Independent research on critical mineral supply chains, Arctic governance, and the structural leverage great powers build through infrastructure, resource access, and technology standards.
Critical Minerals and China's Strategy of Concealed Control
An Analysis of Great Power Competition in the Modern Age
Arctic Ledger is an independent research journal covering critical minerals, supply chain security, Arctic and maritime governance, and great power competition. We publish original analysis from researchers, graduate students, and practitioners working across these fields, with contributors drawn from institutions worldwide. Arctic Ledger accepts no state or corporate funding. Read our editorial standards →
Volume I, No. 2 gathers ten essays on the origin, extraction, and politics of critical minerals — from radioactive sands in the Egyptian desert to nickel reserves across the Indo-Pacific, from laundered Congolese cobalt to Chinese civil-military fusion beneath the sea. What tethers them is a single argument: control over critical minerals lies less in scarcity than in concealment — in who can obscure ownership, financing, and processing capacity long enough to convert access into leverage.
How the critical-minerals chokepoint is migrating upstream into the AI hardware stack, and what that means for the next generation of Chinese leverage.
Read essay →Egypt liberalizes gold and phosphate mining while a military-owned company quietly retains the rare earth-rich black sands, off the public books entirely.
Read essay →Oslo's reversal on seabed mining and the widening gap between Western critical-mineral ambitions and what is actually being permitted.
Read essay →Tracing how smuggled Congolese cobalt is laundered through licensed Rwandan refiners and ends up funding a US-sanctioned militia.
Read essay →Nickel wealth and creditor leverage across three Indo-Pacific states, and the differing degrees of exposure each has to Beijing.
Read essay →A single mine in Central Asia as a case study in how Chinese infrastructure and financing convert sovereign mineral wealth into influence.
Read essay →Why India's ambitions to counterweight Chinese mineral processing keep running into its own infrastructure and interagency friction.
Read essay →Private security companies as an overlooked instrument of legitimacy and control in contested critical-mineral extraction zones.
Read essay →China's civil-military fusion applied to deep-sea critical mineral extraction, and what it means for the CCZ contest explored in Volume I.
Read essay →Chinese state-owned enterprises, sanctions evasion, and the widening menu of US financial tools aimed at the critical-minerals supply chain.
Read essay →Arctic Ledger draws its contributors from across the globe — researchers and writers based on nearly every continent, spanning doctoral and master's candidates, working professionals, and on-the-ground field researchers. That range gives the journal a genuinely wide base of expertise: technology policy, mineral economics, regional security studies, infrastructure engineering, and area-specific language and fieldwork experience all feed into what we publish.
For submissions, institutional partnerships, and editorial inquiries. Arctic Ledger welcomes manuscript submissions from researchers, graduate students, and practitioners working on critical minerals, Arctic governance, supply chain security, and great power competition. Co-authorship and cross-institutional collaboration are welcomed.
Submissions are reviewed on a rolling basis.