European efforts to achieve a sustainability transformation in the energy, transport and industrial sectors require large quantities of critical, post-fossil resources. Lithium, in particular, is essential for a sustainable transformation and has recently come into the public and scientific spotlight. So far, the majority of the light metal has come from countries on the global periphery, but that is soon to change. In the wake of geopolitical upheavals and growing uncertainties, overlapping crises and enormous price increases for lithium, the EU Commission is pushing for the promotion of “domestic” raw material deposits and financially supporting the development of new mining, processing and production infrastructure in Europe with subsidies in the billions. The sparsely populated and economically underdeveloped Extremadura region in the far west of Spain is the focus of the Commission’s geopolitical and economic policy efforts. Here, in the European periphery, the largest lithium deposits on the continent are to be stored and exploited by the EU as soon as possible. But the planned projects in the provinces of Badajoz and Cáceres arouse both desire and protest. This raises fundamental questions about our socio-material relationship to resources and puts the future industrial extraction of raw materials in Europe per se to the test. What values are assigned to the natural resources of the future and what values must be taken into account in their extraction in the new periphery?
The research project aims at analyzing socio-ecological and multiscale negotiations in the environment of the planned lithium mines in Extremadura by means of qualitative ethnographic methods. On the basis of two large-scale projects in the environs of Badajoz and Cáceres, the aim is to investigate which new aspects and value structures are associated with the extraction of critical resources in the “new periphery” and to what extent these are reflected in the current debates about extractivism in the global South or articulated in a new form of extractivist logic(s).
The research project thus contributes significantly to the scientific discourse on resourcification and extractivism in the global North as well as to current sustainability research and also provides a conceptual-theoretical contribution to the understanding and (re)production of new peripheries.