Critical Minerals, Commodities and Infrastructure in Contemporary Africa

In-person event organised with the support of the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation and the Oxford Martin Programme on African Governance, Oxford Martin School

Room H209, 28 rue des Saints-Pères, 75007 (Paris)

Speakers :
Nicolas Lippolis (Centre for Energy, Finance and Development, Rio de Janeiro), Rethinking Resilience: Development Strategies in African Oil and Gas Producers
Zainab Usman (Columbia University), The International Trade Dimensions of the U.S. Critical Minerals Security Strategy
Pascal Airault (L’Opinion) L'économie politique du cacao ivoirien
Olivier Vallée, Des routes de la soie aux corridors de fer: une nouvelle course à l'Afrique
Jakob Hensing (Global Public Policy Institute, Berlin), Europe-Africa cooperation and the upgrading of raw materials value chains: Getting the politics and business incentives right
Roland Marchal (CERI-Sciences Po / CNRS), Strategic Corridors and International Competition in Africa

Amid growing attention to immaterial and innovation-driven economic sectors, this event explores the enduring role of natural resource endowments in shaping African political economies as well as their relations with the international system. While emergent service and industrial sectors have attracted significant scholarly and policy attention, a series of global crises over the past decade—from the 2014 commodity price downturn to the disruptions of Covid-19 and recent geopolitical conflicts in Ukraine and the Middle East —has underscored the persistent embeddedness of African economies in extractive and resource-based systems. This has occurred in a context of renewed recognition of the extent to which critical raw materials, energy, and other physical inputs remain indispensable to technology-driven growth across the globe, as well as of intensifying competition over access to and control over these inputs.
Bringing together interdisciplinary perspectives, the event examines how materiality, resource governance, and global market integration continue to shape state power, international relations and development trajectories across the continent. It asks how material resource endowments remain constitutive of political authority and economic strategy, and how African actors navigate shifting global demand, geopolitical competition, financial pressures, and environmental constraints. Simultaneously, it asks how resource wealth can and is being leveraged by African states to increase their agency in international politics, highlighting strategic options that are far from the cliches of a dependent, passive continent. In doing so, the event re-centers natural resources as a critical lens for understanding contemporary African politics within the world economy.