Mois : septembre 2025

[Communication] Intervention au congrès annuel de l’EUGEO, à Vienne À l’occasion du congrès annuel de l’EUGEO (Association of Geographical Societies in Europe), qui s’est tenu du 8 au 11 septembre 2025 à Vienne (Autriche), Hélène Roth et Nina Gribat organisaient une session portant sur les « New Mining Futures in Left-behind Places ». Audrey Sérandour y a présenté les premiers résultats du projet MATTER, dans une communication intitulée « What do financial flows tell us about mining futures? Actors, discourses, and promises around lithium in the Rhine Graben ». Résumé de l’intervention : At both European and national levels, policies designed to reduce dependence on critical materials, and to extract minerals from Europe’s subsoil are taking shape since the early 2010s. These policies give rise to new mining projects in Europe. In particular, lithium is of interest to many industrial and political actors, due to its role in energy transition strategies. These extractive projects are made possible by a diversity of financial flows. European lithium projects are thus supported by private fund-raising and investment, bank loans, subsidies and public financial instruments, etc. These flows are carried out by different types of actors, who act at various scales, and support a variety of territorial projects. Based on this observation, we propose to question new mining futures by identifying and analyzing the financial flows that make lithium valorization projects possible. Who provides the capital? What narratives justify the financing of these mining projects? What territorial projects do they support?   This proposal links two fields : the political geography of resources, which studies resources making processes (Raffestin, 1980 ; Bridge, 2009); and approaches based on territorial metabolism that integrate power relations (Buclet, Donsimoni, 2020 ; Buclet, 2022). The aim is to analyze the financial flows which form the territorial metabolism of lithium, to understand how they structure networks of actors, discourses and territorial projects. Thus, this proposal takes a close look at critical resource geography’s invitation to consider the “resource-making/world-making” approach (Valdivia et al., 2022), which links construction of resources processes with production of socioecological worlds.   To do so, we focus on the lithium exploration and exploitation projects located in Alsace, France. This region has a deep history of subsoil exploitation, particularly around oil and potash, now closed. Today, new socio-industrial systems are structuring around lithium, capturing financial flows of various kinds. We analyze the role of European and national funding on the discursive framing about Alsacian lithium. According to the funding sources and the geographical scale at which a given actor is positioned, lithium discursive frames can vary from environmental protection, to national strategic autonomy, or even local economic development.

[Panel de congrès] Co-organisation d’un panel au congrès annuel de la RGS – « The political geography of supply chain’s securitization » Dans le cadre du RGS-IBG Annual International Conference 2025, qui s’est tenu du 26 au 29 août 2025 à Birmingham, Teva Meyer et Audrey Sérandour ont co-organisé un panel portant sur la géographie politique de la sécuritisation des chaînes d’approvisionnement.   Résumé du panel : From raw materials to electricity, from surgical masks to semiconductors, the security of supply chains has become a central topic in political debates, especially following the successive crises of the Covid-19 pandemic and Russia’s large-scale war in Ukraine. These disruptions have prompted the development of new national and supranational security policies. Championed by both public and private actors, these efforts aim to reconfigure supply chains to reduce the risks of dependency and enhance “sovereignty” in the face of identified threats. Supply chains have been extensively examined through the lens of security studies (Judge, Maltby, and Szulecki 2018), leading to two divergent approaches. The first one focuses on defining and quantifying supply security through the development of indicators and metrics, seeking to identify what makes a supply policy secure. The second one, rooted in critical approaches inspired by the Copenhagen School of “securitization,” argues that security is not an inherent or objective reality but a political construct shaped by processes that designate certain issues as security concerns (Wæver 1999). However, recent research on energy supply security calls for greater integration of these approaches, challenging the dichotomy between “objective” and “constructed” security (Szulecki 2020). Security is neither a purely representational construct detached from material realities nor a universal metric that can be uniformly applied, but exists at the intersection of these dimensions. This session proposes that “space” offers a valuable framework for bridging these perspectives for two key reasons. First, even though “geographers were latecomers to the critical study of security” (Kuus 2010), the interest of political geographers in this field has proliferated since then, demonstrating that space serves both as the object and the container of securitization, as well as a tool for it. Recent geographical inquiries into security issues have delved into deconstructing the practices, performances, and materializations of endangerment narratives using spatial imaginaries (Billon 2015). Security policies are produced through the categorization of space between sources of danger and sources of stability, zones of peace and zones of turmoil (Dalby 2009). Thus, security policies are space-based practices, where ‘space’ refers not only to what is being securitized or the contingent receptacle in which it occurs, but rather to what enables issues to be securitized. Second, the implementation of supply chain security policies hinges on risk analyses of the threats posed to the routes and nodes through which materials flow. These spaces—corridors and places—are marked by varying levels of fluidity and interchangeability due to their material, economic, and sociopolitical characteristics. Such variations create vulnerabilities that can lead to deliberate or accidental disruptions (Balmaceda 2021). Plus d’informations sur le site de la Royal Geographical Society.