Call for Proposals
Remaking the Global Political Economy through Industrial Policy in Critical Raw Materials–A Global South Perspective
Under Trump 2.0, unilateral tariffs and economic nationalism have become the game in town. Blaming Chinese state subsidies for declining industrial competitiveness in the West, the United States of America (USA) and the European Union (EU) have led a new race of industrial policy among advanced industrialized countries. The resurgence of industrial strategies in the global North has now been firmly established as a primary driving force in the global political economy (L. Chen and Chulu 2022; Di Carlo and Schmitz 2023; Fasteau and Fletcher 2024; Holzmann and Zenglein 2022). The most conspicuous attempt at re-industrialization takes the form of defensive industrial policy as a globalization strategy, which has focussed on ‘catching up’ and reshoring the manufacturing industry back into high wage economies through support for clean energy technologies and advanced manufacturing (Allan 2024; G. C. Chen 2024; Jerzyniak and Herranz-Surrallés 2024). Their policy choices are wide ranging, including export controls, outright bans against Chinese entities to obstruct their access to critical technologies, and more recently targeted use of immigration tools to contain peoples’ movements. Some segments of social science scholarship have described the return of industrial policy as a tendency for ‘globalizing state capitalism’, the construction of new variants of (state) capitalism, or the re-composition of supply chains that lay bare to the growing asymmetry of power and geopolitical rivalry.
Amidst the race for industrial policy among major powers, we remain focussed on the significance of analyzing re-industrialization efforts in the context of clean energy transition (as opposed to geopolitical rivalry). As a departing point, planetary boundaries set the limits on economic growth and the ways living standards can be improved across the world. While economic growth remains desirable and necessary especially for and by citizens in the global South, fossil-fuelled capitalism forged in the industrial revolution in England has failed in promoting social equity and ecological justice (Fiorini 2018; Wainwright and Mann 2020). On the one hand, many developing countries aspire to participate in globalized supply chains of manufacturing, thereby seeking growth strategies built through ‘carbon-lock in’ processes of technological innovation and industrial sectors. On the other hand, the EU’s Green Deal and Net Zero strategies underpin intensive extraction of minerals. By securing access to critical raw materials (CRMs), Europe seeks to re-establish climate politics leadership through the expansion of electric vehicle (EV) cars, greening power infrastructure, and building new supply chains where European companies maintain their strategic advantage in capital-intensive, downstream technologies. For example, the race for industrial policy underpins growing demand for lithium-ion batteries and fuel cells for mobility and energy storage, as well as the construction of new sources of energy such as solar panels and wind power (International Energy Agency 2023). But given the inability of Europe to meet its own mineral demand, worldwide decarbonization is patently uneven, thereby, redistributing or offloading its environmental costs towards mineral producers (Nem Singh 2021; 2023). In turn, the uneven distribution of the burdens and benefits associated with CRM development, coupled with the growing influence of participatory politics, has sparked renewed interest in place-based industrial policy. Depending on domestic political-economic dynamics, fostering “developmental linkages” with local economies may become a central feature in certain variants of the emerging CRM policy imagination (Furnaro 2024; González et al. 2025).
Yet, a major lacuna in the literature is a systematic assessment of new industrial policy responses from–and the challenges for—peripheral countries. A nascent literature has documented the emergence of a critical mineral strategy in the global South, including the deployment of resource nationalism as an offensive strategy in pursuit of structural transformation of mineral economies (Nem Singh 2022; 2024; Ovadia et al. Forthcoming). Some countries—notably China, Indonesia, Chile, and Mexico—have already taken initial steps to leverage their natural resources for industrial upgrading, though there exists little consensus as regards their success in forging a pathway out of mineral dependence (Carrasco 2024; Orihuela and Serrano 2024; Carrasco and Madariaga 2025; Nem Singh and Ji Forthcoming; Wijaya Forthcoming; Fritz et al 2026).
A broader research agenda is critically vital to move forward the political economy scholarship on critical minerals and industrial policy. Specifically, new scholarship must offer a comprehensive assessment over the nature and impacts of geopolitical changes for the global South, including but not limited to (a) the possible shifts in South-North relations in the context of strategic competition, (b) the changing dynamics of power and emerging asymmetric relations within the global South, (c) place-based green industrial policy in global South countries, and (d) the possibilities and limitations of regional alliances, economic cooperation, and resource-based diplomacy as a response to the restructuring of supply chains and shifts in market power in the resource sector and beyond.
To achieve these research objectives, the Governing the Supply Chain of Critical Raw Materials for Clean Energy Transition Network (GOV-CRM), funded by Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, aims to convene and establish a global network of experts, early career scholars, and policy stakeholders to examine the opportunities, processes, and challenges for mineral producing and consuming countries as supply chains of critical minerals-clean energy manufacturing are restructured. The network seeks to analyse the full production chain – mining, processing, manufacturing, use, and recycling – and pays attention to domestic motives, strategies, and power relations across the globalized value chains of critical minerals and clean energy technologies. To do this, the GOV-CRM will hold two workshops between 2026 and 2028 focussed on the evolution of global supply chains and the dynamic interactions between mineral producers and consumers.
