Critical Minerals and China’s Strategy of Concealed Control
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 the 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 the essay →Oslo's reversal on seabed mining and the widening gap between Western critical-mineral ambitions and what is actually being permitted.
Read the essay →Tracing how smuggled Congolese cobalt is laundered through licensed Rwandan refiners and ends up funding a US-sanctioned militia.
Read the essay →Nickel wealth and creditor leverage across three Indo-Pacific states, and the differing degrees of exposure each has to Beijing.
Read the essay →A single mine in Central Asia as a case study in how Chinese infrastructure and financing convert sovereign mineral wealth into influence.
Read the essay →Why India's ambitions to counterweight Chinese mineral processing keep running into its own infrastructure and interagency friction.
Read the essay →Private security companies as an overlooked instrument of legitimacy and control in contested critical-mineral extraction zones.
Read the 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 the essay →Chinese state-owned enterprises, sanctions evasion, and the widening menu of US financial tools aimed at the critical-minerals supply chain.
Read the essay →Jack M. Lindstrom — Founder & Publisher, Arctic Ledger. Master of International Affairs candidate, UC San Diego School of Global Policy and Strategy. Junior Researcher under Leonard Hochberg, The Mackinder Forum. Co-author or contributing editor of each essay in this volume, including sole authorship of “Pearl Divers No Longer: China’s Civil-Military Fusion in Critical Mineral Deep-Sea Extraction”; general editor of Arctic Ledger.
Souheil Mouhajir — African Statecraft Researcher. International Affairs & Data Science, The George Washington University (Elliott School), where he is a Presidential Scholar. Co-Director, Onero Institute Africa Program; researcher on AI governance and emerging technology policy with Demistef.AI. Contributed “Black Sands: Egypt’s Vanishing Radioactive Minerals.”
Alexander Bagnull — OSINT & Beneficial Ownership Analyst. Open-Source Intelligence Analyst. B.S. and M.S. in Cybersecurity, Robert Morris University, with graduate research on OSINT investigation, advanced persistent threats, and AI applications in banking-sector cybersecurity. Contributed “Mineral Laundering & Militias: Tracing Beneficial Ownership Behind Critical Mineral Transactions.”
Ahmad Azzam — Researcher, Indo-Pacific Industrial Policy. International Relations graduate, Universitas Bakrie, Jakarta; McKinsey.org Forward Program graduate. Background in policy research and governance across Indonesia’s foreign affairs community, including an internship at the Embassy of the Republic of Bulgaria. Contributed “Indo-Pacific Positioning.”
Samuel Schlichting — Political Theorist, Eurasian Borders. Ph.D., political theorist working on Eurasian borders, China, and Central Asia. Author of Balancing Structural Power: Reactions to China’s Rise in Eurasia (Würzburg University Press). Based in Germany. Contributed “The Yakjilva Mine as a Showcase of China’s Eurasian Resource Access Strategy.”
Aakansha Singh — Geopolitical Researcher. Master’s in Public Administration, Indira Gandhi National Open University; B.Tech in Civil Engineering, Guru Gobind Singh Indraprastha University. Background bridging infrastructure, governance, and policy evaluation. Contributed “India’s Critical-Minerals Processing Gap.”
David Cristiano Aguado — Security & Defense Analyst. Contributed “Putting a Price on Legitimacy: Private Security Companies, Critical Minerals, and China.”
Leonardo Gomez — Researcher, Sanctions and State-Owned Enterprise Policy. Contributed “The Sanctions and the System: Chinese Firms and US Responses.”