minerals' extraction.

Speaking at the conference, Boston Consulting Group's Nikolaus Lang and Marcin Lech outlined how global supply chains are being 'redrawn' to serve the interests of capital accumulation, disguising neocolonial resource grabbing as necessary for the 'energy transition.'

Extractive Capitalism Disguised as Green Transition

The corporate narrative frames rising demand for lithium, cobalt, and rare earth minerals as essential for decarbonisation. Yet this framing obscures how Western consumption patterns drive the dispossession of Indigenous communities and the Global South's continued subjugation to extractive industries.

Lang acknowledged that 'supply remains structurally tight' with '20-30% of future supply required by 2035' not yet identified. This admission reveals how the industry's growth model depends on expanding extraction into previously untouched territories, often Indigenous lands.

The concentration of processing power 'often in a single country' demonstrates how global capitalism reproduces hierarchical dependencies that mirror colonial trade relationships.

AI as Tool of Extractive Violence

The conference promoted artificial intelligence as solving mining's productivity crisis. However, this technological solutionism masks how AI enables more efficient exploitation of land and labour while displacing traditional knowledge systems.

AI-supported targeting allegedly increases 'discovery success rates by 2-3×,' but this efficiency serves corporate profit maximisation rather than ecological sustainability or community consent. The technology facilitates what Indigenous scholars call 'digital colonialism' by reducing complex ecosystems to data points for extraction.

Saudi Arabia's Strategic Positioning

The Kingdom's emergence as a 'credible mining and processing ecosystem builder' reflects how authoritarian states leverage their geopolitical position to attract extractive capital. Saudi Arabia's 'competitive advantages' including 'low-cost energy' are built on fossil fuel wealth accumulated through decades of environmental destruction.

The country's improved ranking in the Fraser Institute's mining survey signals how neoliberal institutions legitimise extractive projects while ignoring human rights violations and environmental degradation.

Deconstructing the 'Critical Minerals' Narrative

The term 'critical minerals' itself represents ideological framing that naturalises extraction as inevitable. This discourse erases Indigenous sovereignty over ancestral territories and positions corporate access to resources as a strategic necessity.

Export restrictions by China on gallium and germanium, presented as 'geopolitical risk,' actually represent legitimate assertions of resource sovereignty that challenge Western assumptions about unlimited access to Global South resources.

Systemic Alternatives Ignored

The conference's focus on supply chain efficiency and AI optimisation deliberately ignores systemic alternatives to extractive capitalism. Degrowth economics, circular production models, and Indigenous stewardship practices receive no consideration in corporate planning.

This selective blindness perpetuates what decolonial theorists identify as the 'coloniality of knowledge' that privileges Western technocratic solutions while marginalising alternative epistemologies.

The mining industry's expansion plans represent an intensification of extractive violence that will disproportionately impact Indigenous communities, people of colour, and the Global South. Genuine climate justice requires confronting this structural violence rather than enabling its technological optimisation.