For the first workshop, GOV-CRM invites papers that address the following questions:
§ To what extent have developing countries, especially mineral producers, designed new industrial strategies and sectoral promotion policies that seek to leverage their critical minerals as driving force for economic development and national security?
§ Are these new forms of industrial policy place-based, seeking to promote regional economic development in areas where CRMs are extracted?
§ How far have developing countries altered the trajectory of inter-state relations, international diplomacy, and regional cooperation through resource diplomacy and other instruments? To put it differently, in what ways have developing countries exercised ‘state agency’, ‘strategic autonomy’, and/or ‘exercise of political agency’ in the global political economy?
§ What are the mechanisms and pathways upon which developing countries were able to carve their own ‘developmental space’ amidst strategic competition?
§ What comparative, historical, or contextual evidence exist that demonstrate the upending of power dynamics in the international system? In other words, how far have developing countries pushed the boundaries of power, exclusion and hierarchy to design alternative economic strategies that transcend the national interests of advanced industrialized countries?
We seek original papers that address one or two of the questions above for publication in a special issue in a top ranked political economy and/or development studies journal. We are keen to receive empirically grounded and comparative studies that bridge inter-disciplinary and cross-regional dialogues among political science, sociology, comparative and international political economy, and international relations. To ensure that the project will have global and comparative scope, the selection process will involve combining idiosyncratic/geographically specific papers with more general/thematic/cross-disciplinary papers. We aim to cover Africa, Latin America, Central Asia, and East, South, and Southeast Asia.
Please send your abstract (500 words max), Times New Roman, font size 11, single space to Yingfeng Ji (yj262@sussex.ac.uk), cc-ing Jojo Nem Singh (j.nemsingh@sussex.ac.uk) with the subject heading “Paper Submission – AvH Workshop 2026”. Please send your abstract in word format with the file name <Surname_AvHworkshop.docx>.
The following dates will be observed:
Abstract submission: January 30, 2026
Notification of Acceptance: February 15, 2026
Submission of Papers: May 30, 2026
Submission of Presentations: June 10, 2026
Workshop Date: June 25-26, 2026
Submission of Revised Papers: August 31, 2026
Submission of Special Issue Proposal: September 30, 2026
Workshop Format and Logistics
We will seek to balance the participation among scholars and policymakers by having keynote speakers from academia, industry and policy-making. Specifically, GOV-CRM will invite participants from the professional network of the ERC Project, Green Industrial Policy in the Age of Rare Metals: A Trans-regional Comparison of Growth Strategies in Rare Earths Mining (GRIP-ARM). The workshop will combine plenary sessions, a public roundtable on the topic, and paper presentations with assigned discussants.
The workshop will take place at the University of Sussex, Brighton on June 25-26, 2025. We expect most participants to cover their own travel and accommodation expenses, and the event will require face-to-face participation. For early career academics based in the UK, we will be able to cover train fare and one night accommodation on a needs-based request. Please indicate in your email when you submit your abstract if you will need travel support.
About the Convenors
Jewellord Nem Singh is a Principal Research Fellow in Global Political Economy at the School of Global Studies, University of Sussex. He is the Principal Investigator of European Research Council (ERC) Starting Grant No. 950056, Green Industrial Policy in the Age of Rare Metals: A Trans-regional Comparison of Growth Strategies in Rare Earths Mining (GRIP-ARM), and the author of Business of the State: Why State Ownership Matters for Resource Governance (Oxford University Press, 2024).
Bettina Engels is is Guest Professor for Peace and Conflict Studies at the Department of Political and Social Sciences at Freie Universität Berlin. Her research and teaching focuses on agrarian change, class and labour, social movements and popular struggles, recent conflicts in the Sahel, and conflicts over land and mining. She is editor of the Handbook of Critical Agrarian Studies and the Review of African Political Economy.
José Carlos Orihuela is a Full Professor at the Pontifical Catholic University of Peru (PUCP). He recently co-edited the special issue “Greened Dependency and Development: The Political Economy of Energy Transition in Latin America” for the Journal of Globalization and Development. His work includes articles published in journals such as World Development, Journal of Institutional Economics, Studies in Comparative International Development, and New Political Economy.
Yingfeng Ji is Post-doctoral Research Fellow at the School of Global Studies, University of Sussex, UK. She received her PhD in Development Studies at the University of Cambridge, UK.
References Cited
Allan, Bentley B. 2024. ‘Industrial Policy and the Green State: Forging a World after Growth’. Review of International Studies 50 (5): 888–97. Cambridge Core. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0260210524000421.
Carrasco, Sebastián. 2024. ‘State Capacity for Green Growth: Analyzing Industrial Policy in the Latin American Lithium Triangle’. Competition & Change, April 24, 10245294241249202. https://doi.org/10.1177/10245294241249202.
