Mineral diplomacy: Rise of the nonaligned

The global race for critical minerals – lithium, cobalt, copper and rare earth elements – has intensified geopolitical competition. It is tempting to see the G7 and BRICS as two cohesive, rival blocs, each pursuing a fully formed mineral strategy. That picture is misleading.

Instead, what we observe are two loosely affiliated constellations of actors whose internal contradictions, divergent national interests and tactical improvisations prevent either from functioning as a unified diplomatic machine.

This fragmentation, far from being a temporary flaw, is structural. And it is precisely this lack of coherence that creates significant maneuvering room for mineral-rich producer nations, particularly in Africa and Latin America, which remain outside the core decision-making circles of both groupings.

The G7’s fractured supply chain resilience

Within the G7, initiatives such as the Minerals Security Partnership (MSP) and the European Union’s Critical Raw Materials Act (CRMA) exemplify Western attempts to coordinate supply chain resilience.

Launched in 2022, the MSP brings together over a dozen partner countries – including the United States, Canada, Australia, Germany, Japan and the United Kingdom – with the goal of facilitating public and private investment in socially responsible mining projects. However, the MSP is not a treaty or a funding mechanism. It is a political declaration lacking a centralized budget, enforceable targets or a dispute resolution framework.

Each member state retains its own foreign policy priorities, permitting standards and development finance institutions. For instance, while Washington prioritizes countering Chinese dominance in refining, Tokyo focuses on securing rare earths for electronics, and Berlin’s attention is divided between African lithium and compliance with EU human rights due diligence laws.

The CRMA, adopted in 2024, is more legally robust – setting benchmarks for domestic processing (10 percent of annual consumption) and diversification (no more than 65 percent of any strategic raw material from a single third country). But its implementation is hampered by bureaucratic fragmentation: Coordination between the European Commission, member states and private consortia remains ad hoc.

Moreover, the CRMA’s emphasis on “strategic projects” has been criticized by producer nations as a unilateral instrument that imposes European standards without offering reciprocal market access or technology transfer.

Neither the MSP nor the CRMA articulates a unified diplomatic posture toward specific producer countries. Instead, G7 members frequently compete against each other – Canadian investors outbidding Australian ones in Argentine lithium, or French and German development banks underwriting rival rail corridors in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC).

BRICS’ bilateralism

On the other side, the expanded BRICS (now including Egypt, Ethiopia, Iran, Saudi Arabia and the UAE, alongside Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa) is often portrayed as an anti-Western mineral alliance. Yet here too, there is little coherence.

The most visible BRICS-backed efforts involve bilateral arrangements, not collective instruments. The Russia-China pivot to mineral trade settled in yuan and rubles (bypassing the dollar) is significant, but it reflects Sino-Russian convergence, not a BRICS-wide mechanism.

India, for example, remains wary of China’s dominance in rare earth processing and continues to source from Australia and Africa through dollar-denominated contracts.

South Africa, a BRICS member and major producer of platinum and manganese, has not aligned its export policies with mineral lending by the New Development Bank (NDB). Indeed, the NDB – originally conceived to rival Western financial institutions – has approved only a handful of mining-related infrastructure loans, and these have been criticized for lacking environmental and social safeguards, reducing their appeal to African host governments.

The expansion of BRICS has diluted rather than deepened mineral diplomacy: Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund is investing in Congolese cobalt through Western joint ventures, while the UAE has signed separate critical minerals memoranda with the EU, bypassing BRICS channels.

Most tellingly, there is no BRICS-wide critical minerals stockpile, no common tariff policy and no shared definition of what constitutes a “strategic mineral.” Russia champions nickel and lithium from annexed territories; Brazil seeks investment in niobium; China prefers to keep its refining monopoly outside any multilateral framework.

Consequently, “BRICS mineral diplomacy” is largely a rhetorical label for a collection of bilateral deals that occasionally overlap but more often compete.

Divide and conquer

This dual fragmentation – within the G7 and within BRICS – creates what political economists call a “buyers’ dilemma”: Neither bloc can credibly commit to a unified offer of financing, infrastructure, technology or market access to producer nations.

For countries like Chile, Peru, DRC, Zambia, Zimbabwe, Argentina and Bolivia, this opens unprecedented diplomatic space. Producer nations are no longer forced to choose between a monolithic “West” and a monolithic “East.” Instead, they can play individual G7 and BRICS members against each other, extract concessions and pivot between competing initiatives without formally aligning with any.

Consider lithium-rich Bolivia. For years, it was assumed that the country would have to side either with Chinese state-owned enterprises (offering extraction technology but limited environmental safeguards) or with European consortia (demanding higher standards but slower timelines).

In practice, Bolivia’s government has signed separate agreements with Russia’s Uranium One Group (a Rosatom subsidiary), China’s CBC (a consortium led by battery giant CATL) and a German-Argentine joint venture, each on different terms regarding royalty rates, local refining requirements and dispute resolution. No G7 or BRICS initiative has been able to impose discipline on these parallel negotiations.

