Highlights

• Critical minerals like lithium, cobalt, and rare earths are becoming the new geopolitical battleground, with supply concentrated in a few countries.
• Middle powers can create strategic resilience by diversifying mineral investments and processing capabilities across competing geopolitical blocs.
• The future of mineral trade depends on building interdependent, rules-based systems that add redundancy and reduce single-point failures.

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A new strategic paper from the Geneva Centre for Security Policy (opens in a new tab) (GCSP) argues that critical minerals are the 21st-century “oil”—fueling prosperity while raising the risk of geopolitical shocks. Miras Zhiyenbayev’s analysis, “Securing the New Resource Frontier: Critical Minerals in an Era of Great-Power Rivalry” (GCSP Strategic Security Analysis, Issue 43, Sept 2025), shows how competition for lithium, cobalt, and rare earths is redrawing the security map.

What the paper says—fast

• Geology drives geopolitics. Supply is fixed and uneven. About 70% of global cobalt comes from the DRC, and >80% of rare-earth refining sits in China—turning mines and refineries into levers of state power.
• Diversification is stalling. Despite Western spending, the top three refiners hold 86% of global capacity (up from 82% in 2020). Mining is also concentrated. Export bans, conflict, and resource nationalism (e.g., Indonesia’s nickel embargo, Chile’s lithium moves) add new chokepoints.
• Controls bite. China’s 2024–2025 export curbs on gallium, germanium, and rare earths underline how quickly policy can ripple through clean-tech and defense supply chains.
• Security spillovers. The paper flags rising “mineral militarisation”—from Africa Corps/Wagner-linked guards at African mines to rare-earth fields inside Myanmar’s civil war—raising costs, risks, and volatility.

Why it matters—plainly

If a dominant node blinks, prices spike and factories stall. The report’s bottom line: today’s system has too many eggs in too few baskets. The result isn’t just market pain; it’s strategic exposure across EVs, wind, semiconductors, and defense.

The swing players: middle powers

Zhiyenbayev spotlights middle powers—Kazakhstan, Indonesia, Brazil and others—using “multi-alignment” to welcome investment from rival blocs without choosing sides.

Done right, these states can:

• Coordinate offtakes & stockpiles to smooth shocks,
• Host shared midstream hubs (cathodes, anodes, alloys, magnets) to reduce single-point failures,
• Enforce ESG baselines that curb corruption, conflict financing, and environmental blowback.

Example: Kazakhstan sells RE feeds to China while courting Western/Japanese partners for processing—a pragmatic bridge that adds redundancy.

The catch—what’s hard

Projects take years, face permitting and community pushback, and require patient capital. Even with middle-power hustle, the world leans on entrenched Chinese processing. Building real alternatives is a decade-scale job.

The takeaway

The choice isn’t isolation vs. dependence—it’s interdependence done right. A middle-power-led architecture that incorporates redundancy (from ore to magnets), shared standards, and early-warning stress tests can transform the mineral race from a zero-sum scramble into a resilient, rules-based trade.

Citation: Zhiyenbayev, M. (2025). Securing the New Resource Frontier: Critical Minerals in an Era of Great-Power Rivalry. Strategic Security Analysis, Issue 43, Geneva Centre for Security Policy (GCSP).

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