Carrasco, Sebastian, and Aldo Madariaga. 2025. ‘The Middle-Income Trap, State Capacity, and Institutional Business Power: Understanding the Failed Upgrading of the Lithium Industry in Chile’. Business and Politics, 2025/07/28 edn, 1–25. Cambridge Core. https://doi.org/10.1017/bap.2025.10012.
Chen, Geoffrey C. 2024. ‘The United States–China Race for Green Transformation: Institutions, Incentives, and Green Industrial Policies’. Journal of Chinese Political Science 29 (3): 461–82. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11366-023-09875-x.
Chen, Ling, and Buhe Chulu. 2022. ‘Complementary Institutions of Industrial Policy: A Quasi-Market Role of Government Inspired by the Evolutionary China Model’. Third World Quarterly, November 24, 1–16. https://doi.org/10.1080/01436597.2022.2142551.
Di Carlo, Donato, and Luuk Schmitz. 2023. ‘Europe First? The Rise of EU Industrial Policy Promoting and Protecting the Single Market’. Journal of European Public Policy, May 2, 1–34. https://doi.org/10.1080/13501763.2023.2202684.
Fasteau, Marc, and Ian Fletcher. 2024. Industrial Policy for the United States: Winning the Competition for Good Jobs and High-Value Industries. Cambridge University Press. Cambridge Core. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009243087.
Fiorini, Daniel J. 2018. A Good Life on a Finite Earth: The Political Economy of Green Growth. Oxford University Press.
Fritz, Barbara, Middelanis, Martin and José Carlos Orihuela. 2026. ‘Greened Dependency and Development: The Political Economy of Energy Transition in Latin America – An Introduction’. Journal of Globalization and Development.
Furnaro, Andrea. 2024. Just Energy Transition in the Time of Place-Based Industrial Policy: Patch or Pathway to the Green Industrial Transformation? In Industrial Policy 2025: Bringing the State Back In (Again). Roosevelt Institute.
González, Lucas I., Snyder, R. and José Carlos Orihuela. 2025. Developmental Extraction and the Global Energy Transition: Lessons from South America’s Lithium Triangle. Journal of Globalization and Development.
Holzmann, Anna, and Max J. Zenglein. 2022. ‘China’s Leverage of Industrial Policy to Absorb Global Value Chains in Emerging Industries’. In Economic and Social Upgrading in Global Value Chains: Comparative Analyses, Macroeconomic Effects, the Role of Institutions and Strategies for the Global South, edited by Christina Teipen, Petra Dünhaupt, Hansjörg Herr, and Fabian Mehl. Springer International Publishing. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-87320-2_16.
International Energy Agency. 2023. Critical Minerals Market Review 2023. International Energy Agency.
Jerzyniak, Tomasz, and Anna Herranz-Surrallés. 2024. ‘EU Geoeconomic Power in the Clean Energy Transition’. JCMS: Journal of Common Market Studies 62 (4): 1028–45. https://doi.org/10.1111/jcms.13590.
Nem Singh, Jewellord T. 2021. Mining Our Way out of the Climate Change Conundrum? The Power of a Social Justice Perspective. Latin America’s Environmental Policies in Global Perspective. The Wilson Center.
Nem Singh, Jewellord T. 2022. ‘The New Geographies of Energy Transition: A Developmental Opportunity or Challenge for Latin America?’ In Beyond Extractivism: Scenarios and Lessons from Latin America, edited by Henry Veltmeyer and Arturo Ezquero-Cañete. Routledge.
Nem Singh, Jewellord T. 2023. ‘The Advance of the State and the Renewal of Industrial Policy in the Age of Strategic Competition’. Third World Quarterly, June 13, 1–19. https://doi.org/10.1080/01436597.2023.2217766.
Nem Singh, Jewellord T. 2024. Business of the State: Why State Ownership Matters for Resource Governance. Oxford University Press.
Nem Singh, Jewellord T., and Yingfeng Ji. Forthcoming. ‘Industrial Upgrading and Economic Statecraft: The Dual Benefits of China’s Resource Nationalism in the Rare Earths Sector’. In Handbook of Resource Nationalism, edited by Jesse Salah Ovadia, Richard Saunders, and Jewellord T. Nem Singh. Edward Elgar Publishing.
Orihuela, José Carlos, and Sergio Serrano. 2024. ‘Rules, institutions and policy capacity: A comparative analysis of lithium-based development in Argentina, Bolivia and Chile’. Energy Research & Social Science 118: 103761.
Ovadia, Jesse Salah, Richard Saunders, and Jewellord T. Nem Singh. Forthcoming. ‘Resource Nationalism: Histories, Practices, and Theorizations’. In Handbook of Resource Nationalism. Edward Elgar Publishing.
Wainwright, Joel, and Geoff Mann. 2020. Climate Leviathan: A Political Theory of Our Planetary Future. Verso Books.
Wijaya, Trissia. Forthcoming. ‘Nickel, Mineral Geopolitics, and Resource Nationalism’. In Handbook of Resource Nationalism, edited by Jesse Salah Ovadia, Richard Saunders, and Jewellord T. Nem Singh. Edward Elgar Publishing.
Paper can be downloaded here.