Similarly, Zimbabwe – home to massive hard-rock lithium reserves – has simultaneously courted Chinese investors (who built the Sabi Star mine), British mining financiers and UAE sovereign funds, while also issuing exploration licenses to Russian and Indian firms. The government in Harare has rejected overtures to join either the MSP (which it views as neocolonial) or any BRICS-centered minerals club, precisely because fragmentation allows it to maintain multiple, non-exclusive partnerships.

In Latin America, the Andean region’s copper and lithium belts have become laboratories for this strategic nonalignment. Chile’s National Lithium Strategy, announced in 2023, explicitly invites participation from any state or private entity that accepts state control over refining and pricing. While the U.S. has championed the MSP as a vehicle for “friend-shoring,” Chilean officials have noted that no single MSP member has offered a comprehensive package combining downstream technology (cathode production), energy infrastructure (green hydrogen for refining) and transfer of brine extraction patents.

China, through its Belt and Road Initiative, has offered infrastructure but not patent transfer; Russia offers mining equipment but lacks investment capital; the EU’s CRMA offers market access but demands stringent due diligence that many Chilean small and medium-sized enterprises cannot afford. By remaining outside any bloc, Chile has been able to determine its own terms: Thus, in 2022, it awarded two operating contracts – one to a Chinese conglomerate, BYD and another to a local Chilean entity, while turning down major established lithium players including American and domestic bidders.

Brazil occupies a particularly interesting position because it functions simultaneously as a major producer nation and a BRICS member. Rather than serving exclusively as part of a cohesive BRICS strategy, Brazil frequently acts according to its own national development priorities. It maintains extensive economic ties with China while also seeking investment and technological cooperation from Western partners. This dual engagement illustrates how even countries formally associated with one grouping can resist exclusive alignment.

DRC’s cobalt sector illustrates a more complex case of fragmentation creating leverage. Historically dominated by Chinese-owned mining companies (CMOC, Zhejiang Huayou), the country has recently signed a series of joint development agreements with the U.S.-backed MSP’s Finance and Infrastructure Network.

However, because the MSP has no dedicated fund, these agreements rely on separate commitments from the U.S. International Development Finance Corporation (DFC), the UK’s British International Investment and Export Development Canada – each with different governance criteria and disbursement timelines.

The government in Kinshasa has exploited this fragmented approach by introducing key revisions to its 2018 mining code that would expand state control over strategic and reserved minerals, as well as broadening powers to suspend or withdraw permits and increase penalties for infringements – even as Western and Chinese bidders intensively compete for mining-related logistics contracts, which could be heavily impacted by these controversial reforms.

Meanwhile, Zambia – neighboring and copper-rich – has signed a memorandum with the EU under the CRMA’s “Strategic Partnerships” track, but also joined the Lobito Corridor project (backed by the G7’s Partnership for Global Infrastructure and Investment), while simultaneously negotiating a bilateral currency swap for copper sales with the People’s Bank of China. Such overlapping engagements would be impossible if either the G7 or BRICS operated as coherent blocs.

Maximizing resource leverage

Yet this fracturing is not without risks for producer nations. The absence of a unified buyer means that mineral prices and investment terms vary widely across contracts, enabling well-resourced corporations – especially from China – to arbitrage differences between fragmented Western bids.

Moreover, since neither the G7 nor BRICS has developed a mechanism to unify their respective development finance programs, producer nations often find that commitments made by one G7 development bank are undermined by another G7 country’s export credit agency offering softer loans to a rival mining project. The result is a race to the bottom on environmental and labor standards, which producer nations struggle to regulate.

Fluctuations on the demand side have also given rise to severe economic shocks for mineral-producing nations. Because mining requires heavy up-front investments, supply cannot adapt quickly when global demand suddenly cools. This has created massive market gluts often leading to collapsing budgets, sudden mine closures and mass layoffs in export-dependent economies. The catastrophic nickel price collapse of 2023-2024 serves as a textbook example of this volatility.

The overarching reality is that mineral diplomacy today is not a bipolar contest but a multipolar muddle. The G7 cannot harmonize its members’ competing industrial strategies, and the expanded BRICS cannot transform its heterogeneous members into a single bargaining unit. For producer nations in Africa and Latin America, this failure of global governance can be an opportunity for what might be called “mineral sovereignty by fragmentation.”

They can entertain simultaneous offers from MSP participants and BRICS members, set their own processing requirements and refuse to join any bloc that demands exclusivity. Until either the G7 creates a centralized mineral fund with binding procurement from partner countries, or BRICS establishes a common external tariff and investment code for strategic minerals, the current disorder will persist.

And that disorder, paradoxically, is the best guarantee of leverage for the countries sitting atop the world’s future battery metals. The competition is real, but the competitors are not coherent – and that is precisely where power lies.